The Price of Progess Is One Monkey, Maybe

This is the mysterious nexus
of art and architecture.
The flowers greet the sun
with the ugly bazooka of a voice
that sometimes emanates from
Liza Minelli, who is here
along with a lot of quasi-
mysterious bloodshed.
Mysterious because of course
there is blood here, there
needs to be, but we can't
be sure where it emanates from.
The blue sky? Is that a carcass
of some animal here? Is there
any reason to get philosophical
about it or should we simply
continue? Does it stop if we
stop?...A monkey is shot
into space, a Russian dog...
There are a lot of giraffes.
They bend to nuzzle their young
before lifting their heads
and impossible, beautiful
blue tongues to the highest branches.

A Few Words Regarding Propinquity

You almost tricked me into participating
in your sad bastard slumber party
but I'm too quick, uh huh on the git-down,
my heart is a flock of pigeons
pooping on the town square-statue
as well as the statue itself
maintaining its absurd besmirched dignity,
it's the flashing lights in the crowded
hall, the after-images drifting
across your retinas as you try
to hail a cab in the messy sleet,
it's the unbalanced budget as well
as the secret remedies waiting for
you in the ether, just reach out your hand.

A Note Regarding Correct Usage for Nauseous (v. Nauseated v. Nauseating)

I've already raced across the plain
innumerable times and gone
thwacking across the deck
of a ship in rough weather.
There were tigers in sky,
those big fiery wheels.
Blake was close by
but then again Blake's always around.
Cosmic flux and grind.
Baby squeal, squall, harlots
waiting in the shadows.
There was an immeasurable
sadness in the salty spray,
the vomit swished in the pail
and heaved overboard.
There were albatrosses made of fire,
there was some Coleridgian strife.
Eventually the ship docks.
The noose swings loose,
the chair crashes to the floor,
presto: you start your life all over again.

Screw Vegas

It'll be daybreak by the time
we're through hurtling
through the cosmic
whatchamacallit, ions pinging
off of us like tiny rocks
hit baseball-style with shovels,
bad debts and dirty hearts
left by the side of the road
like soiled mattresses
full of memories but
twice as flammable!
A million to one are our odds
and I like 'em fine.
With you by my side, you
with your invincible dread of boredom
and fancy hydraulic caterwauls,
always in and out through
the window and never the door
somehow your clanging
makes me forget the hamster
wheels spinning in the back
of my mind or you replace
it with something new:
a tree filled with snow
and small sleeping animals.

Prologue to a Bildungsroman

The mail stopped arriving years ago,
but no one seemed to notice.
Most of the drunks are really sweet.
They don't really care about the mail.
They smoke a pack a day.
They know lots about old cars
and old wars and the new Administration
and they are attuned to the possibilities
that linger at the edges of town.
They line windows with vivid tulips.
Every once in a while, a new dog
turns up -- parks itself happily
outside the bar or the defunct
post office that has since been
converted into another bar.
They are really good at the banjo,
which can often be heard drifting
through doors, windows, through
the flowers and the red dust
that settles over much of the town,
the granary creaking through the night.
People scratch the new dog behind
its ears as they enter, exit.
One night the sky lit up with meteors.
In the autumn, the leaves turn
just like they do everywhere else.

Heave-Ho

You can't tell me the indescribable arc
of loneliness and loss isn't an arc.

What else gets lofted like that,
that big-ass and domed and doomed
parabola, gaining speed as it cruises

down down down to the land from whence
it came? Loneliness and loss too
have that hard center, clear and in-

destructible, like a diamond as big
as a basketball. Actually, it looks

like I was wrong before: you can
describe it, at least in a rudimentary,

okay-let's-get-started-gang kind of way,
and it isn't just loss or loneliness
that arcs like this, it's also love

and joy, it's just in the latter case
the crashing is the very best part.

Mimesis at the Cafe

In the painting, the old man wears
a red sweater and glowers at an open book.
There is a child who looks like
she's holding a sparkler and like
she's possibly really evil.
It's hard to believe that these
paintings are coming from and are about
the life we're leading. But it's true.
In my backyard are horrors no one should see.

Duck, Duck, Goose

The planet hurtles out of control
but does so very slowly.
No one notices the catastrophe
because it is a million years in the making
like being bled to death since you were a baby.
Even so it's hard not to feel
kinda dumb when you're standing there
in your yard, hose in hand,
in some new plaid shorts,
dreaming about next year's vacation,
and all around you everything's
drying up and burning away.
What have you been doing all this time, anyway?
Deep in the swamp a frog
slips down through the goo.

Cinematic Grandeur Is Your Destiny

In the film version of your life,
you will be played by
a little-known weiner dog named Roy.
As of press time,
Roy's credits include
The Great Time Race III:
Legend of the Lost Incan Gold
and Torpedo: A Dog at Sea.
It is thematically complex,
it has a budget of ten billion dollars.
It is a contender for awards
both art house and commercial.
It has cameos by
Juliette Binoche and
the ghost of Marlon Brando.
In the real version of your life
in which you evaluate the film version
of your life, you conclude
you bear little resemblance
to this anonymous dog.
The role may be miscast.
Also the story doesn't include
any events actually experienced
by you, except at the end,
when the dog gives up
the rights to his life
and sails away to a big farm.

Where Babies Come From (II):

Somewhere deep inside the parent(s),
like, deep-sea-deep, where seahorses
fight and chomp each others' heads off
like a couple of praying mantises
injected with No-Doz and observed
by old dudes in lab coats
who are themselves injected
with various virility drugs
and but also with sugared donuts
which are themselves injected
with unknown grams of sucralose
(which is itself 600 times as sweet
as sugar because of atomic and sub-
structures in which three chlorine
atoms replace three hydroxyl
groups and no one's the wiser)!
Ha ha aha ha ha ha ha ha ha ah ha!
But also still deeper than that,
like where rancor fights with sloth,
a pink car revs over the cliff,
a cup of coffee splashes on the wall.

Close Only Counts In Horseshoes and Hand Grenades

It would be wrong to say that you are
not unlike the make believe electric eels

swimming through the streams in the ether
of our dreams if only because I'm the one

doing the dreaming, placing significance
on the referents, forcing the square peg

down the boulder-big elevator shaft.
You're like ummmmm something else,

my long lost friend/love sublimated
into eels, dark corridors, echoes.

It would probably be more accurate
to say that you are like the bunny

I saw on my way to work today: quick,
darting just out of sight, out of season,

so quick I'm not entirely sure it was you
and not a plastic bag disappearing around

the corner by the pizza place where once
when I was lonely and knew no one I drank

margaritas and sang Steve Winwood until
they threw me out. Not that they wanted to.

I actually think they liked me and soggy
dollars, my loud floral shirts, my sweet

renditions of the songs we sort of all
recall from our childhoods, but not really.

A Very Significant Speech

Read the transcript here.

Mile Five Hundred

Overhead:
some clouds

that look
just like clouds.

Car's running well.
We got one

hell of a
good mechanic.

The Speed of Duende

It is the sheer number of things
to do that kills me,
the beaches I have not
yet begun to run naked through
or all the good intentions
I've yet to ruin completely,
the zoos alone, with
their beautiful emus!
There is probably time
but what about my lifelong desire
to be a line cook who stows away
to wartime France?
Have we missed our chance
to be seething teenagers? Happily
we must've had it because
we are so tired but have
since blocked it out
and that's good enough for me.
Look, a brand new kitty,
a brand new eclipse,
guitarist plucking away in the dust.
Probably there will be another
wartime in France,
another snaggle of bureaucratic
barbed wire between me
and my new state-issued ID.
One way or another our days
are filled before our molecules
are broken up by speed
and the awesome heat of reentry.

On This Day In History

Don't eat the fish: mercury shoots up.
Don't eat the peanut butter.
Nobody being paranoid.
One monkey was shot into space.
Nine hundred monkeys were shot from a cannon.
We saw strange glowing lights in the sky.
Bayer discontinued its heroin tonic.
Thirteen dissidents were rounded up
and sent for reeducation on the salt flats.
Rubber bullets shot into the crowd.
Jaguars were seen coming down from the hills.
Nineteen went missing.
Among the missing were one boy
rumored to have telepathic powers
and one girl rumored to be
a boy with telepathic powers.
The common cold was discovered by Finnish scientists
trying to find a substitute for breast milk.
Drinking water was ruled unsafe.
The atmosphere was ruled unsafe.
You got what you wanted.
It snowed and snowed and snowed.

Predator Petting Zoo

There was some debate regarding
the wisdom of having a petting zoo
housing only predators.
They were all babies, or cubs,
the animals, that is,
whatever, but,
come to think of it,
so were most of the patrons.
Children, babies, whatever.
Anyway, the baby eels
weren't so bad, they were
in tanks and could do
little damage, and the kids
could see the baby eels
subdue and consume
tinier baby shrimp and crab.
In the Golden Age of Mammals,
mammals were huge and
they ate each other:
that's the gist
of the laminated pamphlet
at the entrance, anyway,
which is the thinking, I guess,
behind the whole
predator-petting-zoo thing.
Accidents happen but
are kept at a minimum
for the most part.
Occasionally a bloody mitten turns up
and we have to bury it
out back with the others.
We don't get many calls about
missing children, but our entrance
fee is pretty much just this
donation box, and those of us
who work here are too busy
subduing and tranquilizing
the more dangerous and larger animals,
since baby predators
are still, duh, dangerous,
so we don't have much time
to be watching who all comes in.
Other attractions include
bears, mantises, the poison dart frog,
cape buffalo (killing machines --
do not face head on
whatever you do), salt water
crocodiles, the sea wasp,
and also the mosquito,
plus at the very end
of the zoo the most dangerous
predator of all is housed: man!
There is also an exhibit on optimal
foraging theory and surplus killing.

One Hypothesis Regarding Literature and/or the Origin of the Species

So first there's this big sand worm,
okay, like real primordial and shit,

and that worm eats all of civilization
and then a little later we get

the enormous sand worm's excrement
which is, duh, the first civilization

all ground up, nutrients excised,
all the good stuff taken out, like

burlesque shows and mango groves
and pay toilets and a couple museums

and some sports but not professional football
which is crapped out almost whole,

and bears and sparkling apple juice
and super bouncy balls, dancing,

minarets, Fellini, punk rock, geodesic domes,
ball gowns, tea, coffee and whiskey,

all that's gone, and then you wait
about five or six million years and then

there are some new animals and while later
one shaggy, hungry person turns to another

and says, hey, let's write about that
beautiful yellow animal before we club it.

The Best Birthday Party Ever!

We bludgeoned
the pinata
something good,
changing
the donkey into
a leopard,
a house,
better times
back in the day,
venomous
politicization,
and finally
frilly goo.
The candy
scattered for weeks,
then so did we,
leaving
a trail
of bellyaches
across the night sky.

A Few Words Regarding Predator-Prey Relationships and Greed (Or: Who'd a Thunk?)

I'll agree it seems improbable
but here we are, rocketing through space,
a carnivorous alien aboard,
fighting for survival,
a computer malfunction piping only
Whitney Houston over and over again
through the ship.
It's enough to drive you bananas,
it gets you thinking about whatever
isn't what you're currently dealing with.
Your love of Portuguese.
My affinity for Mexican food.
Our hatred of corporate intrigue.
Let's not kid ourselves:
we're full of vitriol.
There is a strong argument to be made
re: the resurgence of tarring and feathering,
of carrying people out into the square.
I know I can say that though
due to my current lot in life:
rocketing through the sucking void
with only my wits and a length of chain
and you by my side, my friend,
while fifteen feet away from us
an alien who wants to eat us and beyond it
all that space, extraordinarily cold.

Live Blogging the Execution

The convicted (nee accused, nee another surname, surely, though no one remembers what it might possibly be and our records in fact do not extend that far back (and it is worth noting that even if our records did in fact extend that far back it is pretty unlikely that the convicted's (nee accused's) surname would even be worth recording)) walks up to the gallows.

The crowd (composed of diplomats, politicians, soldiers, a few parents, other various people who exude an aura of mysteriousness and officialdom, they of the highly meaningful dress and uniform whose meaning is unknown to us) whispers, jostles, looks attentively ahead.

The cameras (which are positioned at all corners of the room, at every conceivable angle, cameras of varying size, efficacy, and purpose, they have been built into the gibbet, the executioner is wearing a camera nestled into the fabric of his mask (which is tasteful, black, no other distinguishing characteristics) which is streaming live on several cable channels' websites which can all be accessed for a small fee) whirr and make adjustments in focus with small precise mechanical clicks.

The convicted (nee accused) is now standing on the platform beside the executioner, both of whom are standing on either side of the noose. The Secretary of Justice is beginning to stand. A hush falls over the crowd. The Secretary of Justice is standing now and making minute adjustments to his great flowing black robes, which are of a heavy black fabric, most likely velvet, and tasteful.

The Secretary of Justice is about to mount the Justice Platform and Lectern and will make the preliminary remarks concerning justice. The Secretary of Justice is at the podium. The orchestra will play the Justice Song. The orchestra is beginning to play the first great swells of the first movement -- let's listen in:

One Small Portion of Our Love Story

You were a spider
when I was a leaf.
We got along pretty well.
There were a lot of others.
The deer came up
from the river
to eat under the apple trees.
There wasn't a
computer anywhere in sight.
There was a spent match,
a photograph with
one big crease,
a pipe, a piano.
The sun was shiny,
and even though
we couldn't see them
we could hear birds
and also a long way off
a train leaving town.

The Quickest Route to Complete and Utter Spiritual Fulfillment

1

In the hierarchy of needs there is much tumult and confusion. The already shaky and indistinct line between our wants and those things necessary for our survival -- ie, what we commonly think of and refer to as "needs" -- has all but dissipated. We are worried about where we will go from here.

2

Recently, small robots have been introduced to our bloodstream and the bloodstream of others in order to seek out various insalubrious pathogens and eradicate them. The robots have been constructed and programmed by the best minds in seventeen countries, who monitor our health with great interest. The robots are very small.

3

We were going door-to-door giving out hugs. At first our idea was greeted with great fanfare and we heard reports that our initiative was being replicated in other areas of the state. It seemed like an important thing to do, because, you know, the times being what they are and all. After a while our numbers decreased.

4

The new zoo finally opened. It is fully stocked with exotic animals and no expense has been spared. It is located on the edge of town, on a slight rise. The impression one gets when looking at it from a distance is that even though we did not realize it, this zoo is what we've been looking for all along.

The Testament of Me and You

It was Saturday night and we were bored. We decided to make a monster in the basement. The usual things went into it, lots of claws and deep, seething hatred. Then we turned it loose, because what else were we going to do? We made hot chocolate after that and watched the carnage through the kitchen windows until we too boarded them up.

Cataloguing the Apocalypse

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.
Something or other about a dimm'd tide?

Check.

A blowhole full of blood --
check, check.

My manicure is
inciting revolt in the yard.

Pray tell.

These people are poor, dirty -- !

How can they erect a gibbet
when they can't even
groom themselves?

The pundits multiply.
TVs are the size of walls.

How are the best faring
re: their conviction?

How could they
march a series

of guillotines
glinting over the horizon?

Chop, chop.

iPhones in mass production,
a plume of smoke
in the distance.

In which people burn.

Are we not vexed into distraction,
what darkness
growing visible?

No one reads anymore.

A blowhole full of blood --
we've got that one already.

The Superficial

There is love
in the world.
There is also
licorice.
And bees.
Some fragrant flowers
growing
by the coiled
garden hose.
You could wave
to your friend
through the piece
missing from
my head.
You could string
two cans together
and talk.

A Few Words Regarding My and Possibly Also Your Nightmares

The bears were dancing in a circle.
The sky was out of line.
What makes a tornado scary are a few different things.
The hippo clambers up onshore,
where it is most dangerous to humans.

RIP, Ron Asheton

Well, this just sucks.

There Was This Rhinoceros We Didn't Know What To Do With

There was this rhinoceros we didn't know what to do with.
This was actually the least of our problems.
One thing at a time.
So, back to the rhino:
It was tearing up the carpet.
It was scuffing the tile.
It smelled like a rhino ought to smell: not so good.
It swung its horn into the drywall.
We took to calling it a rhino after tiring of saying the word rhinoceros every three minutes or so.
There is no alternative to the rhino.
If this rhino were a grammatical construct, it would be a declarative sentence of profound importance:
We are too close to the sun!
A baby is being born!
Death is coming to all things with terrible swiftness!
Etc.
The rhino sleeps in the bedroom.
The rhino brays/howls -- it is very, very loud.
If this rhino were a color:
Red whorls in a cloud of gray.
Like a cloud in which there are great gouts of blood.
The rhino is about to give birth!
We have trouble knowing how the rhino is feeling.

The Dangerous Flux of Possibility

The woman walks into the dark room. Some hours later, she goes what is sometimes referred to as ape shit. What has occurred in the dark room? Maybe this was the purpose of the room and this was her plan all along, to quietly and then loudly proceed to freak out in a typically socially unacceptable way. Maybe she thought about the tragic rise and fall of this country's celebrities and it just became too sad, i.e., the inherent disposability and plasticity, e.g., Whitney Houston (I like this woman doing the thinking in the darkened room). Maybe she walked into the dark room and began to think about what it means to be standing alone in a dark room, and she continued to think on this for longer than what is typically considered to be healthy, and she became frightened. Maybe she thought about how if you stand still in a dark room for a long enough time you start to see the darkness move, a little. An optical illusion, perhaps, but what if it isn't? Maybe she then thought of Henri Michaux (I like this woman) and about Plume and about our own tender vulnerability in an indifferent if not openly hostile metaphysical and just plain physical environment. Maybe she had to go to the bathroom. Maybe the last thing she thought was, I will not make it into work today. Other dangerous possibilities include: the rings of distant planets, the origin of eggs.

Inside the Monster

Inside the monster
is nothing much of interest.
Viscera, fluid, bone.
In the monster's hand:
several dozen doves.
In the monster's eyes:
calm hate. Obviously,
the monster is pretty big.

Towns

The town was made
of paper airplanes.

The town wasn't
going to last long.

Anyone could see that.
Especially when

the next town over
was made of fire

and the town after that
was made of ash.

My Secret

My secret may revolutionize how we fight wars.
My secret licks the glue on books' spines.
My secret cannot be weaponized.
My secret is hiding in the grass.
My secret is pulling away from the dock.
My secret will not be televised.
If smoked, my secret will fuck you up for days.
My secret has a soft and luxurious coat.
My secret was once spotted speeding along at low altitudes in the barren deserts of the American Southwest.
My secret once stayed for a week at the White House.
My secret was uninvited.
My stays crunchy in milk.
As a child-secret, my secret hopped on a boxcar and traveled the country, living on the land and relying on its wits.
My secret is as ugly as an ogre.
My secret likes the Pacific Northwest most of all.
My secret smells heavenly.
My secret floats.
My secret came from the stars.
My secret has a thing for Elvis.
My secret frequently quotes Shakespeare's sonnets.
My secret loves the tragedies.
My secret has no use for the comedies.
My secret has nothing to do with any of the above.
My secret is about dolphins.

Biology, Zoology, Pathology

The stage is at first dark, then it is dimly lit. A woman walks onstage. She goes over to a jukebox that is also onstage and puts in a quarter and music begins to play. Music fills up the stage and the woman begins to move through it. Her movements make the audience think of other things: fish, gorillas, a finch on a green branch, fossils, organisms and dynamos and unrelated things, like the slow vanishing of telephone booths. There is no way to describe the music, which is indeed beautiful. In the very back row a startled man thinks, it is an illusion!