This is a spoken-word excerpt from "Bodyhammer," a song I wrote for the rock trio Agnes in 1997.
Once upon a machine we bent the rib-cage
To taste the whip, hot sting locked in the chest
The clavicle harness, buckled
Taut saddle ride the spine
Claw to grip smile and eyelid, arthritic
Knuckle, canine and incisor fondle
A Parkinson fist, the tingle of punishment
The whip
Λωτtοφfάγοι
Where broken threads come to rest.
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Friday, November 16, 2007
Caveat Emptor (The Frozen Dead)
Rags tied around the rips in my clothes - leather and canvas, black and olive-drab (and always dirty) - heave a silent menace into the road. Riding freight cars is a thing of the past; the highway is too slinky and clean for me, the woods are all swamp pits - infested with trash, needles, beer cans and waterlogged couch cushions - and the neighborhoods are all built from recycled plastic milk jugs. Our estuary is dissolving into white chalk and re-bar. The black birds in black armor mark sentry posts against the White Visitation, white surf beating its cold saw-teeth...
Sand dug under my fingernails, shabby red whiskers on my jaws, feet in perpetual ache, nostrils in perpetual flare, stare fixed on the hundred-yard line... knives fixed to bootstraps ...hoarding tinder and kindling, hoarding bricks and pipes, ducking squalls under swoop of cedar boughs, rationing canned beans and apples, bolting up from sleep to stab shadows, stinking of smoke and toe-fungus, bathing in a forever of sweat.
This is this how you’d meet me: wrung out, never living in it. Who wrote on this beach trash? Who broke the sundial and left the hourglass upside-down? Will I show up trailing kelp and crab-shells, dune-grass in my beard, eating cold beans from a can, teeth orange, eyes yellow and sunken and bruised? Who’s been chopping at the straw goddesses, throwing the corpses of dogs on the fire? Who keeps carving messages in the tree-trunks, and if I stuff a note into each bottle, what’s to keep them from washing back up on these same beaches, scratching me in my sleep?
The fog is here.
The dead come at me in those radiant under-eyelid visions before sleep. The dead come at me in dancing skeleton circles, in a funnel that sucks the Earth into dead obliterating space, the frozen dead in brilliant blues and turquoise and the orange glow of campfire embers, asking me if the ocean is cold enough to swallow, the frozen dead in lavender and the mad red reds that rip the ocean sunsets, the frozen dead in hammered gold glide their frozen bone fingers across my palm, ask if it isn’t a lovely day to go drowning in whisky and wheels and metal. The skulls all drain and spiral into orbit, and there they forget the Earth.
The frozen dead are focused now into a thin twisting filament, stretched out over eons of space, vomiting frozen souls to disseminate across the empty galaxy waysides. The frozen bones smear into fine hairs, lightyears in length, wrapping the planet in silken death-twine, choking off the solar wind, de-magnetizing the poles. The frozen dead are an electric tourniquet before the celestial amputation.
Sand dug under my fingernails, shabby red whiskers on my jaws, feet in perpetual ache, nostrils in perpetual flare, stare fixed on the hundred-yard line... knives fixed to bootstraps ...hoarding tinder and kindling, hoarding bricks and pipes, ducking squalls under swoop of cedar boughs, rationing canned beans and apples, bolting up from sleep to stab shadows, stinking of smoke and toe-fungus, bathing in a forever of sweat.
This is this how you’d meet me: wrung out, never living in it. Who wrote on this beach trash? Who broke the sundial and left the hourglass upside-down? Will I show up trailing kelp and crab-shells, dune-grass in my beard, eating cold beans from a can, teeth orange, eyes yellow and sunken and bruised? Who’s been chopping at the straw goddesses, throwing the corpses of dogs on the fire? Who keeps carving messages in the tree-trunks, and if I stuff a note into each bottle, what’s to keep them from washing back up on these same beaches, scratching me in my sleep?
The fog is here.
The dead come at me in those radiant under-eyelid visions before sleep. The dead come at me in dancing skeleton circles, in a funnel that sucks the Earth into dead obliterating space, the frozen dead in brilliant blues and turquoise and the orange glow of campfire embers, asking me if the ocean is cold enough to swallow, the frozen dead in lavender and the mad red reds that rip the ocean sunsets, the frozen dead in hammered gold glide their frozen bone fingers across my palm, ask if it isn’t a lovely day to go drowning in whisky and wheels and metal. The skulls all drain and spiral into orbit, and there they forget the Earth.
The frozen dead are focused now into a thin twisting filament, stretched out over eons of space, vomiting frozen souls to disseminate across the empty galaxy waysides. The frozen bones smear into fine hairs, lightyears in length, wrapping the planet in silken death-twine, choking off the solar wind, de-magnetizing the poles. The frozen dead are an electric tourniquet before the celestial amputation.
Afterlife Express
Vitamins. Caffeine. Vomit. Pills. Whiteout. Calendar. Salad dressing. Acid reflux. Scratch paper. Fish scales. Seaweed. Sticky-hot June rain ...and these organs don’t fit inside me the way they did before I ripped them out. It’s like unpacking a suitcase in your hotel room the night before your redeye flight: everything expands. The pills swell up in your throat if you don’t swallow fast enough; they get stuck - halfway up, halfway down - and now your mouth is driftwood-dry with the bitter piss-yellow powder bleeding out, and if you cough it up you’ll get a side of bile with that big-mac - that’s for star-spangled goddamn sure.
That magic-marker, factory-fresh glue smell ripples invisibly off the boxes in the back room – fiber-tape-tight noxious money-shots ...on credit. That’s a Benjamin well-spent, m’boy. And before you can file the flash off your model rocket parts these elastic acres’ll be humming with the lush luminous blue globes of commerce: where the streets move and the cars stand still, where the high-definition flatscreen monitors are embedded into every vertical surface, where the couches are plush and jumbo and help you stand up to take a leak when the catheter slips, and you never have to worry about losing the remote control because the digital cable responds to inhibitive action-potentials in your frontal and parietal lobes, and the sea has a volume knob ...and the flowers pick themselves.
That magic-marker, factory-fresh glue smell ripples invisibly off the boxes in the back room – fiber-tape-tight noxious money-shots ...on credit. That’s a Benjamin well-spent, m’boy. And before you can file the flash off your model rocket parts these elastic acres’ll be humming with the lush luminous blue globes of commerce: where the streets move and the cars stand still, where the high-definition flatscreen monitors are embedded into every vertical surface, where the couches are plush and jumbo and help you stand up to take a leak when the catheter slips, and you never have to worry about losing the remote control because the digital cable responds to inhibitive action-potentials in your frontal and parietal lobes, and the sea has a volume knob ...and the flowers pick themselves.
Notch Six (Non-Zero Sun)
A virus in the planet, an imprint subject to screw... countdown to nova. The sugar-screw circulates and drives. Brain marinates in bland alcohol shivers; this machine shudders, runs on petraglyphs, burns clean eclipsthynol. This is not a reading machine.
The worms drill down viral patterns in the uterine echo chamber: the heartbeat, pulmonate rasp, motor’s thunder, asphalt hiss and the paranoid flat nasal buzz of men and women making sense of things – folding a neat universe into handbags and cocktail napkins, a neat conspirator pacing in the background. Toe clicks on the tile... moth bend and clip, silent on foetal radar.
Lips singed by the barking liquor burn smile now. Lipstick-mottled blank goddess ...a mother buzzard. Fat-fry renderings in chalk and piss and granite... This scroll was written in bile, with a hollow bone, with a hum in my ear. Shovel it in A-major, as close to 8 Hz as we can get down here, in the leech ranch, where the agates are all alphabetized, the typewriters only run underwater.
Six notches down, the cool air condenses on the canister – a pressure differential – like tiny wooden match-fire burns oxygen from a glass cup. The cup, positioned, suctions like an empty brilliant leech, blazing with transparency.
Open end, corpses down... six feed down, six notches up. The joint ratchets, the prices hike; the skyjack knife pinions Braille xenophobe threats on the dust-jacket. These pensions prolapse; now were all uninsurable. Miles of coils, miles of eleven-degree chemical knifings and chemical brides... A mass of tissue bolus subdivides, implodes. Latent twin fetus shares a spine, vestigal gills and fins, shares a jacket-less circular book with his broken blood uncle. Bulemic queers piss in the livery. The bootblack fucks the sheriff’s horse. His signature blot drips.
This island is a whale - a dead whale imploded - and supernovae coalesce swollen oceans into microscopic non-possibilities, particles with a negative tendency to occur in a non-domain. Eleven-dimensional six-corpse opening... buried head down, salt-crowned skeletons of the elevens, skeletons of the nines. The vane rests on the eleven. The gears melt. The axis of Pluto falls through galactic center, trips the wire while our sun rests there, saying nothing, never setting, never brushing close enough to zero. Non-Zero Sun ushers you just to the edge but can never drop you over.
The worms drill down viral patterns in the uterine echo chamber: the heartbeat, pulmonate rasp, motor’s thunder, asphalt hiss and the paranoid flat nasal buzz of men and women making sense of things – folding a neat universe into handbags and cocktail napkins, a neat conspirator pacing in the background. Toe clicks on the tile... moth bend and clip, silent on foetal radar.
Lips singed by the barking liquor burn smile now. Lipstick-mottled blank goddess ...a mother buzzard. Fat-fry renderings in chalk and piss and granite... This scroll was written in bile, with a hollow bone, with a hum in my ear. Shovel it in A-major, as close to 8 Hz as we can get down here, in the leech ranch, where the agates are all alphabetized, the typewriters only run underwater.
Six notches down, the cool air condenses on the canister – a pressure differential – like tiny wooden match-fire burns oxygen from a glass cup. The cup, positioned, suctions like an empty brilliant leech, blazing with transparency.
Open end, corpses down... six feed down, six notches up. The joint ratchets, the prices hike; the skyjack knife pinions Braille xenophobe threats on the dust-jacket. These pensions prolapse; now were all uninsurable. Miles of coils, miles of eleven-degree chemical knifings and chemical brides... A mass of tissue bolus subdivides, implodes. Latent twin fetus shares a spine, vestigal gills and fins, shares a jacket-less circular book with his broken blood uncle. Bulemic queers piss in the livery. The bootblack fucks the sheriff’s horse. His signature blot drips.
This island is a whale - a dead whale imploded - and supernovae coalesce swollen oceans into microscopic non-possibilities, particles with a negative tendency to occur in a non-domain. Eleven-dimensional six-corpse opening... buried head down, salt-crowned skeletons of the elevens, skeletons of the nines. The vane rests on the eleven. The gears melt. The axis of Pluto falls through galactic center, trips the wire while our sun rests there, saying nothing, never setting, never brushing close enough to zero. Non-Zero Sun ushers you just to the edge but can never drop you over.
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