by KUBOA
She reminds me that my calvous forehead stands on its toes against the rest of my head, blocking the spill of pheromones and putting her girl parts in a sullen ponder.
I want to retract my hand bones up through my arms so that when I took a swing at her it would be perceived as playful badinage, the whipping of pink scarves.
I paid a twenty to my martlet guy in the hallway; keep ‘em coming, I said, there is wonderment here.
Hope burns with a xanthic curl of smoke until otherwise labeled on the white hot junction box of her encouragement zone.
Dear, the dompteuse has arrived!
She sometimes has the medianic wherewithal to chronicle future fumblings and then, after they occur, to chastise me for lethargy in the face of retrospective foreknowledge.
Absent intent, I say, what obtains is a prolapsed dereliction, the discomfiture of all your curly memes.
And you find things unfair.
Spinoza
Going to the store to buy more books on Spinoza; he makes me want to get drunk and think about shit. I’m hoping Leonard is feeling okay and has brought the booze. He is a fool. Our moms were friends. You know the type, brothers of convenience. He wears his rationalism like a bouquet of x pinned with y to a monadology of misbuttoned flannel. The divine elevation of the creator’s intention currently takes the form of middle finger towards Simmons, whose Aspen hat footnotes fastimes, etc, whatever, goddam you Leonard, leave that Sophist alone. You just spilled wine on Ethics and that simply won’t do. Simmons, back me up, would you? You asked my opinion on “burrito challenges” and I said that gluttony was homage to bounty and bounty only impoverished need. You nodded like you agreed, but I suspect you were merely caught bee-bopping to your vintage Andreas Pavel Stereobelt which you conned with avuncular shrewdness from your niece, the deaf-mute. She painted her objection in watercolors, a hippo and a rainbow that didn’t reach the ground, hovering just above in a pessimistic malaise. Simmons, stop licking boxed wine off of the Ethics; I’ll be right over here, watching you. Leonard, in response to your question: no, you puerile claphound, I will certainly not; sure, call me an epiphenomenon of digestion if you must, I will laugh and consume your sister, with poetry, that artifact of river stone and sunny roads. Simmons, the pipe, really?...clear the bowl on your own peg-leg, sonofabitch. You two; you even think about taking the Pistol Pete Marivich card I got taped to my helmet, god help me I’ll dismantle you like straw men and use what’s left to form stronger versions of your own positions, then I’ll feed you to a donkey or something. But anyway, the card, hands off. Simmons, I see you running and setting up that step ladder: I’ll simply speed up. By the time you clamber up the ladder to reach for my head my velocipede and I have passed. My logic is like a tiger, quod erat demonstrandum.
Gary, Indiana 2004
How quickly the parsons undertake heterodox theory, taunting pimps in habiliments that exceed common mockery; look at them, go, they remove likeness and infuse a crepuscular energy to salt stained foreheads without respect to epistemological mouths and the wind blows, blows through light cones, the bucolic blown apart apples in a poisoned pie and the pimps render a stoop-wise slant on the ontological wherewithal of vexed runaways and wish for pie, aspire for a cobbler they can really work their thumbs into and lapse into a reverie of mommas and streetcars. This is characteristic of a set of sets, evinced jovially through the elements devoted to hand slapping and the minding of clement affairs. A sow’s udder limned by a morose cartography of ropey veins draws attention, folds in fields and earns thought, indoctrination among vegan trombonists who look into the windows of Gary where an alternate sky is reflected; and, from the side-saddled mayor on the donkey being led by a tether tied to the belt loop of a member of the municipal banjo corps, we hear “Parade!”; still others yell Boolean complements in the form of states of affairs that include event spaces that, in terms of mayors and parades, simply are not the case. The mayor blows into his thumb and wishes it was the reed of a wondrous horn; a fat kid gazes at his own reflection in a shop window and has jealous stirrings. Meanwhile, in a vagrant chophouse across town, the Gary jaycees imagine they hear in the distance a call to arms and they all laugh and get pepper on things.
S
Cover your face in good Vaudeville measure and wonder what it is about a marriage that often goes flat when threesomes demand larger primes and years go unturned, simmering in pans of hot fat.
‘S ‘ has been shown to stave off dementia but only at the expense of unparalleled madness, particularly if what you take is not-S, some apocryphal and undocumented root or malign compote, pestled and rubbed into your head wounds with the ginger animus of a laughing lady or the saccharine angst of occidental diabetic ice-cream models.
She does like you, though, your ruby mane of acne; she presses on them at night, those elevator buttons to nowhere, wondering if your smile will float when you plummet.
I don't know if I should take S again because my fists always strike their mark, slightly off center, scarcely hitting anything.
You are laughing still, a thunder-crack of teeth.
Complement
One’s complements go when there is only room for opposites, the complements of complements? I do not know. I scarcely have inclination. Past forty-five degrees, in a winter’s bed, I surround myself with scoffing children and orange bottles. The children are illusory, though, if I am to believe my fists, or perhaps authentic ghosts, or accumulated laundry in rancid gathers.
The questions line up.
Greetings, lachrymose rocking, I’m glad I found you over here in this corner.
Dutch
We braced for unknown quantities. Looking, we looked. Ted didn’t know shit, nor did the hare-lipped coterie of impudent and saucy barristers who stood advising Ted via passed paper and vibrant tweets, their thumbs blue-veined and terrible. The wife and I shared a bowl of oatmeal with maple syrup. An Amish man wore on his hip a jar of blackberry preserves, taunting the barristers with old world irony. Blackbird in my pocket, don’t die, please, tell me the time and divest your head of song. We wait and make brims of our hands. Woman over there, doing nothing, hand me that bottle of ‘Old Amsterdam’ from my backsack and guide it to my mouth; I need a stern bracer because Ted’s an ass and my hands shake and my teeth chip like shist. The Amish man unscrewed the lid of his blackberry jar and jammed his thumbs inside and then he licked them.
My wife thought he licked like either a kitten or a madman, she said.
Mutual exclusivity as applied to gustatory predation, I thought, or, in the absence of an actual thought, pictured in terms of Venn diagrams suspended from my insides in the fashion of Hex signs twisting in scattered nothing. Look, a privacy barn!
Ted, are you getting all this? But Ted wasn’t, and when confronted, admitted he hadn’t, and when cornered, refused to fight, refusing and grinning, his thumbs in his eyes.
Woodbury Benefactors
Am I interrupting the progress of the advancement of this lady parlor’s soda jerk scene?
No, you are not, so enter and accustom yourself to the idea of bludgeoned thought, Pall-Mall flavored ice cream treats, and a dismal faux-French style of staring at wrecked faces that will violate taste, I assure you.
I will enter and lay my arms inside the candy dish, says the man and so he walks in with his arms bent at ninety degrees, fingers pointed up, palms facing the eyes in that staid manner of great surgeons.
He is greeted with the hiss of dour women preparing marginal meals with old maws.
You are, they said, interrupting a whole lot of important shit.
Then we shall dance!
The man indifferent
to many insisted
that smelling like the contrails of an imaginary plane that ran on tobacco and brothel antiseptic wipes was irrelevant to whether he could develop a file structure amenable to motile dev tropes.
The truculent fat are here, rubbing their fingers together and making corduroy
sounds; would you like in?
Where is the suicide medicine, dear?
Long shipped from Pueblo, Colorado and on the roof where you left it, she said.
Ok, then, but what did the neo-luddite say to the light bulb?
Dear, the language you employ to limn your threadbare dialectic is barely above Cajun-grade.
Fuck you, with a twist, said the man, layering the punchline with the subtle animus of an Afro-centric stock photographer.
Good day, laundromats of St. Cloud, he said, laughing towards the roof.
Watchtower Johnson
He came to see about the vexations brought on by uneasy comportment unkempt and reduced to sepia puddled washwater malaise, and by what, the times of day?
Yes.
Where are the ladies?
With Watchtower Johnson
Why?
Furs and bereavement
Why might that be?
Watchtower Johnson is an unknown quantity, a float of cash darkening in pennies; nevertheless, though, he is a medicine unto the floral ladies and breeds respect from the Petri of horror.
Brimless or not he tips his hat women or men.
These snacks are fantastic, he said, Watchtower Johnson said, he said, and saying no more stood, unannouncing neo-Victorian doldrums, all as you might have imagined.
Schrödinger
He hangs out in the fields with his jacket off, balled up and thrown into a placental bundle; “where does one differentiate one universe and the next when all you have are dead cats?” –this he quotes from a one act play he was considering producing, one entitled ‘Sex Robots’.
He throws another one into the air, and then another, and then another, and waits for the crinkle of dried grass when they fall back into the field, but he never hears it; instead, he either hears the rustle of dried hair against a tree limb or the giddy squeak some of the bald ones make; these sound like balloons when they slide past.
“So where is this locus of collapse?” he reads.
Lamont picks up another and rubs it on his head to generate a static charge and then attaches it via electromagnetism to his car hood. He rolls up the manuscript into a tube and pretends that it is a spyglass.
Eight cats float in the air above him and he will eventually collect them all with his hooks and poles and stuff them back into their cages, probably, and then drape them, consider them somewhere in transit between alive and dead, moaning silently and cock-eyed in some parallel pound.
Later, back at his apartment, he will play for them his recordings of syphilitic jazz drummers and other contemporary conduits of decoherence; he will dance and then pull away the sheets.
He will repeat this ritual and dance and then open all the cages and windows and sleep.
The hi-fi is on and he does this, but in the morning all are gone.
In Here
Can I call you a name, Hildy? Different than that, mostly, and in mirrors where we aren’t really us, not now, but how we looked in the past, back before we dared question the physics of bent light, the rationalization of Brent’s trouser legs and how we winced at the brightness of the prescription plate as it passed under the chandelier; several have said we shrugged at crucial moments, under perfumed, over stimulated, shattered by jacket notes we found written by us, used as placeholders for emotion, we unfolded them, and dilated time and it stretched around us such that our thens and befores reached into common Greenwich time and we tore them up and blew the confetti into each other’s hair during the wake’s boring parts. I decide in moments summoned by stringing thought and heavy synapse, I or them, sought by authorities, broken for mooning, regardless, though, a decision has been cast: Hildy, I shall call you Titsy, such as the pullings of present wont. Please pass the pills for your shoulder disease; earnestly, love, I am hungry, and my fingers are crooked with grief. Say you there, you with your elbows raised high in the choreography of escape, drive the subtext with deviant stutter. Titsy, you would truly shatter light had you a vanity attendant, and I mean that, in my way. Taller than the like gaited Adderal fiends shorn and dazed in Walgreen aisles we stood upright and had us a waltz, right their near the foot creams, and we kept at it despite the sounds of the hurley-burley and well shod constabulary shouldering guests in the anteroom. In here they gather in clumps and divert hustlers and ladies limping in torn stockings towards the parking lot adjacent to the Anabaptist flea market where even the man hawking a book of primo tax liens stolen from a city desk reeks like a church pew; browsers flip through the pages and close the book when they reach a name they recognize. They close the book slowly, reverently, incunabularly, and then the bells ring to provide counterpoint to the sedentary hand slapping. Titsy, you get wig hair caught in your gum when you time poorly a gusty inhale during awkward laughing, and my fez rolls off into the bin of plastic shoes; I fetch it back readily, see, and you stand there with your mouth shut, embarrassed again. You point to the scissor aisle, I point to a rack of smokers gum and tooth polish, and we look at the time in a mirror, two mirrors to re-orient, and we understand; we are going to be late for a funeral, all of them, probably. Yes.
S_epilogue
We should take S together and so stave an abomination of Victorian babies in ornate bloomers from bustling round the edge of the vortex you found in the corner of the guestroom behind the over sized Bento box we use to store sweaters and my collection of gently used historic Civil War tourniquets.
Take S alone and use the orange basket instead, or close your arms as might a man shimmying through the walls of a dark stalag with oranges.
My martlet guy is beating on the buzzer. He slides my screaming fake orange ‘twenty’ under the door. I step on his hand when he reaches for my feet.
Things are beginning to go sour now that the S is gone, I say.
We
You
The dompteuse has gone. Tomás is oppressed by shadow.
And now we have no oranges either….
And the capybara, bloated with merlot and frenzy, seeks respite and a sense of object permanence by snuffing at your groin….
And I have concerns of my own, she says, now that the bathroom wall has fallen backwards into my lover’s light.
The Thomson’s
Fucking Bad Cookout
War light filtered through cigarettes and ambled mediocre smiles rooted back and forth wandering business lunch semantic laughter, if that can be believed, and outside she stared and the shadow crept down the street as it was imminent that the blimp would pass and obviate the need for further talk of the chances of seeing blimps on a Tuesday.
Blimps were fair game and would traditionally interrupt all manner of banal society up to and including shopping center grand openings, arcane extemporaneous cannibal brisses, resurrections, even The Thomson’s faux front lawn dramedy featuring sub-odious one-liners and pimpled cleavage.
This should not have been expected to obtain without the slightest blimp, but these are an optimistic people, these omphaloskeptic milfs, crackerjack barristers…
Yes, I would like what that is, if what I’m looking at is small toast with mayo and powdered meat, he said.
It is, she said.
He reached and it was.
Dad Said
If you are going to try to catch fish by dressing as a bear then you had better at least approach the river’s edge and get the fuck out of your El Camino; fish don’t know from sinister, these zoo fish at least.
When a tooth loosens in a red gum then you had better consider a different brand of carrots and acquaint yourself with the mythology of self-maintenance.
Goddam it, it’s not a Hitchcock rocker if someone is using it at a bus stop, so stop hitting them for inattention to quality craftsmanship; Hitchcock never made a folding chair and Hitchcock never ever made a wheelchair so stop making those fucking bear sounds, boy!
Escaping a World
from Inside and Out
Nobody has see
n a black hole directly; however, it has also been claimed anecdotally, through periodicals folded into cones, that Yang-Mills Theory is the recapitulative sonata scoring the Fermi-Dirac statistics of an as yet unproven theory in which ‘X’ stands for Burt Reynolds, the young one, not the atherosclerotic humbug of the Seven-Corners bar scene. This statement itself admits reference to a certain wanton marshaling of facts, the sputtering of yard bird theologians; perhaps it is all wrong, all wrong.
Burt Reynolds, anyways, is a scalar variable, said one sonofabitch to a cream colored wall, twice.
The most halcyon club members whittle neck tattoos and on the side blithely carve holes into the pages of ‘The Trans-Am Avid Reader Level Two’ in order to hide a knife or a gently used toothbrush or a locket of hair procured with no little assiduousness from a shower drain or sink, though it could be a moustache. It is unclear, really, in all this sun.
You knew this, one supposes, I suppose, dandy strolling as it were in ways improbable and dusty.
What? You are talking. Still.
There was a guy who died in the sun after having to endure listening to a black man and a white man butcher the pronunciation of 'Michio Kaku' before gratefully succumbing to a kidney stab; the syntax of gratitude was well formed, his mouth a pocked figure eight scattering ellipses.
If you are going to withdraw a book from the prison library you should not peacock in front of the dying; bend some real cortical prejudice towards content or metaphor and be a god, turn out your pockets and twist them and make motorcycle noises at least.
It was sunny when the man died, truth be told a regular Wednesday, albeit a day solemn in the hearts of adjacent grab-ass crackers who stared at the roiling dirt on the ground or maybe it was the fence or the sky which was so very blue as to almost evoke birds from our armpits.
