Alamo Theory Night falling once like a horse through a bridge. Page God refusing to be survived. Page God hollering over one dirty haystack at whoever's hiding behind the next dirty haystack, and no one's getting off this tractor alive, no one without a pod of vanilla, stuck like a witch's finger in the throat. Often who goes there isn't the bees. Isn't the cherry trees. No one's darker than me. No one's big enough for pogroms. No one's grammar gets a pass.
Can't you hear the popping of the karen-gun? Why the Hittites, why the Etruscans, sore and lost between vast greatness? See the mountains, their trauma halos of power line? Okay now show me your anagram. No I don't even care. We bury a prom dress in the sand of every coast; sew a new prom dress from the flag of every coast. Jesus sat down, calmly, fashioned himself a whip of leathern cord. Page God had never recorded premeditation at such levels. We never really learned the correct usage of the voice-box, either, but when we took ourselves by the neck, it was ancient, our language, brave the living mammal pinned to its duration, the problem with the orgy always witness, witness, witness. Your breath comes out in a pretty cloud of blue, which is a different color than most people use. What a brand new giveaway.
Students of the game have noticed that, often, before I shoot, I take the time to mention vegetation fretting somewhere across a fact-lit red hill. It's getting late and I'm the only American on the dance floor. Still. Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound) Back when my voice box was a cabinet-full of golden vibrators, and my hair fell white across the middle of my back like a child's wedding dress, I made love to at least a dozen girls dressed up to look like me: the hotel bed a sky filled with the flock of our South-Flying mic scarves, the back of my head and the front appearing simultaneously in hotel mirrors, and the twin crusts of our make-up sliding off into satin like bits of California coast. I heard my own lyrics coming out of the greasy tent of their beautiful wigs, my lyrics driven back towards me, poled into me, demanding of me the willing completion of vague circus acts I'd scribbled down, once, on the back of a golf card or a piece of toilet paper. Sometimes I myself wonder what I was thinking then, but those words went on to live forever, didn't they, radioed out into the giant Midwestern backseat and blasted into kneecaps and tailbones by that endless tongue of berber carpeting blanketing the American suburbs, boys and girls strung like paper lanterns from here to Syracuse along my microphone cord. Who rocks you now rocks you always, I told them all, and all of them somehow wearing a homemade version of the same leather pants I'd chosen to wear on stage that night; all of them hoping to enter me--to enter anyone-- the way they thought I entered them, and the way I entered them was wishing I was somewhere else, or wishing I was the someone else who'd come along to enter me, which was the same thing. I am no fag, my new friend.
Love in battle conditions requires a broad taxonomy, queerness has its ever-more-visible degrees. Josh, I know you know what I'm talking about, you have the build of a stevedore. Which reminds me, as a child in Nanjing, I sculled the junks for my bread and I slept in a hovel along the Chiang Jiang River. In a cage there, I bred mice who built their nests from the frayed rope I'd taken from the decks, and one Spring, when the babies did not emerge, I lifted up the rock that hid them, and I found they'd grown together, fused with each other and the tendrils of the nest. I held them up, eleven blind tomatoes wriggling on a blackened vine. And now you come to me in this Chinese restaurant in Malibu, asking if you can help me. Please tell Circus Magazine I love them truly, and please pass Pamela this message: If you get back to Malibu by springtime, drop by the houseboat, and I''ll rock your ass as far as Cho-Fu-Sa. The Last Critique We think Elizabeth's poems suck.
We think Steve's poems suck. And we think Rachel's poems suck Elizabeth''s poems. We didn't remember how or why the Stranger's poems sucked, but we thought Holly was good, so it scared us when the Stranger's poems refused to suck Holly's poems. A lot of people want to suck Fred's new poems, which suck, but they are too difficult for us to suck, and we'd rather suck his old ones, for though they are old, and suck, it is much easier to suck them. When she reads them out loud, Clarise's poems suck pretty good, but we are reserving our final judgment until we've seen them sucking on the page. We think Martha's poems suck. Sometimes when we think we're sucking on one of Theodore's poems, we're actually sucking on two. We think Ed's poems have that girl-scout look which make us want to start a family when we hear them through the keyhole, sucking.
Philbert's poems suck like they've been sucking Annie's poems too much. Annie's poems sucked, but at least they brought something new to the act of sucking, we'd never seen a poem sucked like that before, and we thrilled to suck on them, as if sucking on household appliances. Many people enjoy the austere sucking of Terry's poems. Still, no one pays to suck Terry's poems like they pay to suck Anton's. We think Tom-Tom's poems suck so hard. We think Wendy's mature poems suck near the unassailable power of the Stranger's poems, and at first we are frightened, as if forced to suck an entire opera, when Wendy gets that Viking look and makes us suck her poems. Maybe we could arrange for Terry's poems, Wendy will say, to suck the Stranger's poems, but the Stranger's poems are missing, and Terry is afraid, and we do not blame him, as some of us recall the first time we heard the Stranger's poems, which enter sucking bird and beast and flower, sucking Queen and beggar, Oldsmobile and go-cart, saying long-time-no-suck me, saying Terry: suck Wendy, suck Holly, saying suck the redwood forest, saying suck me lonely mannequin, saying suck the abundant splendored thrice jismatic suck of lonely mannequin, saying suck theology, missile launch, stirrups and ballet. Some of us choose to recall, instead, how the Stranger's poems seemed capable of sucking themselves, as if they no longer required us to suck them, and filled with obsolescence we had to run next door to suck our neighbor's poems, real quick.
But we all agree on the way, when the Stranger's poems end, they appear to suck the entire round planet, all at once, the planet which--in the Stranger's poem's unhinged jaws--comes dressed up like the Bride who was a Sailor, but all in the white of clouds and with a metallic S&M rig peeking through underneath, showing the chaste girdle of skyscrapers inside of which we suck and sleep and suck the poems we've written in fear of sucking the Stranger's poems, which go on sucking hard for us, through the disastered warp of Time, the Stranger's poems uncanonized, built to be sucked in a way we will never understand, as the Stranger's poems are a work of genius, and only our children's children will ever fully suck them. Blue Safari Or bring along an extra shovel for me, a map of the area, some new interferences, we may need to plant something. Normally I'd leave the important digging to you because I am afraid of tools and how my fingers fall to rest so easily on handles, of the earth when it's been opened, and furthermore I'm afraid to close it when I'm done with it, there are baby teeth down there, beetles in the hollow of a doll's head. Though let me say I am hardly ever done with it, Earth, or whatever it was the first ones called it, even when it's signaling that it's done with me. The timeline unwinds, weeds firing up from the window box like rockets, the rowboat sun somewhat closer than recorded. Additionally we may need to capture something in advance of burying it: a wild animal, a wild animal, I am almost certain we have been commissioned to capture a wild animal, ears like radar dishes turning always toward the racket we are making, despite how quiet we must be stacking tools and tent-poles in the bed of my pickup truck. Or at least that's how I've drawn it here in my sketchbook. Or first it was the tools, and then it was our hands were built for them, and they were built with other tools entirely, over whose wooden bodies and crooked metal heads they never let us speak of the weather or of the day our bodies will disappear, taking all their secrets and favorite paintings along with them toward the sun.
Long and thin, your hands are for the removing o.