 | not at all as you had pictured it—out on the broken edge, liquid mountains float in the air .... outcropping from thorn bush, slates of bloodstone placed there according to the laws of chance (that one should entertain such beliefs) the idea, the motive immured in its vault like a fossil awaiting excavation. daybreak, first yawn of reason .... the 100,000 light bulbs of LUNA P RK dressing the blacked-out scar of decommissioned navy yards, dry docks, kings cross. an attempt at a description or a schedule: doesn’t know when they threw the case or its contents away”— be ready to dismiss any of this: the plush blonde all glass & electric switches radiating from a single point like / a finial on a skyscraper .... the compendium that constitutes its centre [an ever- inward movement, watched over again on rewind] to grasp its entelechy night roads across the flat out-country, apparitions of distance static & pin-point luminous as conducting rods & storm fronts ranging west to east—the rainslashed glare of articulated lorries, visitants from outer worlds, earth tremor & juggernaut cut side- ways in the wake, counting back in reverse order to the moment the halo formed around the analogue dial, wandjina-like & electric as spirit medium shot at high speed, blue flashing across defaced warning signs the imaginary, someone says, is that which tends to become real. the surface of a night stretched thin across the unbidden secrets of dry lake beds. diesel & ephedrine two exxed-out roadmaps overlapping in the rearview, testing the stringency of what it means to be invisible (“a silent withering of intuited forms) though drawing no conclusion from it |
| as if the sky were falling from the sky, the monstrum in animo of all our flawed conjectures piled up at the wreckage site like an overturned horizon .... inverts the thing you navigate by (signs indicating direction of travel &c). what “comes after does not follow. broken glass on the sidewalk, a fake diamond necklace grasped at the back & pulled tight until it snaps—the bruised & neon sky which never ceases its slow striptease .... its mask & trick are laws of nature (in all things only the higher degrees matter), not fear or pity born of bad conscience or from what one has failed to recognise its consequences are elsewhere, signalled in like fashion by a disavowal (i look but i don't see”) or diversion (“it’s clear from the preceding details we’re in a kitchen in hoboken, a moroccan bathhouse, a taxi garage in leopoldville c.1960) increasingly predisposed towards trivial objects, a sheet of postage stamps, stale coffee grounds, the polished buttons on a woman’s blouse, each with its own context & raison d’être—assuming an eye for detail / things erased or later added to the picture: what is the right point of view? describing an accumulated pyramid (standing in a crowd on the steps of the metropolitan museum ....)—the things we are presented with appear lifeless, an exhibit; a sideboard with canapés in advance of the heimlich manoeuvre grey light in the winter garden, a cortex of jazz & dead beat: the peacocks grubbing among the lower branches (the bird that can sing & won’t sing) .... once again led along by the nose—someone begins to laugh, preventing the ceremony taking place in due order or else this is how it was meant to be, arranged not as a tableau but as an “advertisement. a cigar store indian standing watch beside a barber pole, seems to come out of nowhere—dressed in the slogans of fifteen minutes ago, the myriad carousels booming with fairground thunder & no smoking gun? it's late & still far too early to call the shots, though neither one resigned to a standoff. as always the chanteuse is ahead of the field & already in bed with the enemy while each of the others await their turn |  |
 | the algebra of two interlocking figures, a game of chess, sewing machines thumping in the middle of the night. on the side street mannequins appear .... perverted nature, denied or murdered offspring warning, given first. second, the condition for appearance's sake & particularly silence on such a day, afternoon .... to keep track (i.e. to repeat [?]) an impossible undertaking. date time of year .... an object the sum of its complications scrapyards of weathered junk. fistulae. the constipated laughter of naked ambition—a denser more literal reality, bespeaks statutory limits (in the manner of undertaking the necessary steps towards an assent of permissibility?) some unassailable mountain redoubt, a symbol perhaps to invite or surmount difficulty, waiting to be compromised for the sake of a good ending; the lacklustre god wheeling across a stage-painted sky to demand ovation or steal off with the bride still hot from the first throws of criminal awakening (impassive according to the script, though secretly desiring it) a drunken alarm sounding in the street spreading to highways, cross-border panic. a bon- fire set up in the square, of proscribed antiquities & politburo smut, auto-da-fé or ghostly solipsism of new world pornographies: sexless in D.C. in los alamos in jell-o treason trial—the sacred taxi cab geometries of revisionist babels scattered in profusion like spilled contents of enormous cash registers: the lived-off immoral earnings for which we must give thanks to thee thomas jefferson & thee too william mckinley [& so on down to the so-called present moment] |