DARK EMERALD, RED TRIANGLE

Don't wake up

Lonely times, pilgrim. Turns out, there isn't even anyone to laugh at you, when it's all over. No smug face of God, no aw-shucks fingersnap of Satan. There's just Your face, crying on its little pillow in a dark room, any room.  Oh but there are demons galore, circumscribing the night caught by your pretty lids. Underneath. Inside. Dark emerald turns its face bloody with polygonal sweat. Blood? Is it tears, or drops of blood, that someone is weeping? How tragic to write oneself into a dream, only to ape Christ there too. His letters red, your letters blue. Your blue letters to the widow, stuffing your pillow like swollen feathers. The emerald demons with red, triune eyes-- a columnar array enfolds the widow in wings, enfolds her wings of devotion, her paper wings with love's scribbles.

Are you God? Why?

A corpse can think. It realizes it was right or wrong. It has plenty of time. A corpse knows we all go back to God, one way or another. Love or hate, widow or demon, no one can leave him out of their picture. If God didn't exist, it would be necessary to invent his widow. A corpse has enough time, but you don't. You are ruining the paper giving you rest. Soaking the pillow cradling your dead skull. Your skull shines through your face like dark emerald. Your mouth was always a few triangles, worn against some kind of loss. I am a polygon now. I am a Platonic solid's corpse. I am a higher-order shape's widow, just like you. You are me and that is what is killing us. We are evil.

Sometimes the eyes open a little, to let in more fresh gauze, to sop the oozing of the head. The head that trickles oozes, that flows down a high face, a hard thing, cutting randomly a channel ooze, an oxbow's caress in the hour of the ox, crucifying sweet curses on the crucifix of the corpse's face's crux, opening the bloom of silent sight.

A corpse has plenty of time.

Don't wake up

CUCK

I listen to the fake music in these voices. I listen to the histrionics, the coos, the slide-whistle delivery of all slack-faced bitches, of mutterers on the mushmouthed go, of jittering, McCafe-dunked goatees of men too stupid to despair of themselves. Are you an American? Yes shit, Sherlock. Up and down, like a stooge hand hypnotizing another stooge, setting up the slap, the dismal nutgrab of serial stuttering pukes into its relentless broadcast, riding the carrier wave of promised violence like a dollar-menu hooker, each attempted speech act a resurrected abortion wiped back against the burst hymen of the ears. I fail and fail. I wither. I shrink in the presence of the 50-ish tanned devils and their sensible jewelry. I cut open my shirt with artless life, baring myself towards the loaded benches, pews, booths, stinking of taupe flower vomit-- of foundation, of fake hay, of wall treatments, studio backdrops, of cagey deathsquad eyes fiddling through soccer moms' skulls like maniac totenkopfs, dunkelgelb pantsuits, Carharts, and the bone-numbing, mechanized roar of their excuses for children. Here is my chest. Just put the spear in me.

See if my meat has reached a foodsafe temperature.

There is no sense of loss-- there never has been even one moment past, nothing passed away, nothing forgotten, nothing wasted-- none of this was ever any different. I have lost only the ability to defend myself against such insistent life. I didn't last long. Didn't have the stuff, stuffing me. I am damage. I am wounds. I am dysfunction, wearing clothes.

I'm worse than anyone. I know how to be quiet.

The clock strikes the magic moment-- here I am, unwilling to wish again. I listen sometimes, to the birds. I listen to the People. The People never ask me anything-- they just reach at me and grab on full auto zombie. Every utterance is a play of wind for anything other than its own timbre. A defence. An interposed move. A hedge against some scary future in which I erupt and kill it. Against the bloody mess I make. Talking for its own sake, having no preconception or intention, just to destroy silence. Just to pretend something ever happens. Someone walks into a room and shuts down anything beautiful before it can be born. I see her sometimes, behind my eyes-- the widow in a niqab of tetany, hanging out of a dead horse's vagina. I need to start drinking again as soon as possible to save my soul. I guess I won't.

HEY, is there enough sugar in the fucking house? My god, how on earth are you 300 fucking pounds and counting, you fat shit. I am the enemy of sugar and television. I have no irony left. This is how I go out-- against these least demons. Nevermind truth, or love, or beauty after all. Sugar and noise, taken out in a suicidal blossom. It takes all the blood in one poet to eliminate one bag of Twix, Snickers, Milky Way, and Three Musketeers minis. Rate of exchange. Are you an American? This is your world. You fat shit.

We are precious, oh so precious, in our cotton puffs. Our cottony, moist butt-puffs. Little precious tufts. Candy pump. Cotton pup, cunny pop. Puffy pussy, lovey luffs, little giggle homey niche knockers. Little beddy warmfluffs. Little buttcakes. Waggle tush. Wadding wiggle, a beddy giggle, a safey blanky. Fluffy bear buffy butt, a moist chew. Good chew! A bubble, a foamy patty smooth, oh smooth! Frosting cheaty, icing oops!  Butt-butt patty-- safety scissors and rainbow warnings, patty tummy. A puffy niceman, touchy frills. A shopping rainbow. A retail razzle. Nice munchy man, spreading treats. A bunch of honey crunch humps. Chewy dazzle-- Good dazzle! A nicey dad and happy mum, helping dad! Handy dad! Peeping sleepers in a country quilt. A poppy home, a snoozy sofa. Light sleepy, light goofs. A wiggle in the stuffing, a bunch of money. A tip-up oops! A two-glass haha. A movie puff. A stay-here butt-pat. Dressing-gown moo gown! Good gown! A team. Moving money sizzles. Wallet drizzle. Happy peeps, mopey teen-tut. A stacky-mart food hut! Grizzly dadcar! Flossy sleeps, gargly breakfasts. Nuggy chunks, woozy sips, sleepy creeps in sizzle-sun. Hey it's me, what are you doing? Phoning you by phoney home fun, by healthy funsex, by health phone. A tickly textpat, a puffnest, a seat pat, a pillow pit. A woozy widdle war crime; a teensy thought cime. Good mom! Good dad! Cruelty-guilty free, Whiskers and Spot! A cozy little hot spot! A home!

To be a thing it is like something to be. To fuck an electric oven. To face-sit the stove burner. To mutilate a lolling, gummy corpse. To fuck a lover. To fate, to fate with the Internet. Magical cum-circuit of eternal lust. Springboard of dreamspring, of fuckfall, of fatewinter. Alternative shiteat. Savior of discerning idiots. Not like the People. Our mouths drop in amazement at the Hitler Jugend, still eating annual pies. Still with funnel cake, with corn cob, with pig and horse. The hotdog of time is a limp penis. Force its meatus on the burner, to the coil! Brand shut the spurting dick of time! We're not better. I am the worst. I am going to hell. I said nothing has ever happened and I mean it. I'm your enemy, and don't you forget it.

Are you an American? This is your world.

You fat shit.

CHELM

The map of the City changes each night, but the main features of its plan, its intent, are always there. My clouds of sparrows operate as distributed camera networks-- simple screeching retinal dirtstorms sampling the topography of surface streets and freeways, skyways, and bridges. Bridges to somewhere I'd still be familiarly unwelcome. My little bushgangs of birds tower up and hunch above the traffic cameras, bending double like wretching Christ, scrambling to pull the plug on his slated reboot, but rooted, frozen in dipshit shock at his own handiwork. Unable to unsee the orthography of the streets as they route themselves in blasphemies and obscene curlicues, glinting in the fool's gold sun.

I watch the spans of the toll bridges spread away in their arcs, delimiting the river in chopped up parts-- a great serpent strangled by stone block thighs. The legs of the freeway are always spread wide, in pretensioned labor-- tapeworm masses of interchanges stretching open like lips, like birthing mouths-- there are the crowning heads of trash monoliths, about to mewl, about to suckle, about to factor themselves into our calculus. Sparrow Christ pulls out his beard one whisker, one infected feather at a time and drops them behind, a trail for his movements, his housecalls; roving, trying to catch each birthed bundle like the Great Physician should, but he has no hands because he is made of stupid birds. I record everything he shows me in my files; wait for my next chance to sleep.

I kill the connection. I stretch back far in my broken chair, pretending to relax for no one in particular. I don't need to look anymore. The topology is always the same, even if the map changes. The features of the City are merely externalizations of the scriptures writing themselves inside us-- merely an expression of something unsayable, like some greying spectrum of decayed qualia; like some metastatic, dragonesque heart. I try to imagine what passes for love here-- some specialized form of protracted, asymmetrical combat. A low-intensity proxy war. Bleak beacons beating out to each other and bludgeoning each other numb with encrypted pulses, as vehement as they are uncrackable; message content jellied to noise-- only metadata; frequency, number of hops, time-to-death, packet size, nodal origin, transmission protocol, hardware signatures, nude microwaves-- none of the poetry everyone supposes is inside. No actual communion. Everyone dragging their heavy weapons through spiritual mud, cutting permanent trenches in it, from the flat, sprawled shitshow of the pan-faced outskirts, all the way in through the meat, through the cytoskeleton of the megapolis, to its grand nucleus-- the double horns of the twin towers, sucking off the light in mute, negative flashes, wreathed in flexing tendrils of champagne mustard vesicant. A beating heart in sustained collapse-- or maybe there is final destruction somewhere. Somewhere even here perhaps the infinite dwells-- in some sub-basement between rental trucks stuffed with fertilizer explosives, there is a singularity, couched in mountain ranges of denial and black-body gloom, slowly sipping all this away, as we just can't help but mattress-surf its slowly shrinking horizon.