April 22, 2010

This is a photograph of me

This is a photograph of me

It was taken from the future
and must be returned.

It will appear old,
waterlogged, with grey stains,
and when you touch it you will feel
rips and folds
and a scar
running through you like the branch of a river
funneling
between hills, culverts,
beneath a neglected highway,
bypassing a riotous retirement community,
before blooming
lethargically,
without finality,
in a shallow, weed-clogged lake.

(The photograph was taken 
from the future
in which I am soaking

just below the surface.

There is,
as you say
in your ancient, ardent language,
a distortion in the space/time continuum

but I know your microscopes
are expensive, extensive
and carefully calibrated:
You will look
long enough to spot me

watching you: my eyes
poking through
like a frog.)

April 13, 2010

The Three French Nouns


It feels like the Three French Nouns have reached a point where they order a few drinks and begin to discuss the difficulties of their journey.

1.
In a dream we lay wrapped in nylon cables. The nubile maidens who toiled at our holdings acquired sizable cabbages, which they fondly caressed. With sensitive earpieces, a room of expensive technicians scanned and read the minds of our bartender, and each other. They recorded a great deal of Christina. Christina, who commonly, even now, is determined to be neither imperative nor conditional. Thus her story is writ: Christina reprogrammed our bartender. Same old story.

2.

The story is far from easy. Thrice our bartender upraised writhing tentacles for mercy, but the spell prevailed, and to Christina's purposed task our bartender turned. He fostered his own parasitic birth, and was destroyed in the act of giving himself life. The rock of Christina was steep and algal. Our baby bartender had much trouble standing. After several tries, his infant body transformed—tenuously—into rows of cabbage gleaming in the laser light cast from mothership Christina. She hovered in Time above his placid cabbage-field. A day or two existed between them. But her religious soft auto-replies began with us, and we don’t come cheap, we Three French Nouns.

3.

She was always didactic, Christina; She fed much needed money into the education system of our bartender. Like wisps of slobber flung from the jowls of struggling grizzlies, well-funded spelling bees whipped through trees surrounding her Alps. She was exposed granite. She was far-off shorebirds. She was all things, lying back into the conditional, never expanding beyond a vague vagueness. She remembers a dog sprinting across her lower slopes and falling—but really, it fluttered, flew up, thudded against the sun to drop again. Christina accordingly repurposed us, The Three French Nouns, and presented us to the hive of our bartender's heart. As programmed, we bore Christina’s distinct facial features. Deep, deep in our bartender’s subroutines grew a temporary cache called Christina. She writhed, and our bartender's childish elf-like assistants became whipping-boys who grew into nubile maidens fleeing his advances. So it was writ: The egg which brewed inside our bartender danced down the street, singing Christina's door-code. The egg was engendered by the wholesome savours of Christina. She was the root of our bartender’s fervour. She smiled at us pleasantly, more than once. "You Three French Nouns shall be resolutely de-gendered" she said to us, prophetic to our faces and the faces of our expensive technicians. But our bartender had cut her to her core. It was his blindness, his vulnerability. And so she programmed more. "Believe me," Christina sighs, "he grows affectionately lighter and lighter."