Another photograph of me

Doing sit-ups, eating healthy, taking vigorous walks, sitting alone in the hospital dusk, filling and refilling the blank spaces in my settlement package…where was I? Well, the hearts of the Congolese people are calling for postcards from Vietnam. And yes, the dark, continental heart of man is ravaged with good intentions. And I’m all attention, pumping iron, regulating my breathing, getting fit for the big reveal. My doctor, Brenda, comes to light. She tells me, not unreasonably, “No more can’t be done.” Then leans closer, “What I do do, tends to expand the storage capacity of the human heart." She's leaning very close, "Everything does its part, but I can’t help expediting the process, taking the bit, so to speak, ticking this thing into hyper-drive—into art.” She hands me a colour postcard from poignant Indonesia. She says, “Are my methods unsound?” She thinks I can’t see she’s knocked up. I tell her, “I see no method at all.” And then the bleeping machine beside my bed leaps me inside the thumping left ventricle of Francis Coppolla, in the director’s chair, c. 1974 watching his expensive method actor pretend to understand the end of Heart of Darkness, which he hasn’t read. Maybe he can’t, because of the speed. As in life, and in the original, the long awaited conclusion comes as a let-down. The end does not work. And though spring hurricanes may destroy my sets, I welcome the ancient Marlon Brenda in me, calling-up from the depths, somehow, a more realistic pain. “The work does not end,” Marlon Brenda says slowly, Sicilian-shy, like the friend of a friend. And I dare not reply, “No-one expects the fat assassin, spouting epithets from the shadows, sporting a large black t-shirt to distract us from his pregnancy.”

The New Mayor

It is the mandate of your office
to carve a dolphin into a toxic cloud.
The new mayor carves a dolphin into a toxic cloud
with her bare hand. Her wrist emerges
skeletal, handless, burnt.

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.)

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."

Photo of a Lamp

I always feel sublime in my windbreaker

Hot Dog Stand

Angel trapped in a barbeque's body,
I will be there for you
when you are ready to transform.