Heartbreak Robot Mountain

When I look at my work in general, I see
a vast new territory
opening up for us
in commercial biomimetics.
Us, of course, is you,
my horse
and I, off course,
plotting our way to a point
of land I bought
for two billion clams
in bountiful south Alaska.
They call it Heartbreak Reboot Mountain.
I got it for zero chowder,
no interest 'til December.
Don’t ask me how I’ll give it back,
I’ll give the cheddar back, I swear
I can feel it; you;
this vast new territory
opening-up behind us,
slowly riding backwards, now,
enclosing what’s in front of us.

Essay on Marriage

These things remain up for grabs: The ancient nuptial ritual must never be an object of feminine lust. The ancient nuptial ritual will never output, never loop. In fits of dire reverence, feisty marriage experts may sing gnomic sonatas in local woodlots. Get used to it. The ancient nuptial ritual is sotto voce. The ancient nuptial ritual, if auto-replied to, will be broken open by a black blimp, with one white stripe, tethered to the tip of a wind-twisted pine. This piñata is called the night. Night happens in one centre of an archipelago of centres. The ancient nuptial ritual never consents, as I so willingly have, to italics.

How much is Carmen Electra paying you, per hour?

The ancient nuptial ritual avoids contact with strangers. It will never bless a child’s head with holy water, nor give an unlisted number over the phone. The ancient nuptial ritual will be unstressed in the back-woods, behind a warehouse, rotting crates mouldering back into earth. The ancient nuptial ritual will never recur, never reappear, never overshadow, nor be shadowed.

That reminds me of a parable.

If the ancient nuptial ritual will have it, a drunkard’s haunted hatchback will launch off a giant jump. It will spin end over end, descending, to end, wrong way up, in a smoking garland. By degrees, the vehicle will accede to night, ravished in the slowly vanishing light, till all that’s left is the stereo blazing an invisible trial of Love, O careless love. Is that the parable you were thinking of?

No.

Tell it.

Carmen Electra and Agamemnon exit the unicorn temple, reciting His sacred greeting. They sit on a modest heap of banana leaves. Agamemnon keeps reciting the sacred greeting. Carmen Electra plays with the strap of her sandal. She pulls up yellow grasses. A skunk stumbles past, its head in a bottle. Carmen Electra stares into the swelling reflection of clouds. With her rump, she can feel jagged rocks under  the stack of flimsy, half-decayed banana leaves.

In other words, the ancient nuptial ritual will be unable to attend the soiree this evening due to massively branching subroutines.

The trees in Hell will be spattered with massively branching subroutines as well. Yellow grass, farm implements, fire-hardened innuendos arriving inward on each black-inflected wing—Orestes, this thing is getting harder to control.

I tried to listen to some geese. Their noisy hooting and honking painted a portrait of the field between the woodlot and the house. The painting was hardly realistic—

Use me sparingly, Carmen Electra whispered. Consult a doctor if symptoms persist. 

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