IMPULSE
IT’S NOT COUNSEL The Daughters of Production offer, tho they do pretend to listen. There otherwise wouldn’t be – they wouldn’t use the word – much to pillage, they are farming in a learned passivity draped across divans nestled under duvets of apartments their presence makes nice. It’s easy to forget how you’ve gotten here. I did. One, tho, one doesn’t – I wouldn’t – complain. Too much relies upon the readiness of these, their ears. Such lovely, carven things. And, one hastens to assure, so generous.
I am preoccupied, you say. Let me make that known. You lay out the facts of your condition, the arduous job of being yourself, like a hand in a card game you are trying to learn. It does, it’s worth pointing out, occur to you that they, The Daughters of Production – such is their kindredity – are in it to win it, and as such it may not be to your benefit to behave in a manner that presumes they’d advise you in a way that would allow you, in gaming, an advantage. They’d only need to tell you enough to let you lose in a fashion that seems fair. YOU KNOW THIS. You, in fact, are banking on it.
You aren’t interested, for the record, in advantage. Advantage predicates comparison and exploitation. It’s for this reason you have never agreed to play a game you weren’t improvising and creating, discovering, the rules for as you’ve gone along. It’s for this reason, mostly, that you are not well-liked among most other conversationalists or participants, blind or otherwise, in institutions.
Did you know I am a gift ?? you say, apropos of nothing. With manacled hands did I wrench myself up the slope from the ocean floor to be here and share this wine with you. The audacity does its work. The eyes, those of The Daughters of Production, widen a bit as the corners of their mouths raise themselves a little. You smile. You have demonstrated that you can be clever. Accordingly, you deflate the sentiment. Such actions, really — believe me, they are not a big deal.
Here’s this one part where you relate an embarrassing story, a sad story, maybe one from your childhood or first adolescence, something to give a sense of what other hells you’ve known apart from those you drive before your intellection. You perform such storytelling on impulse and against all rationality for one who’d conceivably mind how an audience responds. It is this mode of speech, above all others, that you deploy when in new company.
CULLING COUSINS
WITH THEIR LINES I’m being read, the words drawing out from an obscure set of organs what had otherwise been an ingrown reconnaissance. And this done not just with the currency of paper but thru a voice,
conglomeration of dead brethren,
mixed spirits birthing me relation.
With most here I am familiar. We’re mirrors facing each other, the resultant visual echo issuing a signal mostly only guessed at, cherished in the oases of our shared moment, convergence of trajectories mingling-tangling-bending-breaking in these rooms in the buildings of our city,
living all as we do in a cottage churned up from the earth.
Seated in chairs or
on the floor or
leaning against walls or
standing, we listen.
I never know where to look so I look around at everything. Roving view of heads, reunion’d hydra attentive to the murmur of its mutual heart.
Nice to meet you finally to see you again.
: : : : :
Taking the blood cousin from its box, ancestral dust spiraling up my nostrils into brain, flipping switches toward what nostalgia hasn’t gone to rot, I wonder if I’m making a mistake.
Then the lash-heavy lids of its eyes heave open. It smiles, and I know. Grin growing rows. Long tongue emerging from gullet, flicking at the air to taste how long it’s been. Its tip fishes between its lumberpile teeth for bits of food or chunks of mouth and like a slick pink deformed arm it flings what it finds at my face.
The thanks, I guess, I get for this.
CURDS
IN THE FETISH cottage, a small piling of clots
Sediment licked from the pits of dusty cups
“I love this,” it is said. “I live for this.”
The Daughters of Production cluck their evening eyes toward some distant ceiling, tout impacted standards
The hype-child shits its crib and convulses under the lights
DEAD PRINCE
I’M FINE WITH – it’s preferable – the wind simply scouring and reshaping the stones such as they are in the wide open landscape in its lonesome. What I don’t like is when the machines show up. Whether sprung natural from some geological anomaly or implanted, more likely, thru alien intervention, their motion only serves, at its most benign, a cyclical clamor. Otherwise, the horde, self-perpetuating, spreading quickly into an urban expanse. Another cityscape it takes profound reserves of will to decimate that I may once again attain what passes for sleep.