Air Writes (previously published in interface 13)
insink instinct
hammer bones
intelligence is always hunting for a venue . not just a matter
of a phone call
more like and less like
various slides and throbbing notes, modulated trills
dancing off the scope, the gap exactly right
for a lifetime of performance
into it intuit
sharpen fangs
preparation leaves me bleak
it's never saved me
knowing what comes next
has never saved me
into the evening to return a movie, & at least once a year, a ritual returned to its rightful, my body . the air . why in all this warmth, the sweet grey cloak of dusk, am I not standing naked to the elements
who are, for once
not lining up to kill me, suck the air
out of me, blind and remind me
just how weak I am
spacial special
the boundaries delete
themselves, accompany each other, giggling
about another category concept mistake
excape wile you can
creep & fly
Ur
some combination
flow back into your beginnings like bad fx
or into your slide of the future hauling
my partial lobotomy
o edges
o proportions
hail and gangbuster . I draw the line
& it becomes a snake, a word, a limit
& a runt from another idea's litter
vibrato, the particle that tags the wave
the wag that tells the tale of the dog
so far away
depart from all those lines
live limitless
but on this side of my skin, the joke
that inheres in every limitation rules
bones make rules
fangs take their censuses
air writes
exigent tangent, this
for a handiform critter in profile
enthroned among magazines, haloed
by brittle backwash of sodium light
you sluggard, rise and be done
with words, this is my appeal to you
to silence me
wreathed in apt and mannerly constructions
posit a tacit elixir, present and still corked
put your face against the flower and breathe
unless allergic
histamine blowout
streaming eyes
eruptions, failing bronchi
over - reaction
dance with oncogenes, muddle medullae
whims and strings of arbitrary protein
but rise & borrow the protection of my skin
I can offer this
take shelter
then do something else. My skin
is used to absences.
I live in a country between visits to you.
It doesn't have a name or a physical location.
It is a lost file on a crashed disk.
Maybe one bite is missing.
Send my teeth and clothes to Forensics
when you're done. It is not subject to
examination, but one has to try,
for reasons of honour
or something that sounds just as good.
I live in a room full of your ideas. Most of them are like
windows. Some are more like shutters, but that's the way
the analogy stretches.
I live in a skin
completely shed since last you touched it
dust mites breed where perception did
the body of god
this heaven scent flesh a sacrament
a ritual to end uncertainty
who goes there in the dark?
survivors
that is all . what will I leave
but protein in a carbon shell?
you in the eerie neon glow of a night light
tame fire, this atavistic prompting
commences stalking closure
here is a new tattoo
it reads, amid scrollwork:
Interpretation Centre for the Numinous
ain't that the luminous truth
you with godhead peering slyly out
from every pore
distill the essences & know
what they are for
a reconciliation for these warring voices
within and surrounding, bounding
toward concrete
dust and rust . kicked up and blown
into my lungs, up into the Kootenays
to finally exhale
now, air
sniff the city
pernicious afterburn
of stone and metal
whirling with the hydrocarbons
and the odourless horror
of common compounds
(always trying to plant a kiss
(on Truth's mouth, while the creature
(deer-like leaps away
renegade in ruins
long slow cud
of indigestible idea
and drifting spin(e)wise to a new orientation
The sun's begun again. It never stops but it cycles.
Bless this blast. Hallow this scurvy stain.
Instead of skin, this intimation of a fleshly wall.
Charisma rats on Chaos. Each name has a price.
Count into oblivion, or even farther
away
Oblivion is just as close or far as any whacking great idea, infinity, the limit, that interesting play on words I left lying in the bushes, around here somewhere.
Here was I rapid forward and shake into your field of vision. It's all over so fast
the flavour disappears
mysterious trail, invisible, and dense as Hegel
itinerant iterant
easy to be Tiresias
mendicant hierophant
smile for the ephemera machine
& air writes the epigraph
