Reading: The Lime Works

"History proves that the ear and brain are always being hunted down, shot to death. Wherever you look, ears and brains are being murdered, Konrad is supposed to have said to Wieser."

imagination dead

much is born of deadfish and deaddreams. lovely legs are grown from soot and manure. a ripe foliage extends upward from the smoldering remains of dead men. a fine trade is made in blackened horseflesh. five pounds ripened dogsflesh equals five pounds gold coins. see now our garden. see now the teaming rivers working through our battlefields. our old men run slowest. our old men drop off and become vines. our old men born into moss and crocuses. our old men until they are rats and chickens.

Teeth of Kings

ghosts

strung together


in strange formation,

The New King Finds a Common Ground With Her Subjects

"Why, this may surprise you, but my scientists tell me we breathe something like the same air and that our body chemistries operate on similar principles. Remarkable, yes? We are akin, they tell me, the way you are akin to the apes or cockroaches. I'm often reminded, too, when I'm out 'amongst the people' that we eat much the same food, although I only eat what I kill with my bare hands or arrows or machine guns or helicopter blades whereas you, as a slovenly species, eats only what it finds encased in plastic or jellied or frozen. I eat only what is drenched in its own humid blood."

teeth of kings/ teeth of Bone

a fractured sweetness
dripping marrow
a lucky
king's gullet.

mid-semester writing

mobpropoemsflaficdick and
whatever lit mag arrives. mostly tho

. my work.

on the train again adjunct offices
and nooks. the morning glow.


///frac..//tured.///


hunting wolves
& city streets. hunting
school children
& teachers. the new
king. the new king & her
ivory teeth. the new

king & her blaze

orange; her

red eyes.

a return to silence

thanks to

pindeldyboz

"a return to silence"

sarahpalin a

natural hist-- of the

people
and the landscape.

the new king on the subject of whales and why to hunt the whales and use the flesh of whales in damming our rivers

“For too long we have ignored these magnificent creatures, gifts from the almighty, ‘fleshy tools’ in His beauteous parlance (He speaks to me nightly, you know). According to the King on High, we have neglected a limitless, seemingly self-perpetuating, natural resource.”

from ongoing sarahpalinnovel

The new king read a speech about the days when she was a little girl and dreamed of being our king. “Dreams are possible. Dreams do come true,” the new king beamed. Many remember this speech was written and delivered, years ago, by the recently deposed old king. Perhaps the new king found the speech when she and her supporters crashed into the capital house with knives and pickaxes and lit torches. She likely already possessed it days later, dressed in blaze orange and a wolf skin hat, as she paraded the old king’s limbs and head through the streets and bestowed his organs, floating in jars, as gifts to school children. Never mind, we are told. “It is the selection not the writer,” her press secretary explains. “Her lovely lilting delivery and her benevolent intentions make the words her own. They come from her, just as much, even more so, than did her children." We considered mentioning the new king has no children, that we know of, but the men with rifles made us consider otherwise.

reje(cti-/-on) ;--tter// born ag//ain as a flig//htful// creature. died. & eviscerated.

i --(spa

rows-- & pigeons)--

like this &

(string/wrappedbeaks)

appreciate ,

don't (straw--wireha

irpaperclips) quite

((wormsgrubseye//flesh))
for our


ne(s)t ;
Thanks .

I hope .
Best,

(gizz)(ards/throb

bingh)win--gs

(earts)

Sunday Remix Project

remixed/devastated/deteriorated/reinvigorated


a lone fox,

stealing

chicken

eggs in the night.

After the Fire (assembled from "The Rain Season" by Laura va den Berg)

this is the story the locals told me:

after the fire the heat is constant. the humidity unrelenting. after the fire she is drawing a legend on the walls in chicken blood. the air thickened. low swollen clouds. a hot wind blows through.

after the fire the darkness is vast. after the fire everything resembles a shadow.

after the fire traveling ghosts lose their way in the smoke. they become blind and strange. they fall into the river and live in trees. they dig pits along the village and there they nest and eat grubs.

a missionary told me, ‘the villagers fear the dead. they know different people can stir inside the same body,’ he said, his words quick and sharp. ‘sometimes a better man wrests free of the flesh. sometimes something far worse emerges.’

rebel groups wrestling for power killed a man yesterday and dragged him into the forest. a body thick with muscles and scales. hours later his soul wandered out covered in lesions and feathers. his wife fainted at first sight and his children struck him with sticks. ‘this is not the same man. this is not the fellow we knew’ the villagers said.

the missionary and I watched the dead man’s spirit shoot dice and drink malt liquor outside a tavern. ‘you see? he was a parishioner and a true walker of the straight and narrow. yet now he seems destined for trouble,’ said the missionary. I agreed.

they tell me the only way to disperse a ghost is to sacrifice his mother. so, they have wrapped the mother in sheets and now transport her to the fire pit. the men carrying the ghost's mother are probably his uncles. an arm wags free of the sheets. her hands are limp, her wrists sculpted with rusted wire. she screams for her boy to save her—he is too drunk to stand—he is too evil to care—

her screams grow thick with static. bats thrashing inside a secret hollow.

then came the deluge. years after the fire reduced their huts to ash and their graves to cinder summer rains submerged crops uprooted houses transformed roads to mud— ‘too late’ the missionary said. the deluge came ‘too late’ the missionary said ‘because the gods were confused by the smoke.’

the monster craned its neck. the river began to boil.

friday revisions

no more stories. stories are for old men. stories are for old men & their mothers. the timeless connective tissue of their mothers. better the salt lungs & embryonic fluids of plotless infants dreamed up by mothers. born out of the skin of old men, the dreams of old men. we were all tadpoles once circling in the murk. we were all once flecks in the green waters, swirling.

revising and more

Revising my-- a sort of poetic nightmare

--gobbling smutty black caviar

off golden plates.

van de Berg's What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us. --two years back--

until--Bernhard,

who told me something entirely different--

--phrase, every careful detail--.

I kept thinking about what they would look like if I took a scissors to them.

Help me decorate!

need a--

swirling red.
Don't know--. Suggestions?

We Always Think We Are Authentic #3

Birds of Prey scissors tape ball point pens stowed away on trains living room floors inbetween classes after classes before classes.

cut upnovels prose poems monologues novellas and productive years--. I stole--dead poets

dickered around with--

my flesh and the flesh of--

biographies and novels I read.

the operation.

horror dread pain love. (BIRDS)

Character is
what you write when nobody is looking.