from Plan for a Broken Bowl
Diagram Z
We around here aren’t round, not most of us
not to the degree one might fear if he was living here.
After all it was these vibratory powers that made us so.
And from there the leaning from one side of the room
to the other in hopes of replacing one space
with a new though pre-existing
elasticity of time
so that sequences may multilayer
and drop
like soft ice cream into a cone
not any flavor
but a likeness to that span between deaths
when we sail from one idea
into another quite honestly, unconscious
of the ease of sliding (a minor preparatory note).
Whoever it was who saw us finish
should begin to unstuff the casings
from the factory jobs we are threatened with
just in case the movement isn’t there to correct you.
And you are out of your house on some early July day
though when you look back on it, it is already November
and the whole chemistry of the place
has changed back
to a briefing made through a window pane.
Don’t laugh. I’ve been here all my life
which may not have been long, but is still virtual
and for now, the hourglass is stuck
so until the next earthquake
or spending bill is signed into law
there might be something to run with that looks
more like you than you’d like to think—sorry
that it had to occur this way. More noise
is what we’ve invented, and that’s everything
final umbrella rolled into a baton
for safe transport once dampened.
A fist of light.
And a job one can get along in.
Whoever wishes for more than that? And if they do
boy oh boy I have a feeling
they’re not going to like
this movie with its moderate to inane dialog
action as terse and incomplete
as any picnic basket
without a jug of wine.
Please pass the mushrooms.
There’s more than enough to go around
though several have gone off to play. And the rest?
We’ve already dumped their entire savings
into the kitty, laid out the cards.
After all it’s a feeling thing, not something
you can wrap with the wet blanket
of the intellect, just for the sake
of having something to say. I have some Speech Soap
to wash our mouths out
just in case it turns out to be our fault
or just our shape. You don’t need
any more managerial hocus now that it’s
in a whip-like siege you’ve seen, we’ve all seen
before the magistrate came home, brought building
tools to add to the punishment. It’s not all repetition
but it feels like it, doesn’t it, the way it is
administered in an orbital motion
just before your teeth begin to loosen and the next room
sprays something painful into your eyes. Suits the ones
who’ve been doing it, whose music it is. They’ve ransacked
just about everything that’s belonged to you.
And something more.
Not that you must continue to soak in it
or go off on some protracted hunt for clever vehicles
when all you really need to say is here in front of you
still attempting a reboot. If you can get no solace
from that try imagining the circle in the tesseract
or a pair of larks drawing a flaming chariot
since we have messed up our mythologies again,
construed their pageant twists of dementia to
a fairly standard narrative form, but not this.
It made sure to leave no trace to paraphrase
no bow tie for critical thinking save an endorsement
somewhat particulate in its formation over tea
a vial of lemonade for the new thinkers
and the roustabouts hanging on and wasting time.
Don’t forget, it’s what we’re at heart engineered
to deliver, with a can of dried farts, a flame
and a quiver of darts designed to reverse the flow
of apology pearling from your lips so that it
may later be taken up, and more aggressively
as to add some grip to an eyebrow twitch.
Some may cough at such descriptions
but others will fondly remember the righteous bump
as when hurling out of car windows after a bad drunk
and one belches an epiphany swallowed
too many hours prior to relate the context
to new disciples of the ride.
Though it is only bruising in a silent and pleasing way.
That was the gist of fidelity – stormy
afternoons when who-knows-whom we’d desire
so keep a stack of records under the elm
or under the eaves for when it rains.
The drops would be plinking against a hollowed out
shingle or a leaf frizzed with filaments of heat
determined in part by the conditions
under which the genome speaks.
Though, let us not use such offensive language
among the best of us. Nay, they never liked
that explanation, too full of advanced
sophistry. But so was their spinning of the many
event horizons they’ve left in wakes. Each one yearns
for something once accomplished by the body, now
plastered to the past, or that which we call the past
but is no more than information written
unreliably into our senses’ memory.
How fleeting life seems because these flashes are remote
intangible, though their effect on us may be operatic,
grand, even destructive in their reach,
their grasp around our present moment and bold
insistence in molding what it is our eyes see
into what the mind’s eye gravitates toward. Learn to love
both the thing made and the thought that makes it, says
a quiet inner voice hanging from the chandelier
as it smokes the last
of your cigarettes, which you no longer need, since you quit
nanoseconds ago and the nicotine fit
hasn’t yet wrested control of the way you decode
and transmit what you have absorbed.
It may be nothing but the results of a spoiled crust of bread
coated lightly with ergot mold. Wouldn’t you be
lucky if that was all it was. Brown eyes lining
blue and green filigree around everything within reach
as those at a distance begin to quiver, since
living that way always reminded them of cleansing
and conditioning to a more finely milled set of penchants
toward nothing but the correct finger signals.
But that didn’t mean they had to quit, and even though
the artifacts of the movements had grown
solitary in their organizational triumphs
a jagged tooth hooked through everything they touched
reminding of an earlier swagger,
every blemish an emblematic and caustic face
flying out of our heads
to see the sky for the first time upon the backdrop
of the moon. Wise and clever logic
all the way up the clock for braying
the impossible while still market hot
molding from ear to ear a storm,
an architecture of mad love as it’s
strewn in water colors across the comics.
Someone winged and a dandy with a red cape inviting
you to feel comfortable with the level of crime
you’ve poured into your notebook, attempting
wholesome casuistry of roses, daffodils,
smoldering herbs and incense
and more than anything
a sound and perfunctory reason that can
parry any assault of multiple dimensions.
That’s where the goddess would come in, through those
stiff cocktails of the past with their renditions
of counter heroics circling the same themes,
isotopes as if discharged from cigarette ash
to the beat of fiery lips and repeated piano knock offs
that puff up the night into phantom parallels
of your every recent fascination and fear.
It was the first face you were inclined to believe
as you sat in yesterday’s demitasse night
endearing yourself to the friendly workmanship
like the coalman’s daughter shoveling herself
into a straight and narrow tourniquet of a path
to have a go at the bull run while you fled
into a mountain of shattered teacups, wounding yourself
appropriately, as to avoid another spillage
before the republic was turned over to the riff raff
of the neighborhood. There you could embrace
and in that posture, hypothesize a new day.
But one needs to answer to the cyclops beneath
the staircase in that case, where he’s been gathering
your resentments and heating up his spatula.
Only then will the true meaning
of this paragraph come to the fore. It’s been circling
your head like a fly and grows wilder
every time you move. It knows all your afflictions
and best wishes, where meaning lacks not
the invocation of its premise, but meanders
in a beefed-up suit, not unlike the mobsters
you’ve met dining in midtown during the parade.
They, of course, were in several gradations,
from sparkles of light, to the thin film
over your teeth after too many days worrying.
Perhaps a hangover on the beach, eating corn chips and
frozen pizza. They don’t have any more impressive
thoughts to share and to inspire you
so for the time, being what it is, you could
either collect your things and march down the runway
or continue in good faith, though the only good
reason to follow in uncertainty would be to hold
fast to faith in good faith where propriety
should perhaps lead you to some other
defunct cafeteria, for instance, in some
dead metaphysician’s shop. There you can order
a dirty water dog or two, belch a few times, make fog
in the icy air left by the enlightenment.
But excuses will always suck the life out of you.
Not that anyone will tell you that at a party.
Friends will beg for you to stay, and rivals will try
to trip you out the door. It doesn’t make sense
to blame anyone, since anyone could muster up
a sizable force the same as you, with one
exception: you have a right to your body and its alloys
the same as anyone; with a shield full of grommets
and holes hoisted upon it to promote
a measured permeability. Its invisible dance
to characterize, on the air, between battles, inside
a sentence with aluminum siding, a tarred roof
for viewing comets. The education system
you’ve been brought through smiles urbanely
with its eyes of fake fire and wry stupidity
that camps out for holiday shopping
when it is you, yourself you have failed to avoid.
This is bullshit. Standing in line is not therapy.
Neither is trying to fit my ass into this saddle.
Tote it around wherever you go and the lime
in your drink will remind you of life; you
begin to imagine running away or flying
through the wall with saw blades spinning
on your fingertips. That’s how you envision
leaving your job, and on some ornate vehicle
unrecognized by the people screaming by the hole
you left. I try to shake off this tremor, but it’s been
there replicating since I began these dancing lessons.
Whole tribes of us frenetically intoxicated
by a single nervous system. I’ve got a way
of playing cards that will undermine the government.
I have questions only I can ask because I’ve turned
my body into sound. It is in eighth notes and sixteenths
and triplets and various forms of collateral, from banks
bleeding through their mercy holes. I had a role in it,
a quiet, lumbering step loaded with assorted
energies. Quite the flame thrower you are, is that
kimchee you’ve been eating? I need to start my car.
Find out tonight whether it is really a pattern
or if seeing is the jurisdiction of some
other sensory mechanics, a passion for panic
one may presume, a handle to some other dimension
of psychic franchise ready to have you for spare change.
That’s the exhumed part of the fable, anyway.
Whatever’s left is as much a mystery as where
the buckshot goes. Out of the pipe like steam and into
appearance; a friendly warmth, a quiet penetration
somewhat like affection except by the mode of its chaste
benediction. I’m really in love with your data entry
the way it wiggles its way past the gate searching
for embellishments on either side of the hand
are quick movements, intoned in a circle.
We marvel at the pencil pockings, the three-pronged
equivalences, hopes barred at the opening of your
action planned was severe rental phenomenon
and now wholly possible to record. The movement backfired.
Religion is itself like that, a few scrambled heads
the rest of us starving for a music unmuddled
by insurance analysts. And as the market
betrayed itself, by trying to “know thyself” in ways
that made masturbation seem a public service
commission in comparison, mega-church after
mega-church grew out of the cesspools of all
possible worlds, to bugger us into bigger things,
an underground in wait for souls to capsize
into its one economy that sucks them off from
the podium for a few cents thrown into the basket.
You have done this before
in past lives. It is not a good idea, something
people I know will be willing to kill you about.
Forgive us yonder diner club members. We have eaten
something unsettling for young voters
trying to win by alignment to a personal
welfare state, one’s name, or enter it into
that bucket of apostrophes of ownership
without the zinging final consonant attaching
one to the object of its obsession.
I have borrowed a few of the drums you’ve beaten
upon and they sound only hollow in my hands.
Could be the nails driven through my fingertips are not
sunk deep enough to make a difference. I am not
an actual victim, but a modeler of
victimhood, seeking out a completer sound,
though one redactive enough to insure safe use.
There are reasons why editorial pursuits like these
can begin to know themselves as progenitors
of the plausible, for an idea may be wrong
but a feeling is always might. There is a pond
we all live in. Perhaps alone. Perhaps sustained
by others. I am sorry you have to live this way.
On the surface it doesn’t hurt, only beneath
the green haze of the drug, the incessant action,
bromides for the skill set, for vacillation between
the heart and the hard-headed minotaur-like marking.
No, I didn’t say marketing, not yet, but I might as well
have, since any crucial difference is due, is harkened
only through the dark of framing. And once cut from
the lack of the background an objet loses its glitter
and its toy qualities and you no longer love it.
But behold the benevolent panther. Rocks move
out of its path as it drives down the sandy parts
of this confused tangle of secretive meditations.
Secretive because they ignore each other’s
most trivial assertions. More so because
they are lying in a circle—all unframed parts
without an instruction manual lying in wait
to make useful these lying-to-each-other pieces;
and into the sky, as it suffers abdominal pain.
It begins to shift light and drop water
in hopes that you will recognize its feeling.
After all, it feels too. Who is bold enough
to enter from beneath its hips to sense its clear
aspiration, and to say it doesn’t feel as you do?
Young panther, scraping across the rocks, bounding
a heresy, a fist of light, into the sky’s mouth,
condom of clear wrap, of air wrap of argument
made of pieces arranged in a row. Somewhere
within that above is opinion, a choice word
grilling, a word tribe, trying to bend back the outcome,
its natural toes and the mud it has landed in.
Try not to be too simple, dark hand. You are not
letting us into your flood. We are aware of you.
Behold benevolent panther. You are an unguent
in the mouth of this trapezoidal needling,
the oblique vehicle that solidifies our love
as something more than cybernetic casserole.
Sweet darling mayhem, my chum and apprenticeship
summoning up the slag of the old spacecraft
strewn over the Mojave desert. Young predator,
benevolent killer and tearer of meat
I have choice words for you, a voice of ragtag
emblems, decals, for you, a feeling I had met
you before in another life, one of rent and drug-like
spasms, a gleeful violence. Daggered laughter
in the heart, in the syntax of your saying what
in its moment could ever have been and to find you
here, beside my bed in a tangle of shred clothing
searching for a scrap to eat, an arm, a leg
because it was you who brought us here, and you
whom we belong to, if you could loosen yourself
from my grip, from my choke hold around
what turns out to be a fuel line, a recipe book,
a collection of flavors, a memory, forgotten cause.