Remain saturated to the point of hegemony,
all these trees tinged with dropsy dystopia,
heart on my sleeve bridging its last beat
with second stanza of lost Goldberg
Variation, variation on a theme that screams
theocracy’s lungs out from the bottom rung
of civility, wherein machete lops in a stutter
of dropped frames, gnats flood the eye,
& if I hesitate to record.
As I said to my cube mate, “I’ve been to your church.
Your church sucks. But we do all this
for the same Guy, right?”
“Dog fell apart laughing at lugubrious louse
weeping whilst working the crease from
my pants. Never meta woman I didn’t
paint her portrait in splattertones.”
I’d been given to writing such lines such lines!
some months ago when I had given up
hope the dog down the street’d
end up bankrupt, sire of three pups by three
bitches, fuzzy dice dangling over each newborn’s
crib. That kind of life I smoke through
when I’m out of weed, wherein
the Brads accumulating like snowdrifts
in my reruns of high school
end up like that.
misremembered
where my tent is
naked wandering thru
forest of dune buggiesperil washed in w/tide
people think he’stheirs the way they hide
fleece him likemantle Argonaut
stereo-care whenbut when sometimes
the sun shits in my ear
pang & desist,
& I overheard my dealer on his cell whisper
directions to my apartment, down to the extra
jiggle the doorknob requires, next thing
I’m knocking on an apartment door
I don’t recognize, waiting for an answer.
Which is code for I’m sort of an indentured
servant, but that’s the boring, obsessional side
of addiction, who isn’t afraid their partner’s
brokering bad deals with Syria or Iran?
My wife’s the exception, but even she
turns blue when all the words match up,
& she’s lately been carrying nukes in her nook,
the implication being that a turntable is still able
to reverse antiquity. You’ve seen it in board rooms
mahogany sheen to the brow of the man
putting for the company title.
“Data? I didn’t even know her,”
then some remix of the conversation over a wet lunch.
As the sun sets on the American Century,
the abstract clavicle also tenderly put to cheek
in one of many “human moments”
the last surviving member of the Donner
Party wiped constantly from the brow
of nostalgia.
But when I was a little boy, around five, I saw
my mother inside the jaws of a great white shark
& terrifically dressed she lit a flame in its belly
but the dead sea, god, is a mistake, reverse engineering
for the progress in us, minions, minnows, the sea
the salt, I’ve grown tired of not being able to exhibit
my sadness to others, the mug shots, orange
jumpsuits, the sinners hogging floor space.
One held my ankles, another pinned my wrists
to a hot plate, the third put his mouth around
my ear & told me he had “too many new ideas
& stories crowding” his head, he was crazy
for wanting to put his dick in my mouth.
I told him I had an agent unafraid of
representing Delphic Oracles, so he recites
a story of a cloned white tiger with an almost
human brain (what’s the missing ingredient?)
take control of the life of his owner
in a horrifying way, by spreading blood
from its eyes. He pled for me to give him a chance.
He also writes action stuff. I told him I’d
bite. He called my bluff.
I need to bleed the river of truth. Fascicle
for the sad inside, street team smearing
me over the drear of last night’s whiteout.
I know what I should do. I should
take off my shoe. Serenity
now, the promise crystal
meth makes with an armbar.
But I love the drugs I can get in this town.
Said meth flowering like flowers,
roadside fruit stands wink in the periphery
as I near the wall at such great speed, Las Vegas,
it could’ve been Phoenix, such insane slay of day
light. MRI bores a sonic hole in my head,
tumor’s twitched into a lake view estate fronted
by a swinging gate. A trembling leaf falls
from an apple tree, rich with shame. & someone
please remind my wife to read this when I die.
“Honey, please forgive the histrionics, but I somehow
got stapled into the wrong journal. Please
print the errata & slip it into the memorial program.
Otherwise, I’m your casus belli (I hacked
the Pentagon mainframe & typed “in bed” at the end
of each line of code (that’s just the tumor
doing its best Shari Lewis; you’d be surprised
how lonely, & thus ornery, it gets)) in case
your despair goes on hiatus & you start
preparing for each student conference like it’s war.”
Let me be clear. I am occasional.
I deliver on a promise, so if I say I will
drive a stake through your heart,
fit your coffin. You are useless, dead.
This is the true Twemlow. Whether you know
my name or not, I assure I am feeling it,
feeling Twemlow, that eternal, brandied optimism.
Trust me, when I tell you his name.
His sidekick will crush your knee.
