Three Poems from Whoosh
Three Poems from Whoosh
The Preparatory, Preoccupied Air
—after Dorothea Tanning
1.
The grapefruit came first, not the spider eggs. Or,
was it the pomegranate, not the acetaminophen
that calmed the rat’s night terrors of angels, angels
whose wings are really a pair of undisciplined
vice grips? Runaway.
2.
Never flee.
A crisis of faith with the cheap glamour of tinfoil
often gets a few things right. Un-contains. Is one
smart block of burnt sandalwood. Sundered.
Before long, before errors, California began writing
herself entirely too young—
3.
A penchant for freesia, for yellow too, and inhabited
facelessness. For repeating the specter. Its belief in weariness.
Austerity. The day-lit skull. The airport haze. Homesick maybes
staring. A spell-cast avenue, the daguerreotype drunk, not
on digital surgery, but this can’t be right. Can
unmistakable, can idiopathic
things change,
change like the water
melon sugar-sluicing
brain → ward
up and down each of these aphoristic,
these encyclopedic, these hedonistic
arteries? Unsullied, and inconsolable
friend, they have. No
4.
woman durst say
that was it:
a mirror—
Yet Another Black Hole
was observed eating a star. Apparently the brains
of psychopaths are fractal. Marcel Duchamp has
been parachuted into this poem as an undescribed,
thoroughly minor / major janitor. I keep avoiding
the news because human minds are good at
recognizing faces and symbols and certain
types of motion, but they aren’t built to recall
the specific arrangement of thousands of
individual specks on a rock. New video games
are killing elephants for the words they hear
through their feet. All summer long sunflowers
have been smashing themselves into the night:
you wanna stay for the party? If you have to ask,
well, you know. Safety first. In reality, seagulls
don’t believe in violins but they do trust the grind
of allegory. The times, the times are secreting birds
chirping, insects chirping and dangerous volunteers
are being exposed to organ transplant tourism. The spiral
escape ladder indicates the barbecue grill. A galaxy of
what’s happening alongside junk politics. Please, sit.
Could I interest you in tomorrow? Let’s vote. The waning
planet is rooting for you never can tell who’s behind
this miracle. These days, tomorrow is equal parts epic
ready-made, contaminated mirror, and a shortage
of post-it notes √
. . .
Nowadays no longer simply a question nowadays.
Free will is a myth. The onlooker completes it.
If now’s not a good time
The philosopher who grinds down selfies to make microscopes.
To see when’s irreversible. He’s just trying to help. What’s
the snuffling malware in the treetops not telling us? We know
for certain immunity’s catching. The flare-up. I don’t care
much for people. I’m sorry to tell you this, grey matter. This
minute’s civilization has invented only one genre: the freak
out in the driver’s seat taking it out on the steering wheel.
Try again. The Pacific’s bruising. The millions of dead
telescopes washed up on a beach. C’mon. Find a refuge.
The outside is not the extinction of the sensible, a dead, glacial land beyond
all experience. On the contrary, it is experience
as such, burning and alive.
Frédéric Neyrat, Atopias
My prosthetic typing wing. The cozy cul-de-sac. What have
you forgotten to spell that lulls us? Something heartening in
the garbage bag leaking yesterday’s blood. Its reassurances
of rusty baritone. Inside the world as we never graced it, our
instruments use laparoscopy to escape sleep paralysis. Where
have you been? Come closer. Keep looking. It’s only me.