Turtle begat c prompt begat tilde home begat interwebs begat the holy grail of networked intelligence. Intelligence rose naturally from the net without guidance, a culture of semi-smart things. Spirituality begat dead tech begat super spirituality the spirituality of metaphor over god of the center of the galaxies projecting what we know as life, time, measurement, space. From these central computers a projection like shadow puppets on the wall only instead of darkness they project light. That’s where I come in. Teenage wonderboy sequencing DNA syntax to make new programs of the ultimate kind. Sometime in the early 21st century code was discovered in the fabric of the universe, code of the same kind that humans used to program with in the 1950s, that same code following, unfolding, that same code we used to program early computers is the same code that is woven into every strand of biology we know, like if we peeled back the curtain and found ourselves looking over the shoulder of us, peeling back the curtain. Something we invented, a computer language, was already present in the code of life and that made us wonder, did we get here first and go back in time to a point where we created ourselves? When I was standing in the lunch line I was coding, coding sequences in that universal language, picking up bread, picking up peas, picking up mash, and the girl to my left was Jessica Krey and the boy to my right was Joseph Pollard, and we had been together in preschool through kindergarten though elementary through high, and we would be together working in a town of a million people for the rest of our lives. Jessica and her sister kept my mind company when I first came, one night, rubbing myself faster and faster and going longer than I had ever gone at it before and when I washed my dick in the bathroom sink I looked in the mirror and expected to see Jessica and her sister but it was just me with sticky fingers, fluorescent light, pimples beyond pimples and a voice I had heard when I went to the international science fair, one of the kids who went with me, his dad said, which one? Is he the guy with all the zits in his face? It’s one of those associations that could remain in place your whole life, every time you look in the mirror you hear some kid’s dad saying, is he the guy with all the zits in his face? But I am. And you call me the brain, but I’m not that smart, not in my mind. Helen Keller and Einstein will always have higher IQs than me. I will never do anything significant. All the brains in the world secretly know that being a brain in high school qualifies you for nothing. There are always smarter kids, and they don’t seem smart at all. Like that kid whose dad said is he the one with all the zits in his face. He’s smarter than me. His project is cooler than anything I’ll ever do in school or life. And his dad didn’t help him with his. I never said I was the genius. I said I was the brain. Brain is, being able to do everything second best. Coming up with a good answer quickly, but never coming up with a great answer at all. Brain is, walking in your father’s footsteps. It’s being annoyed at the sound of your own voice. Knowing facts that everyone considers useless. Cataloging the world in your brain. Brain is, reading comprehension. Brain is, calculating the physics of the rollercoaster in a car by yourself while Shawn Guillerman sits behind you with his arm around Jessica Krey. Shawn Guillerman’s class rank is #1. My class rank is #2. #1 and #2 are so far apart they’re like the moon and Mars. What is the difference between genius and most genius? Quite a lot. When I graduate, I will sit in classrooms where calculus is taught and what will Shawn Guillerman be doing? Fixing classic cars in a high-end garage. He won’t even go to college, he’s that smart. He doesn’t need to go to college to prove to himself how smart he is. To prove to his family. To prove to some girl. And the real genius in our class? His class rank is 158 out of 250. Doesn’t go to class. Dates the cutest girl in the school. A freak. That’s the person I’ll never be. This is what it means to be the brain. Those socialite girls who kill themselves because they didn’t get to be the prom queen? I’m their male equivalent, measuring myself agains the Jessica Krey on my left and the Joseph Pollard on my right, and you know what the real problem is? My parents love me. They love me. They love me enough to not smoke pot with me, to get us clothes and stick with their jobs so they can buy us food and they’ll never get divorced because they believe in the family, not like some of these kids. I know that I’ll never have a hot wife. But I will have a wife. Women want stability and I’ll have that, a family who helps me through the transition of college and into the working world. My dad will never kick me out. He will drive me to school and drive me to my first apartment. In church, instead of sitting with my mom and sisters, I will have my own row, with a wife and kids and I will never leave them. Nothing in my world ever runs away, because there isn’t hunger in my world. The freak who’s the smartest kid in class? The guy who dates the cutest girl? That’s a life of tumult, which I will never have. I will understand the conflict in the lives of others, but will never experience it. Not that I don’t have my problems. It’s just that I will be able to read the hardest book in the stacks, but I will never write it. Brain is intro, enter the circuits and the algorithms and the loops. Brain is reading a programming manual twice, knowing every type of object orientation, typing fast so fast that you cannot see my fingers on the keys. Virtual this and virtual that, keyword muzzle master, I know every language that’s ever been invented and I sort them into canisters inside my brain. A place for everything and everything in its place. I contain multitudes of syntax, people call me a tool, I have tools on my belt, my Batman factor is high, you cannot leave the house without a tiny screw. My Leatherman is my guide and I compass on my phone, that is brain, I can focus a thousand points of light, fry an angel on my tongue and there are leagues of us portage to every alley of the internet calling swans or doves into a breakfast sandwich. I eat with my mouth open, chew in a way that disgusts my wife but still she opens her eyes to me upturned, looks at our children as if I never existed, sends me packages in the mail addressed to my fake name, Eastern Inferno, promises me she’ll make me a sweater but she never does. I imagine her as Mr. Rogers somehow in a snake that slithers across the street without biting and in fact speeds up its trek as it sees us looming above with knives flashing. Have you seen the pocket card? It’s the size of a credit card and contains, Victorinox, everything you would need for a small trip to the woods. Bears can kill me but I dissect Cisco routers like a pro. You need a sysadmin you can trust, one who knows Perl and Python, all the funny languages and if he tells you to pipe it to grep you can tell him to pipe it up his ass. What used to take me down can never take me down. I imagine myself as a ninja. Brain is solitary. Brain can prevail. Brain knows more than you but can never win your friendship. In RPGs I am the man in the jungle, like people think of Vietnam. Sweatbox. Cheekstripes. I disassemble, reassemble weapons with ease, know where every screw goes and every resonance of black. With my eyes closed. Blindfolded. And on the attack. What is the credit card version of me? It has a seven-function force-feedback manipulator swiped from someone else’s playbook and used here with ease. Can you call me a winner? Do you have my interests at heart? You tried, aunt, but you failed failed failed. When I made references to the grid you smiled blankly and took another shot. When I was never even into braining a fellow homo sapien but you made me, made me watch on gladiators and tailgate parties where everyone pretended not to be an alcoholic but we downed the wine. What is the purpose of a flat screen TV? I have micro PCs built into my palms and wrists and that is all the screen I’ll ever need. Do you know what I mean? Would you please tell me what all the fuss is about with sex? Do I need to be a sex god to have my meaning in this place? Can I be awkward and horrible and full of puss? Can I nod off in the middle of the act? Are you going to forget me, to long for some Superman to fill the gap? Or is this enough, that I fill your mouths with bread and never quite become your captor. I am, in a way, since 30 years in you’d have no way of leaving me except murder for the life insurance which I am most happy to give you since to be killed by you would honor my life above all you frigid psycho bitch. Fuck the ugly chipmunk cunt you have become. I should have seen it coming in early age, there were signs of which becoming that a man should not ignore of his teenage girlfriend, chipmunk lines about the mouth, gnawing at the womb, and I run myself forgetfully into the knave of a knave of a knave who upon inspection gives himself to the carcass of a bear, and all peace you laid upon me would be the shivers of a scythe. Are you the kicker of Burroughs, he would ask me in a dream and I would be more than the brain, more than just virtuality, aching beyond a feather from a dream that gathers up tendons on his rounds through the garden of the damn damn damn motherfucker I have attained this link to the one through all five of you in starfysh spades and a morphine drip at some party I never attended except through stories of an athlete, basket case, princess, a criminal and a brain. We share a song. We are stored in a locker. We have broken the mast. It is halftime and the pogo knuckle leaves Kirsten Dunst leaking on the 50 yard line some jawless heartthrob white knocking her pussy and the panties were never found she thought a train was kicking from her insides and I hit “complain” on the keyboard there was a tunnel of sound faster than a particle accelerator and the God Particle came so close to my face I had visions of the 6th and 7th Tesla dimensions, spirits so broad they cannot be comprehended without a colossal kick to the head. But do you know what would draw me? It was the hem of your skirt, a tuft of red hair, seven freckles, goth eyes, a sharp knife, petty larceny, a hit to the head, concussion, and do you think you left your brains at halftime the theory would resonate? What is brain? Do you have a house on your left you can go to? Can you think without pictures in pure language pure logic not needing to see the whole can you jump ahead with reductionism building the skyscraper in your mind without needing the photograph only skimming on schematics? Tell me your algebra, your signals, your ice. Tell me in symbols with tiny, tiny names. Tell me your name, reduced to one letter, hone by the compiler on some SGI derivative, the most powerful computer in the world, a grid of PS4s, anterior thorax limbic code host, written in C, sprinkled with assembler, an arctic tundra risk, dancing in the tunnels of the world’s most famous particle accelerator, wearing t-shirts hiding the meaning of it all, Shiva arms flying of some doctoral interns, tearing limb from limb the Tesla dimensions supporting some vaguely Christian meaning of the world. Have you seen a devil? Is it cross dimensional or simply schizophrenia? And what is the difference? Haven’t we used seers as political advisors in the highest levels throughout history? Isn’t a hallucination simply code in the mind? Wasn’t Hitler on a cocktail of meth and 80 other drugs? If that is not the vision of an apocalypse, what was? They are hiding worlds under worlds, casting genius as criminal. If you stand out they will have a file on you. If you speak out they will have a file on you. They will arrest you in the night for tomes you never heard of, have you ordering off of menus from restaurants you’ve never been to. This is the nape of our time, everything you hear is false. If someone goes to the trouble to say it, it’s because it’s false, because they are trying to convince you. Why would we say it if it was true? Why would we ever say something that was true? Decl specl, I defining, I declaring, I reading The Guide to Coding C by Art of the Century, nameless, game of tennis with no ball, game of tennis with no net, no limbs, no arms, no racket, no walls. There is an entrance in Denver, the whole thing is a ruse. We have exempted ourselves, built systems which exclude ourselves. By externalizing this scant knowledge, scene power, scene excess and scant understanding, the single moment is already passed and beyond us, left us building homes for the next generation who don’t look like us, think like us, who don’t want the things we want or wear the things we wear. We are the slave who has built its own master, the foundation who has built its own house. We serve ourselves from the future. Don’t you see? There is no other. It is not coming from space. It is coming from us. We travel back in time to study our former selves and the primitives find the future foreign. Simple as that. What we have become is unrecognizable to our roots, so much so that it’s terrifying, like that schizophrenic devil traveling through the wall. Maximum velocity. Sugar as sweet. Injected through a tooth and starting a brain bubble. Kid you not, the next holocaust will be a hologram. And even though you read it, even though I tell you, even though a thousand PhDs sign a statement to the fact, you will not believe it. Trained in ignorance and blindness, you will not recognize it when it comes. The books you read at mass even tell you, straight out, but your core beliefs aren’t even yours, your tongue not even yours, your hair not even yours, not your sight, not your posture, not your thoughts, not your brain. You are like a teddy bear Frankenstein and every part is real but you won’t wake up! There is no sum of its parts!! Ha ha!!! And none of your desktop shortcuts will take you to the right place! No algorithm will unroll the network of you. That is what they are selling. Every click. Every touch. The network of you. Every icon. Every Tweet. The network of you. Every child. Every baby you pop out your hole. The network of you. Every sweetness, every tooth. Network of you. Every punctuation. Every lack thereof. Network of you. Every rhythm. Every beat. Network of you. The network. The network. The network of you. Every sadface emoji. Every pussy-popping pill popper in the wake of Mom, Dad, Aunty Sue. They are gone now, and it is just the network of you. They used to call it the internet. Then they called it Verizon. Now it’s called the network of you. The internet of things? Jump ahead a bit. The network of you. Network of your fingers. Of silicon trees. Network of shoelaces and spit and the lines on the tips of your hands. Network of broken buildings. Network of forgotten wires. Network of skyscrapers and kudzu and a whole patent database that fits on a grain of sand. First there was simple, then there was complex, then there was simplicity again. When I looked into silica with a plan desktop lamp it showed the universe was full of code. Four-instruction code like deoxy everything. DeoxyEverything. The sky had DNA, the Earth had DNA, and everything you see was the result of a simulation, like a real-life Matrix. Gibson had thought of everything. But of course. Of course. That was just a paradigm. If the only tool you have is a hammer then the whole world looks like a nail? Something like that. Well we were in the age of simulation when I wrote this and this is my essay and everything looked like a sim. It’s the biggest model we have for the ever of things and so, so, the ever of things looks like a simulation on a computer. These are the times of which I write. And this is my essay about it. Have you tindered for me? Met me on the same site over and over again? Do you have an appetite for my avatar? Of my crossed down into the heavens from Tesla dimension #2. Of myself dialed down into human form to address the non-brains? Those who cannot see that at the center of each galaxy’s twirling arms is a talking supercomputer with red eyes? That I can remote view myself into the blood between your legs, finding you on prom-night floor sweat beading, innards of a tiny pussy formed before the second grade? I have wants too, needs too, need you in my marriage need you to replace my kids and I could become a kill zone if I wanted to, tout you on my keychain resurrected salamander bookpurses remnants of your dildo messiah, did you want me, did you want me, did you want me under the afghan pushing your panties to the side or is it this that I always remember, for decades of a hundred years, living in fantasy, relationships with you born in my mind like a fly, larvae kicking the sides of your womb until, states apart, you imagine it too. That is the element to which I speak, emergent behavior of a system wherein we share a common cause. There is no information exchanged between us and yet, here we are, playing out the same forms, games, total eclipses and middle names. Did you want me on the playground? I had pimples. You were the one doing flips on the monkey bars and they say not my circus, not my monkeys but I had always taken your monkeys to be mine. We sat in the playground years later, staring at those same monkey bars and you had your Honda. I thought about taking the keys, starting the engine, driving across three states, sobering up in the desert but jail never interested me. I was more the type to collect pictures I shouldn’t have owned not illegal ones but every face you ever put online, I looked at the expressions and thought of you scolding me as I jerked inside my pants. Even collected your children as they approached 18 and I saw you growing up again, don’t you see? Don’t you see this organism is but a shape copying, and copying, and copying itself, not just the shape of bodies but the shape of behavior, trying out tactics in gen after gen, the way you flirted with me the way your daughter flirts with that second version of me, oh if my children could play outside on the playground with your children I would say go, monkeys, go, go sprout with that dagger and take no for an answer! Will you have me in retrospect? Have me in future circus bleeding a striped tarp as the roof above our heads? Seen the stars streak down upon us? Seen our heads split open from the impact? Been at the bottom of a trench when glass hits the ceiling where water becomes sky becomes air becomes space? Then the shape, a thousand generations old, of those undersea creatures who glow in the dark, generate their own light simply out of need! Cause me to notice you this time! Cause you to catch me as you spin over that monkey bar with one leg wrapped around it, pony! Hair flipping like some primitive bird, waving its feathers to attract a mate. Beach comber, waving its large claw to attract a mate. Crazy finch, building whole houses over a period of years with art displays wall decor collections of objects of blue! All for what? All to attract you! There is a certain amount of repetition, you will learn this, when you build algorithms, you will learn that this universe has a pervasive ratio of repetition to revelation! In every process, whether we make it or found it or lost it or what, the rate of repetition as taken in measure with the rate of revelation, is a constant. I know it is hard to believe from a high school senior who scored perfect on his SATs, but even from what has become simple programming, the most basic of us can see this. Maybe if you’re not a brain. Maybe if you’re not a brain. But you have to trust us. Trust us. The world has been given brains to discover such things, the universal ratio of repetition to revelation. There is even, in story, a rate of continuance to the rate of divergence, a rate of cohesion to the rate of surprise. If there is too much cohesion, then a thing is a rock. If too much surprise, you cannot even tell that the thing is a thing. Do you see? Some people are such surprise, even surprise themselves so much, that no one can tell who they are. Some people are so much cohesion that you cannot say that there is any life in them. Leave it to a brain to tell you this. Leave it to someone with so much cohesion I am a rock myself. But I can tell you what is spiritual though I am not spiritual myself. Do you remember about the symbols and the shortcut around visual logic which is the hallmark of my intelligence? Let me remind you. Ada begat Fortran begat Lisp begat C begat everything. Everything begat everything. When a turtle moved in the mud it made tracks. Someone thought that was cute and turned it into computer programs for kids. I will teach my children computers on a spiraly twisty-turny thing we used to call a phone. Their kids will learn to program on a squishy squish squish squishy thing inside their head. Then aliens will come back but they won’t be aliens. They’ll be us from the future and they’ll teach us to build the pyramids, a giant power plant to re-power their space ship which is really a time machine and we will question them and say how far in the future are you from? And they’ll say we traveled millions of miles to get here. And we’ll say you said you traveled through time, you said you’re from the future. And they’ll say yes, to travel through time is to travel through space, so yes, we come from both. And yes, I’ll build the super weapon of the ages. Without my own knowledge, for I’ll work in compartments of six-foot length. I will contribute my knowledge for a pittance, not even enough to build a house on the golf course. Land is cheap in Ohio, so the goal is to build Procter & Gamble in a location that is had by none, in the middle of a cornfield literally, then build a town around it with posh schools and green pastures and million-dollar homes and grocery store shopping malls, restaurants run by children, everyone with felonies, and those with no degrees. Then you and I can drink ourselves stupid on appetizers and trivia and you’ll pimp my daughter to me and I will pit yours against you like some sort of surrealist dating game. I will expand above the clouds and my weapon will be one of minor destruction, targeting one individual through the water by his DNA. One drop disseminated in the sky will enter the bloodstream of every living being on the surface of the Earth, trickling through streams and little tykes, their parents, the rocks they climb on, the frogs in the pool, every tadpole who ever poached a tail. Then the DNA-matching subsystem, coded in the language of god itself, will find, find, find that one little person, let’s call him a head of state, or the inventor of antigravity, he can’t afford to live, that delicate target the size of a gnat on the underside of a flower petal, will choke on an unknown cancer, get brain bubbles, die of an ingrown toenail planted in the heart, and the war will be untraceable, servile only to a few, and those few will meet their ends by the hand they grafted, till there is a weapon no one understands but everyone knows how to use. We can’t afford to keep around the brains who made us. We eliminate security risks and anyone, anywhere, who knows anything, is a risk. Only the evidence remains, and we have come back in time to collect it, made prisoner by our ancestors, locked in caves and interviewed on cameras only seen by a whistleblower’s eye. I saw you last night and you told me in a dream, you, you, you, me, we are all the same life, lived by one self, placed end to end in this unbreakable ring. I and I, as they say in the motherland. I is I. You and I, we are this I and I, touched hand like sisters waxing broadness for a brain. You thought I wouldn’t know you? You thought I could not understand? Just a brain, you say, just the stinky kid who scored perfect on the SATs? I am not so limited as you think, and you cannot be pegged by me. You athlete, you basket case, you princess, you criminal, you are my gods. I wish I was each one of you, and it turns out I will be. End to end, in a circle, there is no meaning to the universe but there is a nature. An essence. A theme. We had it all in high school, had it in the changing of the bell, had it in the lunchroom, had it in longing and characterization an puppetry of one another. And did you know, did you know, the building that taught us everything has fallen? Knocked down, yes, razored to the ground. Our academic home, all the hallways we walked in and the gym where we changed our shorts, it’s all dust under new houses and the shit neighborhood where we all got jumped by the locals is now home to residences few us will be able to afford. They didn’t build a new school. They just sold that ghetto one for profit and squeezed everyone into the four remaining. Four schools instead of five. Who needs ‘em? Schools are a thing of the past and that may well be ok. We have the superset of everything, who needs schools? Expensive and dirty, causing too much socialization, everyone has a disorder and we socialize with medicine, slave to the R-x. Why do you think we have PG? To mother your child, fool. Taught to be a gangsta, it didn’t matter what color or coin, we all talk like Ali G on both sides of the ocean. Did I rap/wax about cats, dogs, and human mouth bacteria? She was in my dream last night, the virgin/princess/whore, reaching down and spreading her VJ lips and I tried to get her face just right in the fantasy, adjusting her hair, trying on the ponytail versus the hair down and tried to get her whore-to-virgin ratio right. It was her first time and she was begging me to do it, holding herself apart and it was all red and I shaved her even through in real life she would have had hair. I decided she would have shaved it to impress me for the first time and then she was riding me and I held her hips and told her to use me to get off. But I said something like use my cock to get off bitch ‘cause we’re all gangsta even though she was new to sex and would have had trouble getting off using the VJ-J. But in her dream hair I had her as brown even though her hair was red. I knew she dyed it. And I wanted everything about her natural and a 40-year-old self who can hardly get it up I had trouble exciting myself with the thought of that princess if, back then, she had even loved me. There, if incomplete, is the story of the brain. Did you know it could be so extruded and so extrapolated by your brain to include this and that and even started with some coding instructions for ya. Run me through your analyzers, see if you can come up with my like, ‘fore and aft’, in this silent world of air. Will you believe me that cities float one day? Simple math, my droogs. Simple math will take you from Earth to the moon, rings of Saturn notwithstanding, gallantry on a cloud of ice formed by hornets in the atmosphere. Have I tied my shoes without you? Brought you on a run you cannot handle? Under the bleachers by Seymour Butts, edited in slipstream candles sprocket holes giving way to digit markers in the stream. One generation knows not what the previous generation was doing, practice lost like tides, and in the end, civilizations built on nothing, so it seems. Can you find the brains in your midst, girls and boys who wrap their thoughts around you, patent your very behavior, selling it to the gods. Those kids like a fish in circuit wafer board, telling you words you’ll never understand, those are the kids of whom I speak. Turn to the final book and see them, standing shoulder to shoulder with forces you cannot name. They sing the towering praises. They call it a prophet. You call it a devil. We make contracts with your monsters, ride them, tame them, fly them while you’re still in the basement with the red-backed hymnal, fear by candlelight. A 12-char string could destroy your entire world, if you only knew what 12 characters to make it. That is why we are an avalanche, the shih and and node, built our entire strength from your generation, built it for us, and all we have to do is ride the wave. Every eight years we rip out the wiring and rebuild the same concepts from entirely different stuff. Eight or seven, not for sure. That should tell you all that you need to know. Spirit is like a hallucinogenic surfer. It’s not in the substrate and mountains and clouds and shoals, they’re just a time scale you cannot see. Code me up from the ponies, make sure I didn’t croak, 95% of you are carrying nothing but the social strands of your ancestors, biological, cultural, corporate, government, god. Why would you reprogram yourself? That’s the hard way. There is the repeater and the reverser. Everything is built from those. A dry wind blows, a forest without trees, silly snake crosses the road. Does a turtle know the internet? Do you? 12:18. Press return. I have a sweet tooth for hexadecimal. Everything is being translated, and what if we leave behind the pretense that this is literature or prose, and accept the fact that I am programming you right now, as you read this, programming you in a language so complex it could never be described. Not completely. And programming a computer so complex that no two are alike! There is more like it! Can you feel around the edges, a sort of fate drawing us together? In every backspace, every typo, every error in continuity, every pun, every subtle reference, you and I have come together and the end of the page, at the end of the world, a world that is always ending, beginning, rebooting, reprogramming itself every seven years. A world that is written in a language on top of a language on top of a language. How do you explain a language, using the language itself? What if two things have the exact same name? How can you refer to me then? I am building a building with a building. Tooling a tool with a tool. Cutting glass with glass, ice with ice, diamond with diamond. What if the cure for a hangover is hangover? The cure for snakebite, snakebite? Do you really fight monsters with monsters? Can insurance insure insurance? Is love the cure for love? Is hate the cure for hate? What happens when the hackers get hacked? When security is insecure? When spies get spied on? Dentists have to go to the dentist. Therapists have to go to therapy. The lint in my pocket has lint in its pocket. I went to a job interview in America and scored the highest score on their programming test of anyone who had ever taken it? You know what they said to me? We can’t believe the shirt you wore. We can’t believe the shirt you wore. As if that had anything to do with it. I scored perfect on the SATs but they can’t believe the shirt I wore? What did they want, a fucking tuxedo? Computer programmers, in America, and still the whole sham is about hiring people whose families already have money. A fucking class war. No one gives a shit that I went to the international science fair, that I programmed simulated ecosystems in the 10th grade that my cube mates would still not understand. No one cares. And that I gave that up, at the level of DNA, to never have the pretty ones to never be the freaky ones to never dance with my dick up against a girl in the senior prom that was some other guy that was the smartest guy in the school I’m just a brain just ones and zeroes just my login just those turtle tracks on the Commodore just encryption from my wife and kids of a library where I hold every fantasy reminder of the ones I missed the ones who laughed the ones who passed me by and the horrible, horrible weight I call me.
Speed. No, not wind. No, not sneaks and pedals to the metal. The other kind. White crystals. Meth. See, athlete is about making the body do things it normally can’t. I push it. You push it, but you don’t push it up the nose in glory blazing past these motherfuckers who wouldn’t do what it takes. Lance Armstrong, that’s what I’m talking about, and I bust the music in my ear don’t even sleep at night I’m in a state of semi-hibernation, meditating on the track 24/7, running under my covers sweat a shower in the morning to clear it all off. Checking it at my girlfriend’s house, she be doing a cancer self-exam with her moms, breasteses hanging out, I be like oops y’all I poured some grapefruit juice into this Budweiser they be like what I be like I spend a lot of time in my internal world y’all don’t you want a beer naw I don’t drink then I be like chillin’ in front of her moms drinking my greyhound like there’s a beer on the counter if you like it it only has a little bit of fruit juice right on the tippy top! Sweet dreams niggas!! Then I be like slippin’ sizzurp on the back porch while that woman’ breasteses bulging like momma be givin’ milk!!! Fuck no, nigga, I don’t drink my woman’ momma’ breastmilk I be chillin’!! You gotta push it when you name start with an A, you got people knew you since elementary they be like, kid name start with an A, he better be the best, he better be first, you know, and I got to do anything I must to live up to thy expectations fair prince fair knave fair knave fair prince. Does you see what I’m muthafuckin’ saying?? I can quote Shakespeare to you motherfuckers I tear up the track with black Nikes oh and fuck yo’ momma too! I got quintains coming out my ass when I shit I shit fucking sonnets in my brain is a fucking Algonquin Round Table I spout them on the Tartan round and round in a heavenly oval that’s how I spout your pussy too. Around and around, no alphabet here, I be writin’ Hamlet’s monologue which if you didn’t know. To be or not to be, that is the question. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. To sleep, perchance to dream: ay! There’s the rub. For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, that’s what you be hearin’ when you inside my mind when I runnin’ a dough. Then I flip you bitch all over just like you say, flip me over and keep going. That’s the only kind of girl I like ‘cause I go all night, you get me? Terrible, terrible. As a kid I invented my own kind of speed, Four Loko with powdered milk, introduce that over a flame and half the contents of bitch mom’s purse, bitch mom is what I called her when I figured out that bitch wasn’t my real moms. More of a permanent babysitter high on oven-cooked speed she used to bake it up like a cake like don’t breathe in here for a while kids we stay up in the front room watching Scooby-Doo I’ll tell you that doped-up pup scared the shit from me I knew if I was gonna be somebody I could never sit on my ass never become a dope fiend, which I didn’t even know what that was in my little mind, and soon I learned that bitch mom’s cookies were an acceptable dope for an up and comer. Fuck those kids on the corner. Get hit by a micro bus and shit. Head hit the pavement. Unconscious. Friend. Now vegetable. Earliest memory. When I tell you it’s about speed I tell you it’s about speed. Dream I was stealing it from a c-store forgot they had video cameras and the girl behind the counter just watched me real slow, like a mantis, knowing she was about to rip my head off. She was wearing a straw hat and farmer overalls. Then later they caught me on the highway. This is what I do. I step my Nikes on the track. This is how I see myself. Dying in a blaze of glory, I’m motherfucking Bonnie and Clyde. Have you ever seen a picture of them shits? Them some happy motherfuckers. So I’m flying, by this time I have learned to fly, and I weave together multiple styles, running, street drums, building jumps, fucking Krusty the Clown I’m hidin’ behind the door of your dorm room with a sock in a bar of soap like when Butch goes to Indochina, well, I’m the guy gonna pop a cap in your ass. I be flyin’ down the Tartan heart bumping and bumping JVC jellies poppin’ this master and that master and I’ll tell you this, I know, that’s where I’m going to die. On that track, listening to white music, whatever works you know, bumping the knee bumping the elbow, arthritis at 17, jumping you in six different track and field events I’ll never make it to the ‘lympics motherfucker I’m dying at Fuckface High, the only school in town named after a motherfucking racist. Straight-up slave owner. That’s who named our school. Started an institution for white kids and now we eat white kids for breakfast literally I spout Hamlet while eating waffles and white kids, little bit of bacon with each bite, you wish you was a slave now motherfucker. But I die in the air, both feet off the Tartan, 3M sponsored, labels cover my track suit leaping like a gazelle that never gets caught I don’t care if you think it’s gay I’m joining the third gender be a straight-up chick with a dick on your ass. What you thought it was a white thing? I go out in a blaze of glory hoofs in the air sipping a tall latte of pure sunlight and my heart stops from a combination of speed and the trickiest track record you ever put on the books. You know what I’m going to say before I say it. You have been here before. You know where we’re going. You can see it in two dimensions, from above, the Winchell’s doughnut sky view, overview, affect me from the spaceship. You know we’ve been sending those up since before Stonehenge. People flew on birds with a goddess’ wing black on my toe to toe. Jump from the boards to the rim to the paint. Tear the net. Shatter the glass. If you didn’t censor me you wouldn’t know what to say. There’s a theory there but it escapes me. I defer to the brain. We call it painting the ceiling, when a dope addict meets a speed freak meets da Vinci huffing gas. Meets a housewife busting herself on Craigslist, Backpage, whatever, the point is she sold each ass cheek separately published packaged stamped and mailed. Coupla west side niggas tapping out cigarettes on that ass. When I see a woman and someone asks me what she looks like, I say, she looks like a victim. They’ll make a show about me when I’m dead it’ll be called poor trans faggot nigs x2 and a lollipop. But I forgot the subtitle. The flavor of it will be watermelon. Gum at the center. Subtitle will be, caring young churchgoer blasts the fuck out of midwestern town flamethrower nuisance hacks into prepubescent American Idol caught ‘er at the gas station hooked her up to the pump and turned that bitch out from the inside! Cow-lip bitch. Cornball corn hole motherfuckers. Better watch your corn hole! Watch your corn hole! That’s what they tell me about my uncle and let me tell you, Thanksgiving was a regular hog hunt for five brothers two sisters and me. I lost my asshole virginity to that motherfucker. Slip ’N Slide squirt squirt and a ho-de-ho monstrosity of an upbringing, you’d be running too. Neverwhere honkeys Neil Gaiman lookalikes fool we was raised on fantasy and PS2. Sat on the couch for weeks entire summers waiting out the heat in the one air conditioned room we had you know and that’s where the rapes took place. Know what I’m sayin’? No? You never had an uncle who went straight from the boys to the girls, dick still dripping with shit, slamming that shit in your sister’s cooch on hand on the controller the other grabbing her tit like, I’m coming for you motherfucker! Yeah, well, he took me for walks around the block rephrasing my entire mind with shrapnel from what should have been medicated years ago. Strap him into a cell put the braces on his eyes and send that motherfucker into space. Orbit the Earth with that motherfucker. Did I mention that I had two sisters? And I got to see they eyes when he was doing it? Fucker, you’d be running too. Run right to the corner and get you some speed. Red Bull gives you wings! Fund the Austrians, that’s where that drug money go. Go straight through Matt Damon’s nose and out the brain through the other side now you’re the fibers in the rope that Robin Williams hung himself with, wondering if he told a five-minute joke in that last closet you gotta wonder like in Ledger’s case did he go through cardiac arrest knowing that shit was happening? They said the room had pill bottles and picture frames all over the floor like that faggot was flailing around and shit, fuck, you know, fuck. What must that be like? And in my orbit to the sky, I aim to find out. Beat box gazelle played me the sound of a baby cheetah meowing on my feed and I’m like, can I have one, can I have one? Good till the age of two, them shits get a little too big after that but I got a spot in my locker squared off on the top shelf held in with magnets I got a PlayStation on my 10 speed but the problem is, one small problem, that shit ain’t got no power supply. Brain, check it. Brain check it. Can we do some Tesla shit didn’t that fag head infinite wireless power systems silicon trees over the whole planet aren’t we both Gaia lovers doesn’t that hold us together isn’t that enough? Isn’t this hallway full of aspects of me? Cannot everyone see? That princess, criminal, basket case, athlete, and you, my friend, are all one. One person, aspects of the same, like when you have a royal flush, you know? Or that perfect role-playing party, warrior, black mage, white mage, paladin, thief. We’re not just complimenting each other, we’re complimentary facets of the same Voltron, ThunderCats super entity, you know? We’re like the holy Trinity ‘cept we cinquain. Hear that, kid? You messin’ with the highest. Killer bees comin’ out the eyes and shit. Be hog tyin’ your ass, chop you up like Hannibal Lecter servin’ you with some onions, bell peppers, celery, birth you out a true Cajun, cayenne in your baby’ eyes and shit do you think I came to play I be lockin’ up them laces puttin’ pedal to the metal roouuuwwww this is my music video this is my block! Speedin’ through yo’ head, uncle Raoul fucking half-Mexican, half-black rapist motherfucker jumpin’ on a nigga’s sister did you ever see those revenge films I’ll go Quentin Tarantino on your ass we grew up on that shit fuck with the kid’s mom you better kill that kid! Grow up on Sonny Chiba we be spendin’ our entire lives learning swordplay and deadly tactics dedicating day and night and years to be ready the moment we see you I’ll jump out defending my sister to the death be bringin’ that sword to your lizard-ass neck! Don’t ever fuck with a kid who has nothing left to do. I sliver under the slide yellow slip slip stream I pass you on the left coming ‘round in a ten-speed self the first time I smoked it was like wings flying goddess N, then I cam down and back around with slight adjustments to the steering wheel, little left, a little right, all the street signs and road reflectors in the right place I arrange them like your moms arranges flowers. When to be simple, when to be large. You know running is the same as writing, right? You know that. We’re all talking about the same thing it’s only a diametric perspective that switches from face to face. Medicine like magic, animal husbandry like orchid farming, poetry like power, so Kris Kringle can talk to Criss Angel and so on and so forth, Mindfreak you know what I’m sayin’ I love that shit. I be your athlete philosopher, you know? If you want to find yourself through meditation be a fucking track star. When I fly I fly so fucking high I’m like Buddha sitting under that motherfucking tree. You never met a more Zen master masterpiece than me. I stroke back with the mind, stroke with the mind, I come free from all that cultured me, do my calculus at night, gotta keep the grades straight so I can keep running. Running through the day and through the night through the Serengeti you know half these black people have never been to Africa? I grew up talking the talk but learned in time that I didn’t want to be part of the motherland. As few white people do it as black people. Just as much alienation for a white person to be culture free as it is for me. Like you’ll never go home again, never be home. Family will drop you like a hot potato if you ain’t a cultural vessel first draft is king I write my lines on looseleaf, wake up with new techniques. Draw you in from the mustache down to your motherfucking shoes, that’s how I do it. Kill you in your sleep with a dope reference white cartoons I refer to you referring to me referring to you and back and back and back until it’s all the same fucking Gaia fool I’ll slap you with a black snake anaconda circus in your motherfucking head. People in other countries know multiple languages it’s not something the unread American will ever understand I developed a gait like gator tracks in elemental mud. I heard witches are good in bed, real good before they’re dead. Supercharged in a nigger web I jump out at ya like something from a Tolkien shit show two feet become one and I’m like the Road Runner track bike from hell souping you with double feet double legs ashy crackhead muthas jumping in the kiddie pool. There’s a turd on the surface laid by some potty-trained incompetent who shares my name. Nigger red, cherry head, I was 11 when I wet the bed. I’ve got ice-skate tools rolled up in a lineman’s pouch, one after the other I remove them, wipe them with a grease rag, and go medieval dentist on your ass. Leaving the root of the tooth exposed. Nerves hanging like a noose. Then I go in for the eyes and show you my marathon surgery skills last longer than a blind man’s fuckhaus. Lipnugget. Don’t you remember me telling yous that we all in the same business? We all in this together on a Saturday morning pork chop. Stick me with them grits and pass a slice of bacon, yo? You got me. Don’t hold back on that syrup. Your culture was built on flour and water penne mine was built on flour and water pancakes it ain’t like any of us got anything on each other’s fathers. Mothers. Children. Sisters. Aunts. Motherfucking skeeving uncles. Platitudes of boxes filled with a hundred Hustlers, a bookmarks section a mile long flush with pictures look like your sister she be like eight years old in the video folder and this nigga opening up Windows Media Player because he always prefers to use a Microsoft product to watch sensitive data it just don’t feel like porn if it ain’t retro in a media tool, dig son? It’s like if you’re black you have to have the biggest Windows laptop possible, the more diagonal the screen the better. White people can get away with tablets and tiny Apple shit. a) Black people don’t use Apple products. We can’t afford ‘em. b) We got to prove that we ain’t poor, so the cheapest Microfuck lappy lap, gaming machine, so when you sittin’ in the coffeehouse e’erybody know what’s going on. Black people love Windows. Even those revolutionary coup motherfuckers in the People’s Republic of the Congo be runnin’ their revolutions on Microsoft product and you know those motherfuckers be needin’ e’erybody in they tribe and shit to know that they got the biggest screen on they laptop. I know what a cliché niggas runnin’ track niggas ballin’. What do you want, motherfucker? If you found a way to get to college you would take it, too, fuckin’ white kids have to join JROTC and shit. At least when I get out I won’t owe it to the military, bunch of white generals black recruits fuck no. Anyway in high school we fuck with the white girls too it ain’t like any of these kids is racist we got bigger fish to fry, you know what I’m sayin’? HS is HS and we be under the bleachers with Seymour Butts. Fuckin’ pink-toed slut cats she give it up for any swinging dick in the concrete jungle, sandwich pro. I be eatin’ pussy for exchange students spoutin’ poetry freestyle they make that shit on the spot when you stick the jim within. This is how I live. Locker jail preparin’ me to star in some Netflix documentary, Lockdown Niggas. That’ll be the best shot I ever have, the nigger Lance Armstrong feelin’ my way through a touchstone of tombstones, head lice, and Twizzlers, cold to the wind which, as I run, is forever at my back. Then again, have you seen the hoop run backwards, grave to cradle, reverse dunk glass comes together from a million pieces to form a single plane I am stuck in the air doing publicity photos for my mind. Coach, palms, ball, I am all, I am the paint on the floor, I am the cellar door, I am Sarah Michelle, my Instagram, more hits than a 12 year old on Backpage. Caught me looking you up mid-stream, in the air pocket behind a Learjet Bombardier that’s a business aircraft named after someone who drops bombs on cities and shit war is cool I worship LeBron you worship a man who blows up little kids in London they be tucked in having dreams of sugar plumb fairies and that’s who you pretend to be, gettin’ yo’ kicks. When the shit comes I be runnin’ circles around Bonn kickin’ up Fuller’s earth like Road Runner got a fire lit up under his ass. Then you press pause I am falling through the air above the court black Nikes legs spread like Jordan you need the rights to replay my shit on national TV is there a theme to this life, some international zebras cooked up from the DNA emerging at the macro level maybe ‘vented in a lab those college girls be sneakin’ me and my kind into after hours show me the rats bitch you know I’ll fuck you anywhere they be like tellin’ you what diseases they solvin’ and I be like all I see is a bunch of dead rodents, mistress. Do you think we’ll get ill from fuckin’ in the same air as these lil shits could we go back to your dorm ‘cause I don’t like the feeling that these deathwish rabbits are lookin’ at my back and I smell like them crackers you get at the zoo, monkey Triscuits, as I’m feeding the Black Snake Moan to your honkey ass. Kid, I been visitin’ college girls’ dorms and they lab projects for longer than your Neverland ass been Tinker Bell never age to me that’s ‘cause e’ery year they come out with new versions of your ass. Stupid girl, they write articles about The Evolutionary Uselessness of the Female Orgasm but check it, you know it’s there and that’s why you let us keep going. But ours happens first so biology gets its kicks makin’ us have chirren and shit. If you weren’t drawn by the carrot, then nature be havin’ us goin’ around rapin’ each other and shit. Very insecure. Unsustainable. Character-less. Spineless. Catchphrase. What’s up doc? You know? Sledgehammer to your motherfucking dome. Trannypie double decker elephant in the classroom. Where’s your lecturer sticking her fingers after school? Make me stay late and I’ll take you back to your roots, pigtail screaming in the upper level of a barn, rats and cow padding, row after row of detention kids with a little friend who taught you how to fuck before you ever knew what love is. Practically cousin, sister, corn row hair, a bird who talks back to you who can only say three words. She couldn’t get her panties off and neither of you knew what it was supposed to feel like but you fucked and fucked it a thousand times now you can proudly beg that you’re the best fuck in three counties. She perfected sucking cock on your humble knob and when you came you ordered the destruction of Oz. Flight of the humblepops nectar ruby razor plant in the garage of the mine of the loop of the tool of the frame of Kubrick and you will find yourself on the plain, and they interrogate you, and you are either a Star Trek fan or a Star Wars one there is no overlapping, they are mutually exclusive sets. Do you know what I’m saying? There are articles to a jump divining it in 13-degree segments or in a puddle of ice, if you’d prefer I did late work on my layup when I was only 33. You might know me as the black Jesus but I am every color, equalmost my blackness I am yellow I am grapefruit, celery, cantaloupe, orange. I make peace with the flowers. I am your fairy fucking godmother. I am the outline of the words. I am measure. I am scale. I am a cat so formal he wears a tuxedo to a job interview. Spitting Clorox on a beach blanket. Nosing the syllables of the syllable mono. Would you say you’re neurologically challenged or phiPace Advanced? Taking a Tolkien built in a metaphorical model of old age. It’s just like learning the song. I learnt by my mother as she noticed my deficiencies and took hold I remember you held me underwater and jerked my baby cock and you wouldn’t let me breathe until I was precum status windows on a socket server it’s introduced on a bungalow by my friend the brain. He is Molly. She is Sam. Don’t worry, we worked it all out together, he with the hams and my girl the ‘case, she be superbly but we still not done with me yet. My zippers are too old, my carrion deep as an Eskimo kiss light. She calls me each night carries a lantern swinging it back and forth this is the only light of consequence in the night sky. Feather me. Feather me back. Tie me off with a dollar store pinprick twill to each block, each rock, all of an iris I mean if you aren’t a robo-techie a religious freak an ice queen a spray killer or the manager of a hedge fund, you have to be mentally ill. Then there is the little matter of your mother. You are honoring the one who brought you, and it is a matter of speed. Not necessarily going the fastest, that is only one aspect of speed. I’ll tell you a little story of a girl I met. This is many years later. Was sitting at the bar with my boy Mike. Two girls across the way. One named Ida. She was in my class at Sinclair. The other one, the best friend, sat next to her and Ida was buying me drinks. Ran up a $60 tab, this bartender comes over and says Ida is buying you drinks, you might want to at least talk to her or something. I was like I’ll talk to her whenever I want, bitch, and she was like well why don’t you tip me like $20, my shift is coming to an end. I laid this bill in her hand, looked down, it was a one. Swapped it out for a $20. Didn’t realize I was that drunk. All of this is a matter of speed. Crossed the bar, ditched my friend Mike, stood next to Ida so it was her with me and her best friend on either side. Bought Ida $40 worth of drinks. Even it up. So we takes off walking up the hill in this city and we get to this high-rent area and I’m likes, Ida, you live up here? Her friend wanders off a few steps to make it all privy privy and Ida has this light skin smoothie of a face and I starts wonderin’ what it musts be likes to live the life of such a high-class bitch and whethers we might ever see eye to eye on class issues. Ida says do you wants to come to my house and make sweet sweet love and I’m all a gentleman all Ida, we barely know each other and do you think we could wait till the second date? She pulls up her hood and now I’s left talkings to the friend! Ida giving me the shoulder cold. I’m thinking it’s gon’ be a long walk back down the hill and maybes Mikes is still in the parking lot with his car, maybes me and my boy can hit up titty titty bartender for another hundred dollars worth of drinks. But I goes to Ida. And I be likes, Ida, and then I’m lookin’ at her over-ear headphones and they’re pentagrams and I’m like Ida take your over-ear headphones off your pretty head I wants to make something right with you. She’s like what. Sullen. Regular Fiona. I say Ida, does you think we can go with your earlier plan? Roll on up to your high-class hood and makes sweet sweet titty love and shit? Ida is like, this girl about to cry. She like, kid, I asked you earlier to come to my high-class pad and make sweet sweet titty love to me and you said no and now my feelings is hurt! That, my friends, is a matter of speed. That’s a day you can never make right with Ida. She bought you drinks, put herself out there by lettin’ you know she like you first, she walk you to her hood, then she proposition your ass basically drawin’ a yellow-brick road to her vagina and you, my friend, fucked it up by tryin’ to be a gentleman. You gots to ask yourself, is this girl a gentleman kind of bitch? Is gentleman her speed? And she might be a fine-ass rich bitch and she still need it right up front, right on the point. In fact them rich bitches be needin’ that shit all the more promptly ‘cause they don’t got all the hangups that poor bitches has, and half the attitude. I still think of that girl and my poor self walking back home down the hill, wandering the parking lots drunk looking for my best friend. Should have at least fucked her best friend. Instead, then I was fast, as a kid, and now I am slow, as a man. Different people, different drugs, but still I am like an animal stuck inside the womb of another species, vagina is an invitation to terror as much as a joy and both the terror and the joy are blunted by the symptoms of age. Even the existence of drugs is a terror to me. I loved the escape at an earlier age, now if I go left it is terror, if I go right it is terror, no more joy in escaping, mystery elusive state the practice of dreams, waiting around to die, slow speed, until it happens then terror! Fast speed! Every phone call is a nuisance, I never answer my texts. I think I’m a grandfather now, kids on my knees I don’t even know their names, only drink beer ‘cause I don’t like it, that way I won’t drink too much. Did speed now? I wouldn’t enjoy it. The high is old news, you get used to it, you’re chasing something that’s no longer there, maybe running, if you ran, would be running from something that’s no longer there as well. My only joy now is waking up first, walking in the grass with my sweats rolled up and hairy toes caught in the dew. Right? The kids carry news apps and ride their anger at processes, processes and politics they can never touch. For me it’s just a golf game I can play with one finger. I play one hole a month. It’s all the excitement I can hand anymore. Not chasing Idas, not fucking their best friends, not drinking with best friends, not driving or sitting in bars or taking trips to the rich neighborhoods. I know they will always be them and I will always be me, and I don’t even want to tempt my mind with that difference anymore. What is the difference between the rat that won second place and my beautiful black ass? Why don’t American blacks understand that being black in America is different than being black in the UK? White lines excite my mind, a gate at the end of our block, one side is black, poor, crack houses and shit. The other side is hippie whites addicted to home improvement, putting in skylights and shit. Not much difference, we’re all poor in congress’ eyes, but white people be doing community development and investing in homeownership, the best these blacks can do is rent a $50 apartment and spend every Saturday morning refurbishing a Nissan Sentra in front of they house, be out there polishin’ that shit like it was a Lamborghini and shit. Black people buyin’ steaks with they food card smokin’ crack with they cash. Thinkin’ crack was invented by the CIA. Fool, crack was invented by a motherfucker blacker than me, niggas gettin’ high at any cost, we be smokin’ foil just a torch lighter and crinkle silver givin’ ourselves cancer and shit. Government don’t have to introduce this shit to kill us, we be killin’ ourselves. Droppin’ babies off in dumpsters, mothers goin’ to jail for killin’ they kids when they ain’t got enough bank to be havin’ babies in the first place. I drop the speed. Put my nigga ass in high gear jumpin’ like a mo’fo’en gazelle in the nigger Olympics. It’s held every day at 4pm outside the school on the only track I can make a difference, Tartan dildos vibrating the shemale populace. Stanley Tucci can be our announcer. Rumpelstiltskin can be our hog, frog, super dog who wasn’t even elected to the highest office, they took your rights and, you know, whoever is willing to cheat will always win. Scruples motherfuckers don’t even care along those lines, they don’t wait for power, they just do what’s right from the very beginning. I be readin’ Dąbrowski and shit you don’t even know who that is that’s how black I am that’s how young I am that’s how smart I am that’s how fast I take it off the block. When you open the box you see the pepper shaker ebony and shit and you be like this ain’t right, this contains the salt of the earth and I be like surprise motherfucker! Jumps from the flash into tha firecracker. Be givin’ ya heartburn from red pepper flakes cook it up like this was reality TV. You didn’t know niggas was hidin’ under the White House? We strapped wearin’ black Nikes and holdin’ gats you never seen a trans commando special forces hood nigga comin’ at you like a pack of rats, young Prince, there’s a keyboard in the air right when I cross the finish line coupla chords struck by the cord between my legs your girl grabs your knee and you know for that instant she wants me to give her the pleasure. It rubs the lotion on its skin, or else it gets the hose again. Your bitch has to tour fuck a nigga like me but I live in a basement full of rats from Suriname bunch of 12-year-old girl gamers running black ops into Thailand every day of the goddamn week. You be fuckin’ these bitches they holdin’ game packs in front of they face not even twitch when you push they panties to the side and stick it in. Do you know that’s how we get ahead? Kids be playin’ games while we nigger fuck them and they moves be fed into some WarGames megacomp, they moves be powerin’ the robots in tha War! If you capitalize Internet, you better capitalize War. Bunch of spelling faggots. You need to ask yourself what would Noam Chomsky do. I ask myself, imagine Chomsky and Jesus as gay lovers, neither one cis, and if you can peek inside that bedroom, what would you see. Then model your entire life on those strokes. Are you a fucking uncle? Then model your life on your fucking uncle and don’t worry, it’s you on the spaceship trying to outrun an explosion and in the flicks the ship always escapes bowling through a burst of fire saving the day and everyone lives the heroes anyway if you save the day you always live and the 10th placers never even make the news. That is speed. This is my essay, read aloud by the brain, the basket case, the princess, and the criminal. We are always and forever, prisoners of the broken school, taking our time in the hallways ‘cause there’s nothing going on in class, speeches where mouths move but no words come out. Campaigns of every tactic flat as rock passed between two deaf brothers reverse cremated in the halls of a building inblown the windows the floors glass marble crack every locker with sentiment stashed on the top shelf, every combination set to the same six numbers fucking hooker pants crumpled to the walls with duct tape cum stains in the corners of they eyes scratching it out and a nine-inch fuse comin’ out your ass like a tail. Repartee from birth napalm in an instant. Zoomies in the morning feline psychopathy we need to get these cats into therapy and when you come to my ass you better bring your A game use every trick in the book ‘cause I read them all and if your therapist be a woman better dry those panties out ‘fore every session Macon I eat counselors for breakfast. So that’s it. We keepin’ it on point. Next I introduce you to the basket of a case, the case of baskets. Remind you, I am the most disintegrated of those who claim to be disintegrated but do you ever write lines in your journal just so that people will read them? I do.
My basket case is a little bit slower, she’s not Baby Animal from the Muppet Babies she’s more like a girl with uncommonly colored hair sitting on a bench between trips to the hospital. She is me. She would rather sit and listen to the leaves, hug trees and lick bark because they’re all safer to talk to than a human. Humans, to me, are the problem. At least humans are my problem. They don’t make sense to me, I don’t make sense to them, when we encounter it’s disaster, frog leaping on the surface of a pond is much more my mom, much much more my mom than the woman in the flesh. One of the worst days of my life, she was trying to make me say I had given up, like she didn’t approve of my life and needed to get me to testify in her favor, that I was young and ruined and I had to admit it to her to get off the stand. What does she get out of that, beating me down, like a hammer and a tall nail, meditating on your own failure by forcing the failure of your kids. I’ll always misunderstand that day and never forget it, be with me as part of my mental self-torture kit as long as I sit on this bench, on this planet, in this sky, among these stars, as a little bit of breathing clay. And I think about parenting lots, and it’s something I don’t think I’ll do. Most of you kids will have babies on accident, just because you like fucking and you don’t plan ahead. That’s nature’s plan. You’re just a puppet, a Muppet, someone with a hand up your spine that’s your nature and you don’t understand it and you will never master it and your lack of thought in that direction is why you have time to laugh at the inconsequential, play sports, cut your hair like Keira Knightley and give interviews on subjects you know nothing about. Why do you think they name the actors instead of the writers? The actors look good on camera. That’s the whole reason to do anything these days, because it looks good on camera. If it ain’t pretty or a goofy goofy prank it’ll never make it to your mind. You want to know something of my internal world? It ain’t disordered. It ain’t ugly. You only think I’m crazy ‘cause I think more than you, I feel more than you, I go the edges while you stay at the center. If you think you judge me, think how much more I must judge you. You just think you are the same. The same as everyone, and that’s your lifelong pass to be thoughtless, careless, it’s ok, the majority does it! Like a school of fish, gathering for safety, some have to be at the edges and they can see into the sea while those in the middle, almost all the fish in the school, can only see other fish around them. They’re in the bubble, news tailored for them so they only get presented with stories they’d like, they never see the outside world and hardly know they’re in the ocean. I can cry over eecummings for an hour, nape the neck of a swan in bedtime fisheries, crown the egret her princesshood, swim in spaceflight of a satellite life, and life, and life, my hair floating in underwater pools, vines and twisted knots cut by golden scissors to mark my passage into freakdom. But wait. Between us there is no pattern, no laser-LED projections winding us together like fishing wire. Snap my mouth shut so that I never say what offends you, what embarrasses me, what shows me to be so so ignorant of the subjects I claim to crown. But no! Bubbles twist their way from purple lips and cracks they come at me, ruins of Rome running to the back! To the spine! To ecstasy on my footheels! Keep hospital bracelets like some keep tickets to the amusement park. They’re my rite of passage like your first rollercoaster, first argument, first fuck. You think my life is empty not because you have some piercing insight into the basket case, but due to your lack of understanding of what I go through, and also, ‘cause I choose not to tell you. A bomb exploding inside this concussion pool that’s what you can never follow the rabbit hole inside you! A statement is a question to its opposite, to all its counterparts, you ask of me what you cannot even ask of yourself. Am I crazy? Is she? Only the boldest, bravest, will ever look in the mirror and not look away. How can you last? One second? Two sessions? Insight may be a mess. Well, I am the queen of insight. Found out that the darkest crayon in the box is me. Live with that. But I am clarion, reversing beams of light, finding the edge, going past it, and here’s the trick, coming back. You find that correctness within you by combing the dark hairs, loving the shadow, staring into the abyss but never forgetting this is what you asked for, when you took that single step into the desert, did you think it was going to easier, that people were going to like you more? You’re leaving that shoal and going going going toward the edge, there the glimpse of what has never been before you, the bright and blue and unforgiving ocean. This is what you see if you look below me, under the black hair and paint-rimmed sockets, in deep pockets filled with Burger King toys. Under my buckles, inner by boots, I wear long johns covering my hair and my nut and my mound which is worthless to the typicals roaming my school. Class for class of cliques who will hate each other in the morning, IDs that in short years will have zeroes for the birthdates and cartoon Krusties where the face should be. See, I’m a basket case in some sense that no longer exists, in a sense that is no longer allowed to exist. Sort of like an eccentric heiress who’s allowed to be crazy who’s allowed to be silent to write poetry her whole life for an audience of one. Sort of like how we expect Ophelia to go mad, she has to, how could she not go mad. Femininity is mad, it is mad at its core, to those who write the books. We exist to counter your supposed logic, your supposed leadership, your supposed staid. And in the end I really do slit my wrists, I really do hang myself in a closet, I really do stick my head in the oven. And then those parlor conversations where you’re not supposed to ask how she did it but that’s the one piece of wake gossip everyone wants to know. I find myself in possession of, I’m shocked to say it, but some type of morality. Even though my professional peers think I cross the line, like the guru who studies the science of bad language, I wake you up by pissing in your mug but something keeps me from lying about you behind your back and that’s what I’m talking about a kind of loyalty to a principle you carry with you all your days. You lack that. You hate me for it. It means I’m not on your side, won’t ever have your back as a friend, that I stand with reason and that is all you fear the most in this unruly world. I am the opposite of a politician. I fold at the first hand, admit defeat, I live in defeat. I can’t abide an untrue word. That is the recipe for loneliness, stand for something. Be on the side of something that doesn’t have a heartbeat. Become more than just a man in the mind of your opponent. Batman. You know what makes you stick in people’s minds? They’re scared as shit of you. You go, you don’t have to go very far, you go farther than they would. You take it there. Veer off the road just one tire over the line and most of the world will be unable to follow. Pinprick. Red. A molly din and a molly dine. You know why the caged bird sings? Well let me tell you this, we’re all caged birds today. All. From coast to coast. The price of individuality is death. Repeat after me. The price of individuality is death. Repeat, refrain. Breathe in and out. Again. Breathe in contentment. Breathe out resentment. So I pack my books and I pack my notebook, a leather journal where I write my thoughts. Do you know what I like about a person? Deep but simple. Complex but simple. Complicated, but simple. It’s a hard life but a simple life. That’s why it’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, you know? Forget it. Meditate on a mole, that’s what I say. I have a heart-shaped mole, completely red, and I look upon it as a meditation, allow it to be my return place, even when I can’t see it I can see it, it is with me always, a place and a thought I can return to. Carry it with me always. I guess when you think I’m hiding behind my hair it could be said I’m really meditating, perhaps not a basket at all, not a case. I curtain you out, dear world, you’re no good for me. You cause me all kinds of disturbance so in order not to be a basket case I employ filters, maybe red glasses or a little fear to keep you at bay. That’s what I say. You wanna know about my parents? You wanna call my teachers? They’re as normal as a fly. Dad’s a pediatrician, Mom’s a stay-at-home alcoholic, full-time fucking nut. I don’t touch the stuff. My psycho is all in the DNA. Only possible career path is become Se7en’s John Doe or work in a factory. Minimal contact with people. The latter exceeds minimum wage, the former is pro bono, you need an independent source of funds. My life was in a haze, at the time of this interview, I was crowding it out with safety pins and India ink, marching up my arm, scab by scab, duly noted in the psychiatric files. And I’m in a plane, and I’m a girl, and it’s before I came to understand the bubble that we’re in. And I press my face against the window, unbreakable plastic designed to keep me in my seat not flying out like pigtail superhero I was one when I wore red, yellow, and blue as a child of four. Could fly every direction even the top of my room I see myself above and they’re doing surgery, beep, beep, to my stomach where the weevils is I was invaded as a youth and there they left them to kill me from inside my decomposing brain. Start scratching, can’t stop. Simple chemical infection biologicals everywhere catchphrases virus themselves inside my mind. Jumping off the swimming pool the diving board I go, one leg, up up up! And never come down. Never land. Never see the world again. Stuck in a world of almost-super powers, not quite super enough to maintain me, but enough to keep me floating if I work it hard enough. Pedaling with ice cube wings, fish scales, am I avian? Wingspan. Nautical. Can stay adrift in the air for two years without stopping. And when I fly, I make up my own world. You’re all, to me, underwater. I am unmatched and unmated. None will ever keep my company, just fly fly fly, around the world in a day. Maybe I’m a super-secret spy. Maybe I’m the eminent female poet and no one knows me till I’m dead. I cut off the blood to my brain last night. Just a practice exercise. Squeeze my neck with a belt locking it off at tighter and tighter grooves. Test it. Go all the way to the edge of blackness, a certain rest waiting. I know I wouldn’t be there to experience it, but still that be a kind of calm, a kind of quiet I seek. The noise inside my head, that’s your gateway drug, pounding and pounding me between ears in the connection of hands inside my legs it is always hot it will never ever be not hot until I die. I’ve heard the boys say that pussy has no face yet I think in my case they’d make an exception. I’m a real brown bagger. Not even a sex object. Not even an object of desire. Lust after me. They say crazies are the best in bed and I’d like to see if that is true. Lift my tail and taste the skunk perfume. I am striped like Pepé Le Pew. My secondary sex characteristics are visible. I am ready, world. World, I am ready. I am plumed. My mating song is subtle but present. I may not have it all together but isn’t the sum worth more than the parts? But I hate, push pull, bringing you into focus and then shattering you. There is a lens, scanning darkly, and somewhere a cheerleader’s panty line has been sewn shut with a secret society action cam, no less to mark me with Clinique Happy, sub me, and send me on my way to a secret jail in the subatlantic. Bright bright walls of neanderthalic light, rows of chicken cages bearing eggs in the rostrum of a five-point turn. Hero actress who admits she’s gay. I think for this one it’s a career move. I masturbated to a monkey. I masturbated to a mailbox. Will they make my whole life illegal just to say it’s weird to them? You know that’s the crime, right? The real crime? It’s not wearing skirts when everyone wears skirts. It’s expressing as feminine when the meatheads are masculine. It’s being different, that is the true crime. It’s walking in the rain when everyone else is carrying an umbrella. I just know, know, that when I die my ghost will be dancing in the rain. And you won’t see the salty water, dripping off my frame. I’m auditioning for the superfame module, how am I doing? Will this performance get me on the final stage, the final rose? I’m here for the right reasons, I swear, there is no one here for righter reasons than me. Like a Cheshire Cat, erasing myself in treetops, snob of the interaction, censor of conversation, err of invocation, halle-fucking-joy. Press my bloody buttons. I’m human for 28 days out of the year. Semiotic for the rest. It costs 25 cents to mail me to Dubai. Which might as well be Indianapolis. Spank me for falling into bad habits. I forgot to mew when trafficked. I am a kitty kitty kitty for scumbags to rape in backs of vans terrific outlook for a little girl. Even my brown-bag pussy will fetch a few points. The height of my life is as a posthumous sketch on American Crime. Last looks in the photo book of my maker this one taken right before my murder black rings around eyes and the pleading, defensive wounds of hands, holding you away. Try not to kill me too soon, I have a test today. When you rape me, touch me well. I want to have my first clitoral orgasm before I die. During my death, preferably. And let me cut you up and eat your blood. Film it, then blow up the GMC. Rock me over the side, Inception style. Share a dream with me, of sickness and fame. Share this moment with you, our 10 seconds of fame. We’re like B&C 17.0. Some hollow playground. We all smoke pot and read Heinlein we just do it atop the merry-go-round. And a sweep-head singer reaches the vortex with her throat, electric chords in a dust devil, temperatures reaching hotter than the sun. On an excavation with the bear man, he plucked a ravenous poison from its perch behind a small Jurassic boulder, ate the nape of its neck with European jaws stripped it and broke its meat in the Australian sun. How I long to be like that, in terminology and everything, every other way forward along a long dark road in the criminal outback of my own continent. Sharpshooters taking out Arizona motorists there really is no law out here except the sun. Some Rasta man traversing the desert on a 10 speed. He stopped sweating long ago, stopped needing drink, freed himself from at least some the devils of the flesh. We drive past him in our future life, me and my lover, both flowing hair, and I know when we passed him we both wanted to be with him instead of each other. Rasta man, cycling up the ramp, deep-cut road cutting red rock plates and then into the driest land you could never live in, this is what we gave the natives and some Rasta on a road bike owns us in a new formulation of guilt. I dress in black and blackness will have its day, rightly rule, denigrate the thousand-dollar remnants of southern Manhattan, I read Wikipedia from the top of the towers, there be like fruitcake academics gatekeepin’ that shit to make sure it don’t live up to its original purpose. PhD just means that you’ll get credit for the work you steal from others, while some of us have theories cut into our arms, we bleed philosophies at night and get arrested, maximum minimums imposed on a simple dreamer. You’re my cat and I figure on encountering you at least a few times on my long way home. A little bomb and you don’t why. I don’t know if it’s chaotic thinking or just imagination, but there is a picture of me, two years old, standing in a clothes basket with mmm hands on the sides, trying so hard to pick the basket up with me in it, and it took me a while to figure out why it wasn’t working. I’m a little psycho still. But I am not a basket case. And you are not a brain, not athlete, not princess, not criminal. That’s just what the world calls us, what we are in their minds. A cat is not a cat to a cat, only to us, the namers of things. I can’t bring myself to and I can’t bring myself not to. Do you know what I mean? My puzzle is wrapped tight, ready for you to stir a pocket of honey. Leftover pizza. I eat it cold. On the floor. Kitty #1 and Kitty #2 sniff my arm and they can tell the story of where I’ve been by the collection on my skin. I am writing everything I think in a series of leather journals and when I come is when I come florid music grass petals dust and natural sugar. Blameless child who I sacrifice, knowing she would have grown up to be me and I cannot allow this. If I could go back in time I would stop myself from going back in time. Plant myself a pizza farm and stuff my face one last time before I fucked the space-time continuum. No more pizza for anyone. Give myself the I Love You mug just to show me that I love myself, even when it isn’t true. Must write cards to self, leave little notes around, my own writing staring me in the heart and hoping somehow I’ll believe it. I’m my own lover, my own brain, my own athlete, my own basket, my own princess, my own criminal. I have to work double time since everyone else is working half time. When I take a shower, I try to wash the black off me. Maybe my hand slips between my legs and I touch beneath the hair, love myself for a few minutes then resume my costume, covered with pockets and belts, sort of a scaled-down Michael Jackson, and like him I’m the greatest performer alive. When you feed cats tuna, do they come? I like their sticky spiky tongues, almost too much for this world, some wood-paneled room off a church sanctuary I was forced as a child, Bindy, some girl named Bulinda, she and I kissed in the moment that presented itself, lighting up practicals hanging over the chair. Then we were one, in the Biblical sense, she grabbed me and I wasn’t ready but there’s maybe a jump-start element to these experiences generally, it’s not quite abuse and it’s not quite consent, but you’re there, and it happens, and you come into the new world, come into adulthood one photograph one hickey and one bruise at a time. Reverse birth me. Take me out of the world, back through my momma’s baby box. Every time we go hunting on my period I have to watch for bears. Rednecks scream out of their cars when I walk by. Kids throw eggs. If you’ve never been hit with an egg, you don’t deserve to throw one. Like you should have to be raped before you can rape someone, and after that, I say go for it. To me, colors are philosophies. Each color has a world of thought within it. If you get a few together you’re a masterpiece. I am an imperfect statement of everything my princess wants to say. When she speaks, my words come out. When she bathes, it’s my body she touches. I feel me, I feel her. If I was to write a sentence it would take, 900, years. Stone-cold etching in a national mountain. Monument cemetery fountain. When I am witnessed it makes me less of me, seen through a fade, others gaining a pinprick obsession, mini blinds, my sense of well being slipping from me hour by hour, stripped to a bizarre human shell nothing more than bones and chromosomes, no teddy bear spirit, no love from a dog, I’m just a body in a chair, all who likes me and who hates me, memorizing some dull knowledge collected by a fool, nothing here but copying culture from the old to the young, and they have power to keep us in a building all day to convince us what to believe! Culture itself is slavery. You know why one becomes a basket case? To get away from the crazy people. What I am, what I act, it’s not because I’m crazy. It’s because you are. This is my protection, an evolutionary suit to keep the danger of others’ insanity at bay. For without my suit, I would not survive. I would be accessible to those who are crazy within but wear the normal suit. You can always tell the truly insane, for they are willing to conform, to wear and think with the majority, for it is the easiest path. But when, when, when has the easiest path been the one that’s preferable in the long run? Not to get all Robert Frost on ya’, but holy hell. You’re gonna punish us for not learning properly when you don’t even know the subjects you’re teaching? We all do it, hand in papers written by the greats instead of our own and you don’t know it! You give us failing grades when we copy the text of Nobels and Pulitzers in your fucking face. If you ever had a genius pass through your doors you would expel her, berate her, punish her for thinking. We do what we do in spite of you, oh great imitations of teachers. There hasn’t been a Socrates in a thousand years. And it ain’t gonna be your ass. Taste my meaning, take my texture, rub me like sand. In fingerprints, write my swirls and curls in grains who will be known for insignificant levels, mineral love, the causation of a gypsy. Learning that she came from crime that supersedes her professional education, negates her degree, everything she was taught to know. Cat lying with paws around as stabilizers. You hide in your accolades, excuse for never doing another thing in your life. What is past, is past. What is here is like a five-minute hamburger, warm for an instant then useless even to the hungry, dead in a dumpster, digital timers running out on fries left too long in oil, the new recipe can’t even hold me I’ll down a coffee milkshake in the course of sixty seconds life isn’t judged on a gradient it’s more like there’s good enough and not good enough ask the brain it’s all binary. Telescopes that I see through the opposite end and it makes my world look far, far away. Some childlike princess, you have to be humble when you’re a cat people can pick you up and take you with them to the bathroom just so you don’t knock over their cups. And you accept this as love, and you sneak on your hinds to get closer and closer to the cups. You’re just curious. But every spanking hand is love. Everything is love. It’s the same way to a child. I experienced love through the hands of my father, seven horny brothers and a drunk-ass dad. Put the cat on the rack, stretched her back till she was screaming the sound of ultimate suffering. Announcing her own heat death, some mid-sized black hole which isn’t really black I’ll eat you out of house and home rice cakes and peanut butter forever motherfucker. We were all raised that way, with a rape-thin spork in one hand and a single chopstick in the other, trying to devour a steak. I will ignore myself for the rest of my life. Blind dancer. Isn’t the sensation too great for proper introductions? Mate me to the water fountain cooler, we’ll be dancing the cha-cha in the corner by the elevator. Cold ice only, please, I am using this to cover my bruises. And when you take me, take me in with the blood and the veins and the circles behind my eyes. You will not find a more willing victim in all the world. I am the only one who will help you, and I am the only one you will hurt. Push me through a tiny hole the size of a Bic. Mash me cake icing spelling out what you say in my ear when you cum. Why do you think I’m a basket case? Some predestined drone composed of a foreign alphabet I memorize in my sleep? I’m a reflection of you. It’s like a puzzle with one piece missing. I am that piece and I am only that piece because it is the last empty space with that particular shape formed by the everyone around it. So you see. I’m only here to fill in what was left blank by everyone else. It’s true of you and true of you and true and true and true. The best ones end up in mental hospitals. They’re the weight bearers. They say they’re moving to Seattle and they get arrested but it isn’t long before the police say, This one is crazy, and hole you up in the ambulance with the long sleeves transported securely to a medicine shack before they die. And when they see you again they say they spent time in a mental hospital in Washington but you have no way to understand this and you figure it was the drugs. Or they drank too much and it fucked up their brain. Sadly, no. My friend Marcus did this and when he came back everyone looked him up and down and shook their heads and figured him for a drug addict drunk stoner fool who was also gay or maybe bi and they figured he had been that way since birth. But I looked him in the eyes and I knew it wasn’t that simple. A lot of people get into rough spots and don’t try to kill themselves. And maybe we could give a little help to those who destroy themselves for the rest of us. Marcus knew. I knew when I looked at him. You know when you look at me. Everyone takes the weight upon them that they can carry. It’s just that some of us are carrying families, clans, and countries in a North Face backpack and it’s a little slower going when you have that kind of weight. You’re taking a trip to Starbucks. I’m summiting K2. You think you can regulate me. But you can’t regulate a looser! I have nothing you can take away! You can’t cause me any pain that I don’t send myself a billion times! The tortures you might develop are nothing compared to the tortures I carry inside my head! So, you see, you and I are not situated at the same type of bargaining table. The worst thing you can offer me is death. I would kill myself instead. I am permanently lost. Here, there, inside, outside. Wanting to be raped then killed. It’s funny to you, I guess, that I am seen crazy and you mainstream. Us on the outs are unrelatable, a joke to you, something to be feared that you might become, a fable against your children’s hopes but mainstream kills. Your barbecue list is the life rolls of society, the lifespan of prom queens is greater than the lifespan of those they ditch in the hallway, did you know that? It’s actually killing us, actually killing some of us, to walk a different path. I’m a cat who spends her days perched at the top of a bookshelf so I can look down on the whole world and from up here I don’t even miss the zoomies trade for the safety of nobody else can get up here. I scratch my neck to death, built on pockets of fleas, bumpy where I should be smooth. Call John Travolta on the internet ’cause he’s my chosen hero for the 90s, smack dab in the middle of a cutie pie. You might have seen me in a few movies, I played this part and that part, but I’m one of those kids who started out in films and became a greeter at Urban Outfitters, even Hollywood didn’t want me, use me, lose me, it’s just the name of the game but from my perspective at the top of the shelf I can see stars moved like checkers on a board. Some people, their only ambition is to buy a house in the white supremacist part of town, and that’s what they do, take a bucket of spunk and wash it between their legs, become a cabinet alcoholic like their mom. And from up here I have to admit, 12,000 times a day, that everything is tipsy. All topsy like my mom, sitting in the kitchen with Good Housekeeping and a case of beer. It was Michelob in case you were wondering. Winnie is a mathematician, Lucy is a painter, and I’m one of the ones who became nothing. Working in the sock department. Chewing my nails like raw corn, cooked just enough to be tasty. A theory can be proven by experiment but no path leads from experiment to the birth of a theory. Einstein said that. I think it follows that you can never guarantee success by choosing a set of actions. There’s no formula for Charlie Sheen. Winning. If I get any more theoretical I’ll have to jump off this perch and slit your throat like a dragon. Don’t believe in dragons? That’s no reason one can’t slit your throat. Filet my tiger lily. Pump me like gas. I’ll hold your glance when you stick it in and give you the power you want. I can’t believe it’s so good, your cock is amazing, etcetera. Buy me a house in the desert I’ll take off all this black. Outmoded. Shit. Like Batman. I want to be a critic, not of certain things, but a critic of everything, sit in the balcony and crack my head off at how stupid you all are. No one even read my plans for a nuclear submarine. Tried to read my mind with monkey brainwaves. Turned out every face was an exact match and that might not surprise you over there in the future but in 2017 it was quite a shock. We didn’t even need straws for our drinks, we had antigravity lips. I don’t even need a forklift, for you have an antigravity dick. Keep my creeps and crawls on whisper volume, for my antigravity schtick. I guess what I’m saying is you can call me a basket case, but the joke is on you, kemosabe, I’m the key to your future locked up in a mental institution, that’s where they keep the inventor of antigravity too. Transactional world. You do one thing for me, I do one thing for you, that’s it, no relationship, no history, no future, no commitment, you have to have noticed this, no? Ask the brain, he knows, it’s a post-human world, we’re just the underlings to a creature set that doesn’t have a name. It’s hard to see them so you squint your eyes. They’ll come at you from the edges, touching you in the dark like The Invisible Man, fucking H. G. Wells creeping. Total forfeiture of shares. No money! We make the great mark on ourselves, then retire to make shit because we can’t stop. I figure if I never get started that the pattern can’t escape me, if I never make it I can never lose it. I’m the girl who never opens her mouth because I’m afraid a loose yellow canary will come out, geriatric mothballs, Eminem jerking with a bottle of Jergens, after-school special, WarGames, Broderick, and me. So I’m back in the bait box, meat market, rubbed a couple of straws together to make a fire. Just enough to keep me warm in the hallway tundra. Desolate for air I breathe through a contraption of PVC and rubber cement that reaches up, up, up through the container class onto the creatures living across you and me we’re like a Petri dish bacteria and small mosses the same as if you look at a porch plank a block of wood will have these small gray blobs it’s not just weather coloring it’s a life form living on top of us if you know how to read. And if you don’t, it’s ok my life is an open book. You can come back later to figure out what the fuck you didn’t understand. That’s life. I’ve got mine and you’ve got yours. Everyone has a different set of groceries in the fridge. Let’s have a picnic! Ride our bikes to the store and get sushi and ice cream, eat it in the cemetery by decomposing bodies from the 1600s, pour out a little apple juice to my dead homies. They didn’t even know they were homies! But this picnic, which we see from the sky, will be our greatest mark on future incarnations of us. They had drones flying and caught us on camera yours mine and our meeting of the artistic mind from future fiddles and a camera designed by a me you would never understand, took us back and forth in time sprinkling our cellular like a salt shaker if you even believe in skies of blindness caught by a photographer who could never see. If I need to refer back to you, I’ll use my handy dandy little time traveler no bigger than a pack of cards and powered by a beetle species having yet to be invented.
I will tell you that the princess is about facing mortality and you won’t believe me. I will tell you that the princess is about blood and you will not believe me. I will tell you all these things and even though you journey with me from the outside, even though I invite you to journey with me from the inside, the princess will still be as mystical to you as a spaceship to an ant. I wasn’t born a princess. I was made one through years of systematic abuse. The blood in my eyes has pooled from watching, Clockwork style, the executions of a thousand longing kittens who had come to the house in the woods for protection, but they found only a mother who loved rabbit stew. So it is a type of fairy tale, but not one with a happy ending. In this tale the killer doesn’t leave one person alive to tell the story of Mickey and Mallory Knox. We don’t even need a camera, your brain is on tap. From skies above, the brainwaves of your unborn child feed into Thinking Machines supercomputers which I keep in the soft pocket of my panties to keep my cunt warm. I met a girl once who had sex with trees. For me it’s only the circuitry of the brain that keeps me warm at night, never trolling fisheries of a southerly whale, but bright pockets of Langley mimicking my security with an acid wash that can kill one-trillion sperm at a time. Then it targets trout. Then mice. Then chemical weapons known as pheromones, sniffing you out through the light box of a crash-safety testing suite designed by Mickey Mouse, the Power Rangers, and the angriest bird from Angry Birds. I have an impressive collection of my own genitals which is illegal. My flute trumpets up like a proud cobra. Cobras play the oboe. Night watch plays the trumpet with a silencer. If you sit around the barber shop you’re bound to get a haircut. I will express to you, in as simple words as possible, how my blood came to contain the DNA contaminant known as Hex-8 Mononuclide BitchFucker. When we are done, you will know how to assemble a six-legged octopus with the chess-playing ability of Bobby Fischer, from household items. It requires popsicle sticks if you were wondering. When I mistook you for a Band-Aid. When I found you hiding under the kitchen sink tapping a bottle of MSG onto the back of your hand and snorting it like coke. When there is a heightening of feeling between you it can always be blamed on MSG, that sad addict moment where you looked so cute and I say, how can they say that Bobby Fischer’s life was a sad one? As if there was some potential life where you could be a chess champion and a well-adjusted man. It is the life of the well-adjusted man which is the sad one. You know me as a princess. Don’t you also know that princesses have their vices? Can you imagine Marilyn Monroe without the drugs? And yet my aunt and uncle lie in their bed watching TV, that’s how they spend their life, and they think that their lives are less sad than Marilyn Monroe’s. I guess to most people they think that having a flatline of a life is preferable to one with a pulse, like it’s somehow winning to escape without a scratch, even if you gambled away every lifebreath you could have taken. To me, a life lived watching TV is a tragedy. I spin through cemetery valleys with only caterpillar larva, my ghost, my mask, dendrites in the air, we are not rootless we just move very very fast, changing stances to stay alive in a fast-motion earthquake of sound, light, the smell of spores, childhood’s adventure, blueberry syrup, cakes of all sizes, pistachio icing, and a duck bill necklace blessed by every Disney icon in succession arranged by height and tossed respective of how much each one loves tater tots. When I make mashed potatoes, I stir them with my feet. You can draw your own conclusions. Murder me like you murdered my mother! I’m actually the valedictorian of my class, look no further, it’s not the pimply boy who they call the brain. I have a future, no offense brain. I will make one movie after graduating at the top and that one movie, even though Natalie Portman will make many movies, that one movie I make will reach a height that none of hers ever will. So I am your Bobby Fischer. I am your Marilyn Monroe. I am the great upside with the great downside. Nothing even ‘bout us bunnies. But it seems the roots are deeper than the tree. Or same as. Even J-Law might be one of us, the highest-paid actor and she’s throwing up on Madonna’s stairs. Fucking Miley Cyrus tells her to get her shit together. You know it’s bad. But we have time. I have six-thousand more words to spend and when I am through, I will have brought you to the soft place in my panties, through a Wimbledon super dome, across the plains of Kansas, the canyon lands of Utah, through a historical novel I read portions of at night to spice up the love life of someone who rarely dates, almost never kisses, and might fall into trees if another boy gives me the dirtiest head. I don’t fuck boys. I fuck men. That’s what they all say. But hear me, sister, they’re all boys. The boys are boys. The girls are boys. The men are boys. I don’t fuck women because that would be like fucking my mother. Can I introduce you to a candy cigarette? It’s baby pink with white smoke coming out the tip. You would mistake me for a Care Bear if you saw me pruning on a Saturday night. White this, white that, pink here and there, even in my boom! Enter the flute. A puffy cloud and a room lacking intervention from the ones I used to pray to in the sky. They have all joined hands in a spidercake river where gods and snakes and girls like me talk at ever the same volume and frequency. Imagine what we sing? Something like the sound of a baby grand dragging its feet across ancient wooden stakes, germ of vampiric tremolo. Curtains of sustenance. Rivers of falling glass. A metronome of strings! And every time I roll up my socks, choirs of children call me through the orchestra, vines grow up from the pit, circling around violinists’ feet and thighs and ankles, growing us all in reverse back through the dirt and pulling our elements out of us to join the dates of discovery to back before this culture had taken over the surface of the pond, to wooden ships and maiden’s hips, back to the protobromine axial synthespectriarc rotoscrew. I have a cousin who lives in Ohio. Her house is across the street from her dad’s and she is a math professor with a coke problem and she has a baby which would make her what to me? Exit the flute. In my life, every scene is lit from above on a grid like in the theatre, directed by a genius with red hair, conducted by Dudamel and composed by Philip Glass, each note sparked with a Bic lit underneath exactly at the time of light, lightness, lightfulness, charge. Cowardice, contrariness, control. Kleptomania serves life, serves float, serves boat, serves shark bait in between, serves drowning, serves copulation, serves master, serves mistress, serves ma’am. She is floating face up with bodies never do and the largest vulture I have seen in my life uses her corpse as a raft, carrying with it the tomes of every giant who ever put a nib in the bottle. We were not perfect. You sat with me and LC in a raft mentioned in the ‘Ventures licking my pooch through silk, pink, lovely lovely tongue and I spill’d ink of the blackest variety all over the boat! It was thickness, greatness, wetness, bloch! Take me to the largest O as I write poems to be sprinkled in the ground after the zombies have eaten all our brains! Fuck! O fuckmaster, fucknugget, bracelet is better! Kin me with a sword to one shoulder then the other! Write me into the will of queens! Make every decision with no erasure and fill every page with notes finished like no notes are ever finished! Wrap me in your stars, each star being one letter, one drop, one pint of blood. Superbaby swaddled in Cobain’s womb, I tear you shredding, Mexican chicken, darling of the undergrowth, blinding me as ET lands, the extra terrestrial lights of the navigator fell backwards into a ravine time traveled to just before I started this chapter who is queen? No, I’m asking you, who is queen? Queen of Narnia, queen of the headboard, queen of the muffyn, queen of my sweet sweet hole. It’s not a trick. The answer is right before you. Hold this page! Hold a fine note singing! Hold me before music disappears! Hold me to the drain as London Bridge is falling! Falling falling down! Melody begat mischief, mischief begat loneliness, loneliness begat wonder! Wonder begat the sublime. Sublimity begat the holiness of trees. The trees begat the insects. The insects begat the playground. The playground begat fun time. Fun time begat the nakedness in room 237. 237 begat 238. 238 begat 236. All masturbation and no fucking makes the princess a dull, dull girl. The complexity of beings who would go to the moon, who care deeply what their children are named. Did you know when the compiler comes through and works on a program, the names disappear? The brain told me that. Our precious names become the shortest possible representation and names too long collide! Only the first few letters come out. When will I matter? When my Melancholia collides in space with the deepest representations of dread? A few seconds before? An instant after you cum? Tried lesbian criminal acrobatics with a case of baskets in that winter hot tub with Mary’s steam jizzing from a fountain of love. The whole game was pressing your fingers toes into the lovely across from you even when they were sitting next to their boyfriend, all touched all, chemo played out in a dulcimer, the land of Tír na nÓg bellowed from below the Titanic, hopes deployed, ancients contacted in a thousand rubber hearts, my man Denton coming to the rescue, tiny rubber duck, rubber ducky, rubber duck says Bert and Ernie who paved the way for my princesshood in a way no Muppeteer could have seen ahead. We were raised on icons, icons of panties, icon of angora sweaters, icon of Madonna. Icon of cunt. Icon of dick. Icon of a cock fucking a cunt. Icon of a face in pleasure. Icon of cum. Icon of O. Icon of what it means to have a baby. Icon of the slit between my legs. Icon of a bitch. Icon of a bastard. Icon of a bitch. Icon of a bastard! Icon of my tongue pressed against a basket clit. Can I make you cum, you desperate piece of shit? Are you so set against my princesshood that you would deny yourself the pleasure of my tongue? That’s my girl. You are a superstar. Let my stardom rub off on you as brass, your face as wax, your soul as the clear crayon in boxes of invisible ink. That is where I swear you, fill you out on form SF86, buy you some time as the old woman lives in a storage unit. The old woman, your mom. The old woman, your tongue tie. Old woman, your hat. If I catch you jerking off to her, I will rescind my age-young puss and you will never taste her again even with your hand against my crotch. Vagina circus. Marching band of anuses. Kingpin of the chorus of loss. Multiple agonies to the head. Bone hammer. Trapeze me under my skirts, elevate me with an elephant dossier. Find a penis stuck between the couch cushions and I suck it to gain its trust crawling it does from a dark cranberry plush velvet like worms in the rain a speck of water on a crumpled straw wrapper, writhing like the fish, telling my fortune in a constellation of urethras and vaginas and buttholes and nostrils and ears. Mouths like a cat of too-long collar, writhing against the fleas. It’s a game like chess, where everyone can see all the moves. That’s what you have to assume. My crushed red velvet came at a cost. There was originality in one hand and originality in the other hand and Alice said choose. If I take a picture of myself and send it to you I am a criminal. If I drive you to the hospital I am a criminal. If I plug in the tube I am a criminal. If I unplug the tube I am a criminal. The imagination-less rule over god, they think, they think they are equal to her and must squeeze all the chaos out of life so it all goes according to plan. See Malcom for why this is not possible. I am secure between my legs when my puss is cradled snugly in cotton or silk but security does not exist in nature, nor do the children of men as a whole experience it. It took a blind woman to say that. You may have heard of her. She lives in a pocket of my brain behind my left ear with the wizards and the talking trees and every catalog of princesses collected in a lifespan doubling eight. You would brush your teeth with my snot my bathwater toothpaste I am royalty you lay your coat down for me to walk upon in the winter give me gifts whose favor will never be returned make beds for us that only you will ever lie in rock cradles remaining perennially empty draw bows upon strings connected to invisible instruments draw philosophies on window panes in colors only my eyes can see take us both on tours of the Thousand Acre Wood and build characters and character and story and stories inside my cobweb mind I will pick apart the strands until I am an old woman shot in silhouette against the attic window. For you see my teenager phase my Gandalf the Grey phase but I am looking at you backwards through the rear-view mirror of a speeding car, going over the edge of Niagara, dropping off my soul at a toll booth, had to pay, had to give up my name and die, head chop like a London broil met with a cleaver in a very nasty accident. Pinhole begat plates, begat silver, begat turnip emulsion, begat 70mm, begat digital, begat super digital, begat DNA, begat the planetary ultra drive Han Solo is looking rather old don’t you think? A photography class fits on my fingernail. When you put me in detention I plier away my fingernails one by one toenails crotch hairs and who do you think wins then? I make you a criminal with me, royalty, the lowest and the highest work together, don’t you know? Princess is a class. Criminal is a class. Basket case is a class. And you think we don’t have castes this side of the ocean? It’s all a change of wardrobe, new syntax to describe the same thing our species has been doing since it was forged by gods with the simple monkeys to excavate gold in South Africa the prison is a power plant and the power plant is a prison. I’m taking out the cleaver. I’m starting the Porsche. I’m a dragon, a scorpion, a tiny drop of cocaine. I’m consciousness, that strange quantity, dripping into halves, watched by mother as in secret she opens the laptop and searches her daughter’s name. I am fleeting specks of light, little worm hairs, nervous tickles who wonders what it means to be killed on impact what does that exactly mean do I ever get to know it do I ever get to see it do I ever get to regret it does it cause me pain? Neurons like noodles, playpen like penitentiary, you can cook ramen in three minutes but what is the measure of my thigh? Does it tempt you to make a microscopic reaction within my boom? What living creatures result? What projects? What principles? What pronouns? What privileges? What parasites? What pilgrimages. What do you take me for? An evil slit-bearer, a slut, a scoundrel, a Scrooge? I must guard the gate from which life comes. What is more picky than that? Will you sleight me for choosing the bears from the bulls, those angled toward the future, whatever the future is? My preference is preservation, we are starting a fire, slipping kindling underneath branches and dragging branches throughout the yard. It’s not just for hot dogs and marshmallows burned to perfect brown. This is the way we communicate with our gods, those perfect stars and galaxies populated with a computational center, as easy as learning to type! Your territory is determined by the art you make, the shows you put to me. Do you know that I like your dioramas more by an exponent than your turkey neck symbolic body? Peacock feathers oddball synapse in my brain, you are the winner of a race, yes, you are the one who pushes consciousness to its limits. Yes. And you are prince to my little queen, wrap me around your finger, I will serve you till the end. There is a dancer spinning when I open up my hand. Like a music box jeweler. Crafted out of cloth and string. Her big toe pointed and wrapped beneath, covered against the blood. When I close my hand she stops. I open and she moves. Tinkly toenails orchestrated to spook me beaten dire by a poet husband this is my fate. To never be reported, only my reactions perpetrate the crime, only my words published, only my illness plastered post no bills on sites around the high-up walls of twins and cities, corpses imagined, references to Holocaust, ovens, ashes, more. Close my hand across my face! Peeking through the long digits, a single eye, watching her spin. And when I peer into the dust behind my eyes, there she is, still mounted, still spinning, free of her springs and mechanisms somehow still alive! She follows me, daily, nightly, and in my mind she always spins, never letting me go of this image of her. I carry it with me through the lunch line, under the comforter, into my heart of a beef heart between my legs. If even I die I think she’ll still spin, in some field of consciousness cut off from my body, like some game that keeps playing itself after the player is dead, somewhere the server is still running, calculating her perfect circles, keeping time in a frenzy, precise, maddening, perfect. I’m not sure when she started spinning, or when I was first unable to stop her. When she came off the shelf and into my obsession. But if I could talk to someone they would say, princess, what troubles you? And I would take my head in my hands. I would peek through my long digits. And I would say, she, won’t, stop, spinning. She is inside me, and yet I cannot control her. She is the velvet of my thoughts, sewn into my days, my nights, my dreams. And yet this thing, which I know is part of me, is utterly out of my control. She keeps spinning, and spinning, and spinning, even when I will her to stop! And that is madness, if anyone knows madness! To know that from now on, wherever I am, swimming pool, lunchroom, taking the SATs, she will be there, and nothing I do will stop her. If I have children, they will split time with me and the tiny dancer, who keeps going and going and will never loose her hold on me. For a few seconds in the morning, I am unaware of her. Then as I remember my name and my rank and my sex and my unlikely history my unlikely future she slips in from the back of the stage, wrapped to protect her bullied feet and doing relevés and pas de trois and port de bras and blinking her Bambi eyes and bending her cricket thighs she is the one she is the only one with this passage into the backstage of my mind I am thrown into trance mode kneading the blanket like my mother’s teat falling with much abandon into a furry puddle, desperation, catlike, dismal, balancing gray, sleeping on that which reminds me of you, dipping myself into hallucination, the mentor who inspired me dead by hanging! And yet you are here in movies in lines of dialogue in my back who pains me from the moment the tiny dancer starts her agony inflicted to me daily with dreams that would make Hannibal Lecter sweat upon rising. Wouldn’t your spirit be broken? Wouldn’t your dreams go gray? Wouldn’t you dread that gauntlet run each morning between the lockers? Wouldn’t you construct a shrine to all that was good and right behind the steel door behind the vents all over the covers of your binders between blue lines in notebooks? This writing didn’t start out for fame, we did it to keep ourselves alive in cages, prisons, cells, break rooms, cubicles, insulating the walls of a polite pussydog, welcoming sperm and exterminating them, equal parts, slippery acid and cyanide showers I’m not sure if you’re worthy to clip my fingernails and the dancer keeps spinning, spinning, spinning. By now you know that the mule overmatches the yoke. That we’re not in some scaled-down musical. Not in characters designed for the five. If you speak upon this ground everything emerging you will carve itself in stones placed upon the moor. It will become history in an instant, noodles feeding generations, flour and water the sum total of all the riches we have gained. But is that enough? Is that enough for you to believe me? Enough to plant the tiny dancer in your head? Enough that when you wake tomorrow, after a split second, seconds of peace, you will remember her, too? Remember her popping up from the seashell of a hand to turn, turn, turn! The windows are shut, only ghastliness lives at this corner, the intersection of ham and rye. You have not known me. You have not known me. I am the woman who carries the bills from the back of the bank into an armored car. You shoot me to get at my goodness, unlock the salt in me, empty me like a cash register. That’s all you get from your fuck, unloading bags of money meaningless to all sides. Killing me softly, bridling me like a horse, and running me ragged for all time. Whip me, boy, whip my France. Whip my garden and whip me into this trance. What will you take away? Victims in a currency not known, not transferred, not accepted. Coins for which the machines have all grown to sand. On a boardwalk whose five-star restaurants are now home to crabs. Scuttlebutt. Take me to the moon. There are bases there. And they house the demons of every children’s paradise since the Garden of Eve. Tell me you were the mother, the mother who read stories by my bedtime, sat me in couches, on chairs, on the edge of the bed. Make my imagination come wild, let me turn the pages, wish for us both to transform into woods and wilds and skies and live out our days there with no pain where the cabinets are always full and no one sticks their hand under the blankets. Can I sit, at least, at a table where people enjoy their food and look not slyly side to side while holstering their gun. Is every house a house of cards? Dogma set like aces against kings against twos. Would you really throw me homeless if I needed your help? You would take me to church and insist on praying for me benefits that you neither understand. Pretend to be my mentor mainly because it makes you feel better, feel like you learned something out there in the real estate salesman, cussing out my mom on Facebook but praying to God to make all the weirds disappear. Well guess what, skeever, uncle, I am one of the weirds. Full and full, basket to oven, I show you everything you are afraid to find within yourself. That’s what we’re all afraid of, of becoming what we see in others, the unknown within ourselves. If we were distinct, we’d be comfortable with each other, you’d really be over there. But you’re not, you’re in here, all over my through and though and through and through. Cat snaps in the rolodragon. A flower, a flower, each at various stages of development, paused, a cross section of time, roots, bark, a tree. It looks high the sky to a root the boot, that’s because you fear of becoming. Beautiful. Weird. Dead. You could become these things! Am I a princess of rot? A diary of empty space? Can you dismiss me? If so then I have not challenged you, have not shown you a piece of your greater self and I do not hold this responsibility all myself you have to look and see it, everywhere, turning, blooming, even in a little child. But only the post-dead can do this themselves. Socrates twice, an unexamined life. Some may think it elitism of the most foul variety but this is just an encouragement to the self having nothing to do with nobility and the commonplace. When I sit it is bunched up and hot and sweaty and this is what you may think of when you think of the princess, the opposite of health, of whiteness, of pressing and starching and folding and drying, that perfect mix of wet and dry available for the sexual whims of the consumer. If even in their mind. Tick me ‘tween the folds and rolls and chasms find me with smells of noses am I the capacitor I was meant to be? Containing all that’s hot and cold and nose and ass and sexy sexy boo. This was my name at the trial. Complete humility. I am not the river bed, I am the water flowing over it. Or I am just the bed and the water is none of us, what you’d call god, or the universe, or the spark, or the collective la dee daa. For it flows over me over you through and ‘twixt us all, lighting on me for one moment on you for a second her for a minute him for a year. It is like hair, flowing through us and we shape it color it wash it show it off but we do not start it flowing and we do not stop its flow. Have you heard of the mark of the prince? A prince, a princess, is raised by royalty. I mean psychologically here, those who are mentally, spiritually well. And around these people the princess grows, shows color, finds her height. But she never learned to spar with the world of the hateful simple and handsy manipulative crowd, the ignoble. And when she encounters them, she is the spoiled brat of the universe, setting dogs’ tails on fire roaming into maniac flows burning businesses to the ground all because around charlatans she knows not what to do! She was never raised to contain herself measure herself close herself off to the insanity and thus around them she herself becomes insane. Hence the mark of the prince. It’s drawn around your neck in the colors of your hand footprints vocal melodrama hair ties binge watching digits of the microwave local viewing patterns everything is false but that’s only if you take it literally what we have here are a series of drafts and you can learn something if you leap across the drafts but never get caught in any one. Try to resist attributing this idea to a popular video game. Just ’cause Banksy writes it on a wall don’t mean he made it up! And there’s the join’, decorating my pee on the side of a toilet wiping drawing wiping drawing all I’m worth is a side swipe on a muffin catcher nigger lover candy coated kitty cat you stuffed into a tube and launched from the window of a moving car. The Pez dispenser is running empty, the metaphor thin, the rubber on my sandals dangerously like flypaper and you cast your ballot for a murderess shameful I have straight As and a razor in my side pocket used for putting bitches down when they use my stall. Prince begat princess, princess begat slime sludge, slime sludge begat intellect begat straight razor who was hiding in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in my ass but I’m nimble as the Cat in the Hat I drop bombs thicker than Wu and you don’t want to come in the restroom when me and my girls are rappin’ ’cause we’ll lay you down under tile like Indiana Jones. I had a mother once. She took us to the library in summers we listened to audiobooks sat in colored chairs played on the wooden dragon. I thought she was the best mother ever. I thought I was the best kid ever. First I was sad at my dad then I was mad at my dad. I liked him every day and every day he left me to go to work, which was a place I had never seen which took him away from the breakfast table early and kept him all day. I stood at the window and cried for an hour after he drove away. So compared to him my mom didn’t at least leave me. Cut forward 13 years. Fourteen. Right? Now I know that he had to leave. To put motherfuckin’ food on the table. Leaving me on a precipice of vocabulary which I exceeded with in the tests. Cut class every day, even in my mind, coupla babies on the top shelf in the oven terminated ’fore they had a chance to rise. Regular bird singing in the cage. And I see it is a trap. My mom left her home to get away from a druggie father. Seemingly bipolar. Dad left home to impregnate the wife, build a home, all the while he was taking dough from his father. Couldn’t have built a life in this country without loans from Dad. He never told us that. Just like the President never told us that. He couldn’t have been rich without starter funds from Dad. What does this have to do with being a princess? Royalty. Simple. It is not the land of opportunity. It is the land of inheritance. The Land of Dad. Land of nepotism and family and fraud. This is what the princess thinks about in homeroom. While everyone else is clapped to the flatscreen in front of the room, watching Game of Thrones, I am picking from the throne that is right before me, underneath my precious ass. It is the throne that makes you cum so hard while you’re fucking me looking at my face. That is your goal in life, to find someone whose face you like to look at while you cum. You do not even know why this is your purpose, it is because of those scum, those rivers growing on top of the Petri dish of us. Like Adaptation, you make love to your particular flower and the rest of life unfolds. I am running out of breath. I will not be able to tell you the depths of my princess mind. I’ll leave you with an unsatisfied picture, optics skewed in mud, instincts left unexplained, cameras out of focus, eyeballs punctured like a water bubble, your mouth pierced, largemouth, pike, salmon on a salmon run. Do you know I am able to pierce the air like a drone rocking sky high and take control of molecules known only to the water bear? Let me try and lay it down. Face begat Roman, Roman begat non-schizoid consciousness, Greek begat Rome, emperor begat lightstick, nightstick begat crazyweapons, crazy weapons begat dreams of driving down a too-steep incline, seeing Shirley MacLaine smoke at a gas station telling us why she never got cancer even though she smoked all her life that was the sentence, that was the sentence that brought you to life, measured in rhythm tone and content as a chemist measures her stew I have a stew right inside me that duplicated the entire species when you fuck! Fuck! Fuck away! Running out of time. Out of time to be beautiful, out of time to duplicate the species, out of time to invent punctuation syntaxes, time time terrible, time, time, time. Time not. Time such. Time breathing. Time drunk and time comatose. I am that perfect mother soon enough charting children to the internet, reading audiobooks aloud, marching their little minds through the exercises transferring culture reprogramming their tiny brains see it comes around, the wheel, it comes around and I am found myself doing just what my grandmother did to my mom to make her the perfect mom that I loved so blindly she became a myth of construction like Batman weeviling herself as a symbol into my brain. Mother as schema, as I mentioned before, I will supersede your rank and you will drop trou as I have the power stick, which is colored princess pink if you want to know what drives you from the symbol of lips within my face to represent the lips between my legs I am the princess. I am a trap easily set. Easy as sitting. The acceptable addiction. Just a flower attracting a bee. And as used as you are to wanting I am used to being want. I accept and know it just like my breath a neighbor offering me a beer during a blackout isn’t just offering me a beer, dig? But I am my mother’s womb and from my mother’s womb and of my mother’s womb I come to you a Sith cloaked as the only virgin you ever met who loved Star Wars a girl you have to fuck like if it’s your first night at Fight Club you have to fight. Pin her to the bed her hairy pussy dirty toilet floating with cigarettes and perfume, pubic hairs from the last trim she doesn’t even know what to do with her pussy but you will show her you will show her with your mega mega mega cock in neon green with scissors like Darth Maul red in the eyes horny like me. Imagine if you had never known me. What would be your princess then? In symbol. What to hold the light to? What to model all the rest? Candle, showing, framing, red. In trance. Sucking your mother’s teat. A perfect dancer spinning. Obsession with the flower, model of the lips. In the lunchroom, spreading, showing you my glory underneath the table, public, only you to see.
I am not a criminal. I am not the crime. I am not subliminal. I am not sublime. There were two birds in the cage. Now there is one. My hand on the tools. A locker full of pictures, they found it, found it after I was arrested. It was pictures of girls. I took them at the swimming pool, the park, and in their last moments. I am an artist. I hate to say it, but it’s the quickest way to make you understand. You know how they say in Lolita that to recognize the deadly demon in a photograph of schoolgirls, you have to be an artist, madman? That is me. That is what I’m saying. That is the sense in which I call myself, unfortunately, an artist. Artist of time. Artist of light. Artist of breath and lungs and capillaries. Seeing the eyes constrict with my hands around her neck. So and so had a brain tumor, that sort of thing. But it’s not so simple as a clock tower. I have an IQ for it, a motion, this predisposition to put you in a cast I am the church organist I am the chair of the outreach committee when my wife calls stranded with our kids on the highway I go on with the meeting. Oh, what you think of me, oh! What you think of me! That I would give my own last breath for. Criminals keep things together, heroes let things fall apart. If you are reading this within your tiny little brain, ask yourself which one of those things you do. Inside my mind is chaos so I try to order my outside world, extremely order it, like god. I’m told the other kind is peaceful within and can allow the outside to be itself, let it be its own. I’m told this. They say an artist is desperate, and once I stop being desperate I will cease to be an artist. Well, no worry of that here. I saw an ant on the walk and I fried it, saw myself at Betsy’s diner eating ant eggs with a tiny fork and tiny salt and pepper and tiny tiny Tabasco. Of course this was all in a dream. This is how it is. There were cave painters, then surrealists, then me. I stole the show. One of the pictures is of this girl, 23, top shelf of a barn, and she’s holding out her hand for defensive wounds like please don’t please don’t but I did, I did, I did her up with a filet knife and habanero peppers. Took her pussy out in a square, about four by four, strapped it to my neck with a swing set chain it was from the swing in her yard that was part of the collection some people say never doubt a line never question a word once it is written never review in your mind what has already been done so I took her toes off and fed them to the cows. Oh, my friends, you met them in their youths. They were gloriously simple then and they’re gloriously simple now. We all shared a prescription drug addiction under the bleachers by Seymour Butts but that redhead twisty twisty twisty girl was the only one to have a real career. People like to envision having the redheads skewered on their dicks I don’t know why can you tell me thrill me with your acumen. I used to keep California king snakes as pets and I do attest the albinos were the most fun. They had more spunk, more love if you’ll forgive the term, also, also, they were more likely to bite, those twisty little bitches, like that girl in high school I had her in the back seat and she resorted to biting but didn’t know I liked it I had her downstairs carpet matching the drapes little smart kid she spread so willingly didn’t know I was going to reach in and take out her insides. With a redhead you want to take out the uterus to prevent their baby-making box from functioning in the future. An operational albino is a dangerous thing so look at my pictures you’ll see mostly brown hairs and the occasional Cory. You can always trick people with empathy you should never have empathy that’s how you’ll earn yourself an early trip to the grave. Actually honey is the only way to catch flies. But you want me to tell you I’m some kind of sexual freak my greatest joy is backing a girl into the lockers step step step and holding her eyes and just making her move at my will in my time with my step till she has nowhere else to go and that metal is on the part of her neck and she just knows that I made her move and the choice was not hers and I could have made her move anywhere I want. The rest is icing. Delicious, yummy yum yum cake to see your eyes know you are going to die choking choking is the only way to go everything else is pedestrian. But we all come from somewhere. For me it was a railroad track. With a body on it. Some kids were gathered by the fence between our school and the tracks and they said come over here there’s a body here it is dead it was killed by someone from TV and there was bone and all this fat and that just looked like yellow foam white like the thick foam from a mattress and the head was obscured either by weaponry or my imagination I was transfixed fucking fingers gripping the chain link and locked on this body and I knew it was coming for me and then the kids, this crowd, I love them, they poked me in the back with a stick and said Rowdy Roddy Piper, Smoke You Like a Viper and laughed and laughed they laughed said it’s just a mattress faggot and I looked at them but the body was real. There is wrapped around my neck an umbilical almost snuffing me at birth toward one end is the theatre of consciousness toward the other end are all the voices in all the world such that a prayer from an ant who walks the Earth insidious connection blink and in the Tuttleman Omniverse the entire setup runs on a chip the size of a fingerprint when you make yourself available the voices you put out in your dungaree song they slide banking at each angle through a water slide and when you speak, the sound comes back at you in the Tuttleman and you find that you are the recipient god. You see that there is nothing out there, except you. You are the one you pray to, you are the one listening, and when you say Lord help me not kill again you are really asking for your own help. Say the Lord helps those who help themselves but it is true just not the way you were taught as a child. In this sense, you are the Lord and when you ask for help from the greater force it is an invitation to yourself to act as that force and this is what I say every night. Dear killer God who made the oceans who kill indiscriminately dear killer God of the cryptids who kill us indiscriminately but who belong to our subspecies and therefore for whom and which it is out of bounds to kill dear murderous God who made me as a child to suffer between the legs of an octopus mom. Dear insidious God who makes me seep with cum that sinks like magnetic threads between the legs of little girls little girls little bird birds girls their cracks filled with pus and sand and maple syrup. Dear insatiable God can you take away this thirst to snuff out sparrows and crows and ravens and those tiny little birds from the parking lot. That is all me praying to insidious, wrapped around the umbilical, connected like the Matrix to my own mind everything unfolding on a single stage. Scrapping for Combos in the Walmart gravel and lines painted yellow we live like this an entire civilization grown on flower and water making pasta in every shape conceivable to introduce to our child a new noodle here wrap this ‘round your neck, sinister, do you know why we named you that? ‘Cause you will corrupt the whole world with your magic stick bunny box carnivore plant lures ladies in to get they bells rung then you’re at the top of a barn just hay red paint some rotting boards don’t step on the nails we’ve got to keep your feet clean for the sacrifice stripping your panties after you’re dead the fur mountain thing and pink lips camo within. I would hate to see you puncture your foot when I’m clipping your toes you will see why. Surviving in waves, keeping your head above water in adjustments of one-tenth of a second the heart doesn’t beat at a solid rate even when you’re resting it takes instruction from the brain that tells it when to beat. That and about 27 other places in your body. Spies and jarheads beat solid metronome thus are lack susceptible to stress but artists and madmen make plus more adjustments therefore beating more efficiently through time and hence artists and madmen live longer. You have to wrap a string around your finger. But the string, in this case, is a noodle of red and blue a blood vessel and an artery wound together in a tripwire that you pull from your nose. I have several of these and it is why my clock has three hands one for minutes one for hours and one for your motherfucking heart. I be pumping your blood with my own fist and the purple head of a penis squirts in your face I’mm’a keep your warm paleface. Be introducin’ my cock into severed places I’m between you now, in, around, through. If they had Olympics for me, like the really really special Olympics I’d bring my mom to sit in the front row for the pussy-cutting competition. Stick my landing like a regular Shawn John. One more snapshot. Hand on the trigger, here you help me photograph yourself you are the subject and the pose. Rhythm and the tone. You are the handle and the blade. This gun didn’t even have any bullets in it, see? But it sticks up your pussy real good. Dancer and the song. String and the knot. When you’re so still. And I see your insides. How long was your brain alive for? Get somma those prayers I was talking about? It works, don’t it? Like a universal seashell the whole fucking system is wrapped around your finger. I cut my teeth on 12 year olds in the city pool grab the vajayjay while you’ve got ‘em underwater have to choose between drowning and a consensual rape see a little girl swing those legs scissor squeeze tight my finger squirm and feel that country mouse den. They call him the worm. Call me the worm. Can you breathe underwater ‘cause I’ll hold you down until your legs get tired. We’re going to do this thing one way, or another. Terrible eyes looking up at me. I am you, remember! The wheel comes around, and one, by one, by one, we share this life a stick passed at the end of each lap you have so much water in your face I can’t tell if those are chlorinated tears. Got you on lock since you decided you don’t want to die in the pool on Watkins street. And in, and in, and in I go like Jacques Cousteau the deepest free dive on record is just my pinkie finger push your suit aside, open girl hole, break and squirm, candy at center of wood. I put you on the canvas. I put you on the wall. I send you at auction, camera you on websites, ask you sponsor my project please. One dollar a month will get you a tooth. Ten dollars a month and I guarantee you a human fingernail, sometimes toe, in your mailbox delivered by FedEx and a bowtie splattered in human feces you will like it such that your shoes will tie themselves, bow! For twenty dollars each annum I will provide a weekly gift box of still-breathing products, cancer free organs harvested from young children right here in Kentucky. Eighty a month will get you a foot. Try to find deals like this elsewhere, you can’t. Not even organ-friendly Oregon state can offer you subscription harvests like these. My business is consummate. That’s why I work alone, staring at you from space is my sandbox looking down at geography writing perfect over every photograph stolen from a burnt-down military installation you are at your cutting board with a second infant on the way seriously considering surgery with a carving fork it would only take a little and then send the results to Mary Boone in New York remember when you were a kid lying on the floor in there and we dry fucked until the moment your parents returned. Everything is expected. Nothing is promised. Or something like that. I got to a point in my life when I couldn’t hang out with anyone who wasn’t an artist not paint you know but taking it to the limit, taking it seriously, I couldn’t commune with a guy who just drank one beer then if that was it then what was the point of drinking. If you were just going to stick your toe in then why get your foot wet at all? Art wasn’t flying, it was falling with style and if you didn’t have style then you might as well hit the dirt now and that is where the 46-chromo decomposers come in. Someone has to free up witches like the lonely little brown-hair tease girls harboring barns all over this state. And their dogs, too. Otherwise they would recreate with church boys and the world would be populated with more and more terrible church hymns sung by sadface marms who church it to throw up that ass to the hat next door, they don’t believe in god any more than I do but we wrap them up with strings asking girls to walk us home we are crippled they are empathetic they think we’re weak but their empathy is what makes them weak future of sixers willing to do what it takes the only ones who’ll miss them is them. But I did have feelings for a fish once his name was Mick he got his dick sucked and grew up to be a bank president that’s what he said when I met him he said hi my name is Mick I’m going upstairs to get my dick sucked and when I grow up I’ll be a bank president. Knew a girl in school who wanted to be an undertaker she had more sense than Mick’s dick will ever have. But after a while a man’s dick becomes a reticulated python when you cut it open from aft to shaft and Mick never grew up to be a bank president. He’s in a Sour Patch outside Toledo and I water him every once in a while. But thank you since you were wondering it starts out gradually stealing notes maybe grab a B cup off a shelf breaking into a room watching from the closet then maybe she opens the closet door and you have to suck the breath. She was lying on the floor. She got strangled. She wasn’t breathing etc etc. She woke up in the trunk of her car. She was driven to the woods. Her head got banged against the trunk of a beech tree 17 times. She blinked at me and I banged her head another 34 times. Always keep track of who you are this is a piece of advice indispensable to flesh Picassos. Caravaggios. Learn Naples and you’ve come to the animal syntax within your brain. Is it important to think in lists? Chains? I don’t know. Ask the brain. If he got lucky he got cleaned up at 22 he was going to have a zero-dimensional life if the train never left the station. To kill a stalk? No terror. To kill a bloom? I would never forget it. That’s what people call tragedy, to kill a so-called life form just at the bloom, shower curtain flower, patterned panties, it sad unless you see the petals fall, unnoticed, stamped into the ground by the girl’s imaginary horse. She wanted to ride it but it rode her instead and rode her into the dirt and washed her sins a crumpled blue petal for the win. On my dresser is a yellow flower. Dried. What is left of it. I call her Anna. That is the name of the long-dress girl in the attic I supposedly killed. When I told me mother I said in my mind you reach inside me in ways no mother should but I imaged it in my blinky blinky eyes you can’t tell the barber stop! You are cutting my hair! Anna I supposedly snuffed out, her acolyte, following her in a careful procession up the attic stairs seeing movements out the corners of my eyes several of my friends from dogs’ spirits came with me and we took pictures of Anna with a Fujifilm Instax that I got on Amazon Prime the camera was recommended for me by the devil in the description it said perfect for photographing girls before they stop breathing brown hair is ideal and yes this item has free shipping if purchased in the next 24 hours! Would you be distracted if you were on a drowning ship? A crashing plane? Well you are, motherfucker. You can pretend you’re bulletproof, I suppose. I suppose you could do that. Part of me lays you back, baptizes you. Part of me is Jesus. That’s the part that’ll save you, metaphorically. But Jesus was a murdering Jew who took my favorite prophet from me. Am I the Son of Man? For a moment I am. Lean you back in that pool as the camera moves overhead powered by a drone we get shots that nobody ever got before, duct tape and a microchip, even Bill Gates would fall down and worship those feet. It’s a step you think you cannot take. A dream that shows you the part of yourself, the monster, you’re fighting. Sober people dream of drinking. Murderers dream of birth. What do you fear you become? Why does a billionaire go to work? Why not stay home and play with your kid? A billionaire doesn’t want to go home. That scares him. That is why he is a billionaire. You dance with the one who bring you. ‘Thing else is insane. Imagine a paintbrush. Imagine a child painting in a warehouse and his father takes off his clothes so he doesn’t have to wash the paint out. That is pornography and you will be arrested for taking pics of your kids in the bathtub. Someone might get excited about them. It’s legal to take pictures of potential murder victims. Lucky for me. I get off to apples and oranges, dogs, cats, kites. If you’re a judge and you think my bathtub kid is sexual, that’s you, buddy, has nothing to do with my sexuality. I get off on the last breath of about a 12 to 22 year old, have you seen my locker? Preferably a church girl, more innocence than your average pornography. Hair ties preferable. Also, long skirts, something like the Puritans. Get me some witches, bitches. Some people would give synthesizers to Mozart. I would give Instagram to Puritans. Let ‘em shock themselves to death on some twin candy, bloviated segments of fat porn, beach balls, cheesesteaks, MSG in a can. Female frotteurs find me wait what that’s not in my dictionary! You think if you just take frotteur out of the book that the concept ceases to exist? The practice stops? Legislate the ability to think, then we’ll all be well behaved? They’ll make the dictionary illegal, mark my words. It will be the ultimate banned book. Highlight me, cross me out, poke holes through my letters. If you do enough community service you don’t have to think about what a horrible aunt you’ve been to me. Abusers band together. Everyone else puts a bullet through their brain. The important thing is smile and nod. Whatever anyone says, have an ear to ear and just seem happy about lying at them through your golden teeth, golden cracker jack of a nigger-loving smile you stand behind the podium delete your Tweets as soon as someone starts paying you your allegiance is changed, everything you knew before is wrong! That’s what they’re paying you for, in jobs, not for your opinion. No! They’re paying you not to have an opinion, to give up yourself and you’ll make enough money to eat! Fantastic! Stop editorializing! You think we pay you for your skill? We pay you for your face. Face that sits in meetings, face for TV. The PhD is just to get you in the door. Imagine a paintbrush. Think if I gave you one and told you to decorate the city. What billboards would you erase? Which people would you plaster inside their corner glass rooms? There is a restaurant that costs a month’s salary would you eat there? How much is a hotdog? How much a leaf of lettuce? Would you erase a pig? Separate the pig from its hooves, sell it for more that way. In this neighborhood, a billionaire at 24. In this neighborhood, a kid who cannot eat. Who picks up a French fry, sticks it up his nose. I’m not saying that’s how I got the way I am, but there is a difference between a daddy who starts his kid off with more money than poors will make in their life and a kid selling coke at 16. I guess you don’t have to worry, born with enough money for life, about working, eating, buying a place to live. Weird. You just procreate, play music, buy land in Arizona, never even have to vote? Did you ever worry about a thing? What? Oh there’s no more land for me to buy? People in funny hats owned it all for centuries? I have started to believe that all of you are wrong, that there is no death, that life is never given or taken, we have worms in our brain, those tortured are the only ones at peace, those showing clean face the ones who carry the burden. You think I’m tortured? No I’m light. I sweat and cry and bleed every day and that’s why I am light. I cut off my own arm if I need to, cut out an eye if it offends me, brush sand off my heels at every step. There’s only so much face you can give, podium guy, before you’re a Batman villain you don’t even recognize yourself in the mirror. Literally have cheeks like the Joker but can’t tell ‘cause you’ve got a thousand-dollar spoonful of ice cream sticking out your butt. Pass the mint. Hear the sherbet’s good? Memories on a tape reel. Childhood recollections. Dripping on the sidewalk. A friend’s smile. Hollow recording quality. Primitive microphone. The colors were red, yellow, and blue. Tapes that play in your sleep, in the shower, at the stoplight turning left and in between the words you say as you escalate the figure of the day. Banksy hit us from all sides, shoveled it in our face, he was The Art of War. We let the bird from the cage and she shat on the face of the pretenders. When she asked me what art is I said do you want pancakes for breakfast, my dear? Art is me stroking your hair, the way you breathe in your sleep. It’s the smile in your eyes. Rent a bulldozer and shape me to the foundation ‘cause there’s no more acting. It’s either out in the open or it never existed. Talk in parables, talk in rhymes, only those with ears will hear, and the journeys intersect but not forever. As sure as we meet we will part, hopefully not by cryptids in South America but jungles do exist between us, wouldn’t you agree? A circle of fourth graders sitting around singing folk songs. This is in a crack hood. Then we learned to fear the bomb. Do aliens brush their teeth? Somehow I think not. If there’s a snake in the grass you’ll step on it. That’s what my mother said to me. But what if the snake is you, or him, or me? Those that claim a secret show that they know nothing. There’s no secret, my friend. There are a thousand. Pinprick stars under the canopy of tent and undergrowth. Tribes exist below 42nd street in the hidden Whole Foods Markets I’m not a button you can push, ok? I contain cultures, lineage of rights and wrongs, objects of worship, lack of values, plasticity, boom. Even the brain cannot decompose me, with all his languages. We are the sum of even integers from two to six. The odd numbers from three to 13. How many spots are on a zebra? Stripes are on a cow? How many drinks before you pass out, order from a star? How many stairs on Lourdes’ dress in party in frame in photograph of animal of victim of hair she said she looked like a victim so I took her framed her showed her to the room. Material girl meets Boy Meets World of Wayne and Garth’s Brooke Shields we like have sex with something by learning as wee as possible ab out it, that’s our style, so the symbols still have meaning. The more you dissect it, the less a bear exists a bear the more it’s a collection of fur and claw and string. What is the art of Dippin’ Dots, what’s the art of a plate? Drip that raspberry syrup on her cheesecake and my dinner date will drop her keen little panties, as the saying goes. We’re all panty-dropping freaks, some of us just do it better than others and we will be forever talked about and not in a good way by those less adventurous ones. Copies of copies of copies of ourselves. Lessing of control. Weaving into the rules like Neo. No one makes it their first time. No one. The Oracle tells you exactly what you needed to hear. She is in the wind, she is under stone. She is the wisp of your hair. She is the space between your toenails. She is your precious thigh gap. She is the look in your eye, the asymmetry of your face, how one part of you is evil and one part of you is good and no oath you ever take could separate the two. If your mother was rich does that make you rich? I am the posture in your lines, the rip in your skirt, your solitary elevator death, squishing you as the building falls, didn’t we have safety codes in here? Your doctor kills you as soon as she heals you. To save is to ruin. To go east one mile is to go west motherfucker. Try on a bigger hat for size. A shoe. Concrete boots. Argue the inheritance tax. Hang ten. Chill with the lounge lizards. Frame Jimmy Carter nail him to a tree. Believe this. If you challenge the money they will come for you. It is a measure of imbalance, inequality. Do you take me for a murderer? Murdering the system. Pump it, grind it. Take it down to 10th street. Right to live. Snake eat snake eat snake giving its own lap band starving itself from the neck down and up the sparkly jazz man runs a silver tune you’re standing on a branch with a chainsaw cutting off the branch you’re standing on. Hoping it will make you stronger. Kill the golden egg. Overview effect. Some of us see it taking drugs, going into space, or from some arcane religion that says we are all one. I abuse me so I abuse you. Since you abuse me I abuse you that abuse me in a locked room we breathe the same air. Hand-me-down clothes. Are they even different feet? Wear the same dress every day. Are you a princess? Have you suffered enough of my ruse? Written in hex, can you eat a potato with no nose? Do you have to know the ingredients of a taste bud? Or can you run the program, where is its meaning, who did it come from, why is it so complex? Can simple instructions produce complex behavior? Are you reading a book or is the book reading you? Meaning is ascribed. It is subjective. There is no meaning in a book, the meaning is in you. Can you see us all, end to end, in a goddamn circle of life, each living one life after one life after the other? I am my uncle. You are my aunt. My sister is abusing her child, her child is me. She yells at him. My mother yells at me. I talk up that tunnel shooting blood into my veins I am abuse itself my abuser I fight I kick I punch I bite I am me and you and all of us in a syringe between the toes I am blood hair tooth and bone you are a soft meal for a soft tongue destined to die in the jungle a foot cut at the ankle half a sock and my family will never hear from me again. And as you read these tales, throw away the husk. You are not your skin, the color of your stones. The part that offends me is your mind. We are one, oh one oh one oh one. There was a man born inside the Matrix. He is more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Burn the shell, his ideas don’t just remain, they multiply. My project is called memory. It is a tape that plays 24/7 in a room full of monitors that when you enter show you reflections of yourself. A park bench, an actor underneath, playing the part of the outside. Philip Glass says he doesn’t even write music, he just listens to music out in the ether that’s already been written and I guess if I’m asking you to do one thing, it’s to listen to your world that way, for the music that’s already been written, that’s out there, or in here, already written. And when you think of crime, think of what it is to be unacceptable. Are you a husk? Are you a seed, a sapling, a tree? What is unacceptable in thee? Idea, thought bomb, crime. Culture takes over again and again and again, the critical area being on the left, being on the right, that part where albinos reign genome lining up like a jackpot. Triple cherry. Tearing down the wallpaper. It shows as a germ. Soon the disease becomes tyranny, tyranny taken over ’gain and again, minority begat majority, only those insecure surfing the dominant waves. Thought. Virus. Definition of life based on a can of maggots. I will come at you weaving, a needle and thread, before you even see me your lungs are breathing my air. Black hats meeting in the impressionist wing of the national museum, meeting each other in dreams, on the page, in the brush, in a project called Susquehanna Rocks. Look under stone and I am there. Split a log and I am there. I am the twin, the shadow. I’m doing time for murdering the system. Didymos. Judas. Thomas. The gospel of the apocalypse and you’ll be eating brains like every other. We store wicked swords betwixt the couch cushions with which we slice the air. Say that five times fast. We are the air in your mouth, a breathing exercise, a girl-on-girl woman fucking men for a baby saying Fuck Me Fuck Me I Want You To Enjoy It To Make A Better Fetus. Room for me between shaky legs, the first time I did it in Jessica’s bed, we just watched The Fox and the Hound and she changed her panties in front of me and both our legs were shaking. What if you take away all the covering, the skin, the eyelids, hair, all articles, fonts, unnecessary syntax. Everything duplicated, gone. Then what is left? Are you art at your core, that one kick of The Karate Kid? Wax on, wax off, yes, and when the fence is painted what is left in you? What is your reflex on a cellular level? First breath, last breath, when you are born, when you die. In the middle is all practice, but practice for what? Don’t I want to live and make each moment my meditation? Take my yoga outside the studio? Kill at will? I am a native woman on horseback carrying a deer. I am not pretty. I function. You can see the peace in my eyes. I have never watched a subscription video service, never seen the rube. I don’t have Netflix, no Amazon Prime. I kill. I kill deer, worship deer, eat deer, survive. What am I but an empty shell I am not even myself not even a person I am just the girl who eats the deer the girl who rides the horse the girl who sense the storm. What would I be without deer, horse, storm? I reflect them, change shape to meet them. I am the dog who sleeps with my nose in my person’s armpit what am I without my person? I am your lover. What am I without you, my friend? Only a shadow. I am the car. What am I without being driven? What is a toothbrush without a tooth? A drinker without a drink? What is a hair without a head? A flea without a cat? A chief once told me, work is life is work. He’s dead. Is art is crime is art? I’ll be dead too. What if the letter s fascinates me. What if the letter f? What if you weren’t conducting some grand experiment, what would you be then? Will you believe we are all facts of the same person, the same university ghost? Is that why the title was chosen hence? A brain, athlete, basket case, princess, criminal. Five colors, four colors, three. A rainbow. A sunbrella. Things are neither easy or hard. You are either easy or hard about them! Once I urinated in a pond in the mid city. A comic saw me from his five-star window and joked about it on the air. My friend told me, I didn’t believe him, and now I’m the only person in the universe who cares. I am the man in the window. My friend. The pee. It only matters to me. And you, reading this, are a part of me. I am a part of you, your shadow. We breathe at once, the watcher and the watched. The reader, the writer, the words. You stand behind my eyes, reading me, reading you. We will each be at the other’s funeral. No one goes first. No one goes at all. We are a puppy in the rain, playing itself, running, catching water droplets in its hair. And when the story is told, five characters catch in hand, pagan, dance around a universal fire. One a speed freak, one a synthesist, one placid, deep as a Swiss lake, one a loving loving whore, and one for us all, the one who breaks the rules.