from The Fields
Ornette gets frantic with the iambs. My feet
on American Soil rubs blur from lurid directories;
I fill my bong with ice quite cooly scanning
the Acme parkinglot with a book on javascript
and a Winston between my fingers, in black dress clothes,
like an electric Emily Dickinson I blink unused
to these strange frail girls with their tans and
cashed-in clothes. I must look slept-in
to them. But, high, I cease to be
an object for their view, I become
purely sight, pretty hearing,
the arcade mingling with the washers mingling
with TVs near the ceiling, a beautiful couple
shooting pool, knocking balls slick on velvet tables,
knocking back beer, while I blink
unused to all this, perhaps drying up in this
harsh air; where is my lover to render this climate
palatable, to lush the machines? Smoking reading java-
script compiles an object file that terminates due to
dislocated syntactics: no-one's looking at me, Ornette
loops while do is doing done dawned and freshening,
with a cigarette balanced on my hand. All the smoke
is trapped belly-up with us, and haze shifts
a salome syllabary down the blacktop as if
sugar were never invented, my house of java-
script's boolean values grepp'd while wishing I
could point and click, my lover's fields of screen
image-mapped, arrow to white-gloved hand
to hourglass across the rolling of her dappled
body, and those dizzy seconds of transfer
as the browser shakes through the dilation of my nerves
into octet-streams: Ornette plays a plastic horn,
Ornette blows the nailing of laughter
to nicotine-cauled bedrooms. I could see
eight seperate or intricate views
of the fields if I squinted; and the weight of my gaze
on every thread of my lover's new capri jeans
showers up her pantsleg to nest purring gales
where the trees blend together. Eventually,
I got to know everything, same way you did, except
her movies, voluminescent, spinning over her hands
sculptural, convex, and that's what done me in.
Silence stretches across the smoke strained
through ice and water, in turmoil, like a glacier
just cracked open (in my throat) and started throwing
stars down to sizzle like single-celled rain
multiplied through duplicate threads. On the ground
beneath our feet my lover and I discover American
Soil in a blaze of parking lots and rollover rinks,
and the stars are falling down at our feet, erasing
our facts (there is no Richmond Virginia there is no
Kent Ohio), easing us of our bodies, run-through
with Spring babbling, loaded and wet:my baby has
'the urge,' and I think the garbage truck just went
by (no time to take out the garbage? Try new Zen
consumerism, and watch that trash go the way
of one hand clapping the other on the back)!
And I walk past where Paul Deal must have died,
as the tiny placard indicates inserting his name
into the fog. I walk through this haze of no beginning,
going nowhere, and moisture peruses my faux arabic shirt,
I walk until electric light scalds a three-thirty
in the morning wall, making shadows run.
I want to play my lover forever, I think, ply
from the pink boutique of her gestures some chic
(buddha) from which to glean. Electric light
as the girl coming out of the automated doors
as I am going in jumps almost to see someone else
wandering this grizzled smoke of a midnight morning.
I walk slowly. I walk past her in the perfect silence
of spider's dew where she cross-legged leans against
the screaming wall. Reading pictures from a creased page.
If I leave the screen on too long, it begins to shiver.
This makes getting home difficult. I have to step over
rivulets of graphic folds, in danger constantly of slipping
into the skips electric light engineers. Like ridges
of sand pressed by wind into dissolving ledges, these ripples
shift into sudden gears and we're not in space anymore,
nor in time, but somewhere extension warps
and turns in on itself. Jen used to gnaw the inside of
her cheek. The coffee's raw this morning, hot, still
life'sblood shooting through it, propping it up, much
as I'm not just sitting here, but am on my way to work
too, am passionately famous the whole time none of you know
my name. My lover's collection of floats and spaces
is as unrivalled as any dazzling urge to her lucidity;
to train all focus down below her dress. I am a man, and
this is the twenty-first century. Cogniting my lover's
lamps from the middle of the last century things
could ever fall apart wraps in quick candle lemon
tongues of all indexed periodicals referenced by
nerve. Maj Ragain hopes to never read a poem from
a screen. Everyone wants to ride the spider, at least
once: the best of us capillary to the other. As in
I'm handing you this, Maj. Jam with it! My guitar,
purple with obscene handling. 'Obscene' is a value
judgement. Let Francis Raven equal identity politics!
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