Exiled to the plains states for doctrinal irregularities. Lunar solitudes. Margent lands, earth-platters heaped with sky. At the dilapidated, gem-littered edges of the earth, from serried VHF antennas tethered in the dying light, coruscated rubies like drops of blood on barbed wire:
Low down, the lights of evening rust.
The television czars
Trampled our rubies into dust
And hung them up for stars.
For VHF and microwave
Now, manacled in towers
Of radio transmitters slave
Those ox-blood beauties, ours.
(Last one to leave the country please turn out the lights.)
Wending my way amid industrial-residential prairie detritus I patroled the boundaries of my prison yard, pastoral solitudes, vast sunset lands, the parks and signories of exile, the vines of Burgundy and milk of France, casting the water of the sky. I wrote “Suburban Eclogue”:
Upon a reef of chimney flues
The solar engine run abreast
Has burst a sealing ring and spews
Nuclear coolant in the west.
A clockwork salad on the wall
Meters time in kilowatt hours
Under a bowl of glass too small
To hold the hemorrhaging sun’s powers.
Crapulous gaiety ensues.
A polyvinyl chloride pipe
Chokes on a skein of wires and spews
Rainbow spaghetti, colored tripe.
(Canto Sixteen)
Coconino county, lit exclusively by moonglow. Moonface smiling indulgently on Offica Bull Pupp’s jail, where Ignatz cools his heels behind a balustrade of prison bars after braining love-struck Krazy Kat with a brick (miniature hearts dribbling out of his ears like marshmallow candy). The moon morphing at moonset into the earth, in balletic mimicry becoming a mesa painted with moonshine, or a multistory adobe dwelling with protruding timbers, or a marquee placard placed among cacti on an easel at the edge of a procenium arch, stage right, a row of footlights illuminating a bleak theatrical space planted with weeds and roadside litter.
And me stretched out bleeding in the dirt behind the footlights, stage left, brained by a block of sky dropping from the flies, love bubbles dribbling out my ears like cotton marshmallow hearts. Me a prostrate heart, limp, inflated wind sock, as large and empty as an airplane hanger, sunset echoes reverberating ceaselessly from one end of the empty hanger to another, dying, ceaselessly dying. Exposed to the cactus spines of my enemies like a lost and anchorless, dejected, wandering party balloon. The dirt: former farmland groomed for a soon-to-be-built industrial park or shopping complex, mischievous municipal morphology. Threatened, dying lands into which my misery melted like a marriage bed, like spring rain, fertile with dispondency. Limed and harrowed, dressed and tilled under the sulphur of a beneficent evening sky.
Swollen with pity and hate (i.e. love) with its disgruntled taste of infected lung, the taste of death in my mouth. (Tom’s a-cold.) And never ceasing to bleed: leaving blood trails everywhere. Sharp flints, arrows, sprigs of rosemary. St. Stephen, St. Sebastian: a bleeding saint.
Arrah, Christ, a bleeding saint. By Saint Bridgid and Saint Brendan and Saint Catherine. God save Ireland. Clean up after your self.
My made intent: to save the world down to its last sunset reflection.
To concoct a sadness so profound it can swallow in its depths and distill every last dying ember and gemstone of futile animal life out of parks and playgrounds, hospitals and office buildings, preserving it forever in sealed alembics, and out of the suffocating blanket of sprawling one- and two-story residential townhouses and bedroom communities mantling the earth like a swift-breeding colony of flesh-eating bacteria. These especially, housing their concentrated poignancy of intrepid animal life so tender and useless, haphazard dwellings so indistinguishable they seem to spring from a Home-Depot catalog-heaven of Platonic “house” archetypes.
All of it beautiful and fleeting as a sunset gleam. A reflection in a rain puddle, “specular” land, Platonic mirror-world, as unsubstantial as a cloud wisp. A country that fell from the sky and melts on the lawn like a record hailstone.
To save everyone. The vast pasty sea of throwaway man-and-woman flesh housed in throwaway “life” containers, which they call “houses.” Clapboard shiels. Shantytowns. My enemies. State-of-the-art military, population-deletion technology, best that money can buy, scourge of the earth. Nevertheless “peace”-loving, because they love “life,” which they breed prolifically in houses with a plentiful infusion of video and game feeds, junk food and internet access.
I will have such revenges. I will do such things. What they are, yet I know not.
(O fool, I shall go mad!)
On the road to Dover.
I love you. I love your daughters. Taylor. Amber. Regan. (Regan!)
A thousand uploaded cell-phone snapshots from sea to shining sea, I love my country, framed in the bathroom mirror, America’s daughters, autoportraits, demi-nues, self-publicity, computer-literate, social websites, self-enterprising, adorable.
Unless they all drown first in the Spanish invasion along with their parents. Melt in the Spanish gene-pool. Coconino county. Puddle on the lawn. Mestizo. European residue wiped from the face of the continent. Contained in a wet face towel. Discarded distillate. My people. A continent that seems to love human sacrifice. Aztec ruins of the Chrysler building. West of the West. Abendland. Continent of the slain.
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