I wake up and the room is strewn with bones.
All of mine are still inside me, but there’s a rumpled pile of flesh
in the bed next to me, splatters of red all over the wall
the film camera in the corner knocked on its side and recording
With the zygote of first thought came a host
of consequence, gatherers plant seeds
in brutish light, invent furrows and farming
women told to bathe in the Elysian fields
no man on earth,
no matter how large and strong he is
is able to slowly suffocate me
by taking over my lungs from the inside,
the way the disease inside of me can
the river Flurp when mentioned
may call up images and sounds
which combined may not be deemed
fit for polite conversation
as well as etiquette-related criticism
“Why? Why do I want power? What good can come from controlling people? I suppose there is both a simple conclusion and a complex conclusion. To satisfy the feeble mind of a nonagenarian–”
My words went through the man like a pin through the skin of a balloon. He bounced off the tent’s canvas walls, the air whooshing out of him as he tried to outshout me. “I am famous and feared, and you are nothing,” he sputtered.
The customer’s face lit up with wonder. Ryan wrote the sentence down with a ballpoint pen on a small sheet of paper and autographed it. Using a wood hand stamp, he labeled his writing as Natural-Intelligence-generated work.
He bears the hallmark of the fugitive. It’s there in the eyes with their flatlined glaze, or in that slump under the kurta, yet there’s also something entitled marking him out from the other flatliners these streets specialise in.
She knew what joy was like:
a frantic fuck to summon the missing ghosts of her ancestors
those who abandoned us
we’re alone in this building of random communications
I am a famous artist who discovered in my early thirties that
drinking a full glass of a secret mixture derived from boiling
a certain OTC pill with a [name withheld] OTC ointment
for 1 hour on a low flame gave me the dexterity, vision, and stamina
to paint murals in hundreds of villages across North America.
The language is pyrotechnic, mind-expanding. With 64 poems it might be the new I-Ching, treating the dictionary like a bundle of yarrow stalks—pull carefully, you have nothing to lose but your illusion of limits.
