Or envy more? Thus, the god we inhabit banishes
scale under banner of justice-being-what-it-is as
world, what we would with it, what world we would,
would we have? Now get off your horse. Proved more
than dangerous in little time. Standish out of Masood, al-
Qaeda, a wannabe gansta' with the public will (a
determined somnambulism) "strongly" behind him,
Ashcroft sweeping across vast stretches in furious blind
pursuit of his own inadequacies, dark loathing, dread
beneath the lines.
What land? Whose?
But even his sense of his own confusion is uncertain,
vague (Where's this mad fucking hatred coming
from?), his faculties solidified into that which other-
wise would be known as an identity, the human, not
simply this excremental stalagmite cold torched like iron
to cave floor, in short someone to whom we are meant to
show deference, if only that his protestations seemed to
convince him, himself, that his vacuities were covered
in ways we knew ours never were, to satisfaction. Thus
we were given the vote and the act at the same historical
moment. In a few thousand years ol' Numb Nuts will be
going out each morning of his life to add another pelt
to his corporate belt, actually a toupee collection (he
keeps them on his desk, center spike).
So little's given us, go
take a fucking hike!
Our crusty world breaks at my feet like lobsters and
crabs with chilled white, service til dawn. The orgasm
sweeps across both hemispheres with its little sleeping feet
releasing orgone at every step (where sky's orange comes
from), in a ballet of existence, entering a state where mists,
hugging the surface, brighten even as they slide off into
deepest space, to entail the stars. What molecule gone up,
forever deferred, the sweet juice that never reaches gut
of satisfaction but that there is not, in such sweetness, a
fatality, the presence of all we have lost, are losing, can
anticipate ourselves in the absence of. This is the
name of the most difficult in several incarnations.
They had not yet left the ships, in fact, when Standish
began ripping off the local populus, a breed just below
the Spanish cur, these things are MEANT to slide by on
their bellies, anyway, it's good fortune nobody's
here, the only truth is in my hand, echoes the heart the
head, distance called lost (Whose land? What caves?)
Man's natural state IS darkness, And the sooner you
realize THAT, the sooner you'll take that joint outta your
mouth and help us develop calibrations for the NOTION of
lethality based on the stratification of radical dispersals, at
once supple AND nuanced! Dig? Only error's margin keeps
us alive any moment to the next. By this, I mean nothing
fancy, breathing as though you've done it all your life,
matching your intent to theirs, notching it up.
The design at once so grand and meagre that the sheer
scale of its indifferentiation is dazzling, looking down,
what could they have been thinking, raising such towers
into such a sky? The state of Texas, one big motherfucking
thumb, zero minus one, a dimension both vast and vague
(i.e., there's little room in all that space) yet with an edge
that'll open bone on its first pass, or when it rises, sun over
sill of such a world with the mind of a machine, it will
tend to make you recalibrate your response, before
proceeding, . . . straight on.
Cut twice, then measure.
So much is given. He who says otherwise belies the
human, reveals his life for the shabby dissemblance
it is, the glint in his eye all abdication all the time, 24-
7, until he thought this is what he'd read about and
dreamed about, adult existence, sadly toxic, a quiet
dance in the enervating drift we know as contemporary
culture, life, what do I care?, but never the measure, thumb
as jewel in hand, something for the pen or brush or wand
instead of neck. Something for the hammer and dick for
Christ's sake! Star in its socket, the hand's grave, rhymes
with prophet who proceeds I am he in whose forest there is
great need, confusion the master, columns of petrified
trees, eyes swinging from god to god. The mind's socket,
obsidian, mirrors the hand's, but its jewel cannot so easily
be discerned.
Skip Fox was recently in Ambit, Sugar Mule, Poetic Inhalation, Tarpaulin Sky, Big Bridge, Hamilton Stone Review, Malleable Jungle, Black Box, eratio, Gestalten, House Organ, Word for/Word, moria, Fuck, and Dirty Swamp. Previously in Talisman, Hambone, lower limit speech, Exquisite Corpse, sendecki.com, etc. Four chapbooks. (Bloody Twin, Oasis, Auguste), one book (Potes & Poets), and one in press (Ahadada). In a couple anthologies including Another South: Experimental Writing in the South (U of Alabama P). Book of poetry due out this summer from Ahadada Books.