from COLUMNAR TRANSPOSITIONS
from COLUMNAR TRANSPOSITIONS
Columns āA,ā āB,ā and āIā have previously appeared in the anthology Expat 5.
COLUMN āLā
SIGNS : She Isnāt Going Nowhere Soon. āOnline dating is like a first person shooter, but for women,ā he said. She got up, went to the kitchen for lemonade, added ice to the juice-jug, came back to the living room, and poured it all over his head and lap. Then she banged out the kitchen door and into her beaten car, drove off giving the finger to the shirtless wet guy in the doorway. She drove around all night watching neon morph into a thousand shapes and listening to Gethsemane Delusion on the radio. Itās blackened death metal with killer guitar riffs arcane like something even Aleister Crowley was afraid to read. The streets were laid out like a microchip no they werenāt. She got a butter pecan ice cream cone and a 40-ounce of Carling Black Label and drove out to Science Hill and saw a man on an ATV with a nude woman clinging to his back. She was wearing only a silver motorcycle helmet. The Lemonade Girl sat and watched the naked woman disappear and she drank 20 of the 40 and nervously shredded up Burger King receipts strewn around the inside of the beaten car. Online dating was not like a first person shooter. It was like a lottery for monster people. Cute goblin girls teasing men in skimpy outfits. Zombies in couples therapy. Mummy divorce. Werewolf dates, Dracula blood is a āred flagā in the lingua franca of the single girl on okcupid. Giant women, 500 feet tall, on Tinder swiping right on King Kong. Guinness Records Often Win The Height Sight: GROWTHS : Generally, Rental Owners Wonāt Trade Home Steps. The Church Janitor as a kid wanders around the neighborhood picking up pieces of trash on the sidewalks. He has this thing where he canāt help but pick up paper that has writing on it. He has to see what was written there. His eyes drink alphabets. His pockets are filled with notes and grocery lists left behind. The geology of the city, outcroppings of refuse. Broken fences, upper tree branches growing outside the yard. Moms with big feet watch the kids playing in the paved-over playground where knees are flayed of skin, kids skidding to a stop on their knees. Kids biting the dust, gums full of gravel. The Civil War memorial statue watches from the square. They say you can tell how the officer died by how many of the horseās hooves are touching the ground. Four: he died in bed. Three: he died of war wounds but later. Two: he died in battle. Bullets fly like someone laid everything over with quadrille paper and plotted straight flight lines. Kids buy chocolate milk and candy from the corner store. Someone sleeping turns over in the cardboard box. They know what life is. Cats seek for skunks. Hydrants get fixed. Springtime pimps glide in old salt-bottom cars. Sample Year, Most Pussy Trained Over Many Seasons : SYMPTOMS : Say, You Might Put Two On Magenta, Sir. The gay parts of the dream bookstore, the majority of the aisles, are wreathed in shadow, while the hetero corner-section is well lit with track lighting. Thereās a book there with selections from āGeorge Bat Eye.ā Get all caught up with the āBat Eyeā kids. Did you get enough horror to eat? Itās the difference between an eye jumping from video cliff to video cliff, a dexterous goat clinging to rock-sides. Static-scabs on the video skin surface. Auto-mute automatically. Selective mutism of the children impedes murder investigations, must haul in the estranged father who, paradoxically, the kids will ātalk near.ā You have 24 hours to figure out whatās wrong with the digital recording device ā why all the menus are blank. No replacement. The kids whisper about the shadow woman. She matches some of the fact pattern, enough to make you wonder about the missing box of bullets. The sike-ologist suggests sheās a coping mechanism to avoid admitting the true suspect into the shared consciousness tank. On episode 14 of the true crime podcast she is nothing more than a background sound effect lurking that makes you sit up out of bed in a garment of terror-sweat after the day-mare nap. You fell asleep 1/2-way during episode 2 and the podcast just went on autopilot for hours like a slowly leaking pipe. You heard it all but only on a less-than-conscious wavelength. Therefore she owns you and you donāt even know what she is. Can All Necromancers Catch Enigma Rats?
COLUMN āOā
REAL : Ready, Eventually A Light. Through prism threads the sunlight plays. Light is a thing that canāt be seen itself, only through reflections and scattered wavelengths testifying to substance and matter. The orb weaverās webs outside my window are so omnidirectional in a profusion of angles that the sun will reflect tiny prisms from them all day as it arcs across the sky. The object field disguises a deeper truth, sunlight mysterious yet plaine to all eyes, John Donne, Satire III. The sunbeam reflecting off the surface of a twirling vinyl record, the greatest hits of the Jakob Boehme Jam Band, etching a spinning vortex of fire on the wall. The onliest gospel. Iām trying to tell you. The sun is a god you canāt look at, fire and lightbulbs are angels: light sources illumination is taken for granted religion. I always wanted to steal the promethean fire of a poetās authority and write Lucretius, imprint my science on the iron sword of a new empire. But my science is delusion, a harpy of the underworld. Figment-imp overrunning the sorcererās laboratory: the worried rabbi in his study looks over his shoulder at the diabolical grackle perched on his telescope aimed at Saturn. I am a Kabbalah casualty as you shall see.Ā Very Imaginative Risks, That Undermine A Learner : VIRTUAL : Vortices In Rapallo Treason, Ultimately Applied Later. Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot built a dam, and I will have to go further upstream towards the Romantic 19th century to Wordsworth, although I have preferred the first hidden eddies of the modern found in Byron and Keats so far. Or is that glimmer of modernism, prematurely detected, an optical illusion cast by the water playing on the rocks and pebbles of the streambed. Extended metaphors from nature snap like the elastic twig flexed too far. The Church Janitor read Hugh Kennerās book on Pound and drowned in lexical flux. Phlox. Beeās legs over-encrusted with pollen the color of saffron. If I knew the Greek or Chinese I would fling those chunky missiles (rhymes with smiles) at you, those quotation-tiles from other languages. Ezraās web: another orb weaver trying to throw a net over all the countries of the globe like a sweater over a shivering child. He was trying to get beyond the poetic unit, the building block of the phrase, to something innate and historically foundational in language. I revert to dichotomies whereby nature excludes its opposite which is human culture. Nature poetry I have hated but after shackles are knocked loose from the eyes and heart it is something to love. You go out into nature and get a mosquito bite, you carry it back within the home and itch hours later: the natural world is with you, even within your civilization. Boundary-drawers, those who try to put nature into enclosures like me, are apt to be defeated since nature contains it all in actuality. I tweeted out nature and put my face into a book. I went into the backyard and saw the glorious landscape with its many layers of hillsides growing each hazier the further from me they got. And a demon whispered to me to take a picture, go back inside into the blue biome of my wifi and show you. It is a saturnine light, a rotten light. I will translate this all into other languages and shatter it into smithereens and pass the pieces to someone millennia downstream in the future, like the exquisite Scythian comb of gold unearthed from the Solokha mound which must have straightened out so many tangled heads of jet black Slavic hair. Carving out a channel in archaeological time, golden treasureās presence longitudinal in a 4D zone of antiquity. Pound on his money tip might have dug that. Arrowhead Caches Tremble Under A Lecturer : ACTUAL : A Cunt Traded Up, At Last. She went for long walks. She walked across America, down empty highways. She slept in picnic areas. She picked up bottles and cans. She found ash-circles of old campfires. She talked with a baby in a car seat while the parents bought ice for the cooler at a convenience store. After she left, when the mother came back, she found dark fingerprints on the babyās arm and the baby never smiled again, forever. The woman caught a midnight train. The point was to go out walking but the train was fine too. On the train there were no available seats but the woman was so small she sat between two riders who didnāt even notice she was there because they were asleep. One of the riders had headphones on. Listening to something for a long time now. When they got to their destination it was sunrise and the rider with the headphones didnāt wake up. The woman wasnāt to be found either. The train conductor when he took the headphones off the manās body heard four chilling words repeated. Motivational mantra for a dead man. They were in the police station city. The sike-ologist was in the police station bathroom when the shadow woman came out of the janitorās closet and breathed in the sike-ologistās right ear. The sike-ologist swallowed his tongue and suffered a crisis of belief in the hologram-image. The hologram fled from a hundred sluice-gates into the water table. When they found the sike-ologist he was drowned in a toilet, head down, all the way down. I Made A Great Inner No-no After Revealing You.
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Cremaster 2 (full movie)
I donāt know how they made this. Iād heard about this movie project before, read about it in art magazines. Watch it before they take it down off YouTube.