telling himself he’s game she tells herself the same, exfoliant détente postponed
by the awkwardness and drink t'at finally, stirred to a boil, occasion the imbroglio.
Though the strife is endless and the bloodletting most tremendous
they remain close and talk on the phone most weekends—skirting a disaster.
Keith Carradine is Playing at My House
2.
After nothing there is something irreversible. Afraid to touch, contaminate
as with these turdblossom homicides of courageouslesness, weeping, theatrical.
First there was Fred then there was The Dead. We stood no chance—
when one dreams of father one dreams of not being saved from monsters.
There was a song my father loved. Harry Chapin. “Cats in the Cradle.”
When one dreams of son one dreams of that song, now, mellow yellow,
as though it were your own very deathbed poking fun through a taper;
knowing, of course, that you are loved, not knowing if that is enough.
And every father afraid of the monster, luggage monster, or baggage we mean.
Like Adam into the apple, watching evolution worm a meathook
wondering if he did anything right at all or if that is even ever determinable,
most fathers having all these rings in them like trees.
We never intend to break one another’s hearts having been defending our own—
still we do a favour to our blood by refusing it its earned oblivion.
The dream of the avatar, a morphology of sleepmaps, and a lover shapeshifts
in a bed not yet determined by the mass of intent, a prickly wound there, a pearl
stuck in the riverbed, memory, like an embarrassing Trilobite.
Here there is a coming together. A nest is improvised of computer part debris.
Anyone at all. Put them aside and fall asleep into them.
Centrifugally, as water through a drain. Someone. Anyone. Always a transference or
a fundamental deadlock, fridge door bolted. Unauthorized object, frigidaire!
Nobody has to wake up from here and apologize, waking the crimson maps.
A nest in dream, where we meet the first literary descriptions of ourselves together
and the last, also. A nest of broken sprockets and compromised outlets, a den.
Prospective multiverses of unaccountable irradiation, integers left to no account,
no communication at the entry or exit, the place of the dead and their prospectum.
But life is just a dream and the dream is just a dream and I am just you
and you are just Chew, neither created nor destroyed, not exactly void.
4.
As prescribed is the datalessening parlance to which [...]
our discourse in suspenders accustoms. A series of plasterform beagles guard the mantle.
We get away with this talking into the wee hours, barcalounging
until the cavity doctor, fastening that glove, go get himself a peek under the sundial.
The alcoholic poacher compromises his donkey in the Bresson:
matchcutting bounces his promise never again to fall into the bottle off the thwack of
the next drink served.
He is eddying, as in Heidegger, is he not? are we not, dear? ever more cutting
off our supplylines, discontinuity of roots, a dark film over everything.....
How many times does this petty domestic dispute cycle around to the same tired
things? like Zarathustra and his ‘damned monkeys,’ like the stars inhaled then exhaled
where Our World’s Children can hear us fighting through the plasterform
and walls and the midday gridlock of carpools, spermatozoon out into the inward thrush.
Then at once there are new possibilities for the fowl here between blister and nervebeat
and intrigues beneath this sheath of ice—this Antarctica here before us—
