Child Among Metal Sculptures

Roll the metal sculptures out;

Shake out their gnarled limbs;

Loosen their terrible torsos;

Let the air be filled with horrible clankings;

Let it grow rank with sulphur smells

And be splattered with blue bruises and yellow flames.

True they scare the children,

But the tortured faces are necessary I’m afraid

And digestible if spied from the laced shadows

Under the trees of a bright afternoon.

Unfold your hand dear one

And you will find in it the curled nature of all beginnings,

Pink and shy,

Longing, perhaps, for the absence of light.

The boy’s copper hair is like a mist covered sun,

Such a bold red to be exhibited before these consuming engines.

Keep him back here, behind us,

Where his eyes, round as moons,

Can examine the grass and bits of stick, his playthings.

Ours are gone now,

But this boy, see how grave he is, see his pale, shining skin.

No human heart can resist him,

None can avoid becoming victims of his loveliness, his beauty.

Famous

Famous is embalmed;

Famous is ringed round by a sunami of malignant mirrors;

Famous is insane but every one pretends you’re not;

Famous is main lining false epiphanies;

Famous is gargling a tall glass of your own piss.

Famous begins with advice, ends up with egotistical moralism;

Famous is fitted for a suit of historically acceptable megalomanias;

Famous is Vladimir

Become a Barbie doll for the Russian Chamber of Commerce;

Famous is when they pin medals on your naked chest

But you don’t bleed cause you are dead;

Famous is the nose hook pushed up

And the brains pulled out on the mortician’s tray;

Famous is a dance of corpses where every one claps

But secretly they are horrified.

This is why I want to be famous;

Hungry ghost, stapled stomach,

Rolled out thin on a thousand pound press;

Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

My Boss

My boss is a pear shaped manikin,
Fiery martian face,
Metal wheels spitting sparks, bits of concrete,
Racing corridors searching out miscreants with her X ray vision.

My boss is a victim of brain fever,
Inflammation of the pancreas;
Evenings she receives messages from distant planets,
Wears chain mail underwear, dresses cut from sheets of aluminum.
Her desk drawers are stuffed with death warrants, charred writs of Habeas Corpus.

Listen up she says,
Swinging a steel hip,
Reconstructed from the pistons of an amputated locomotive;
‘Now hear this!’ she says, chrome fingers flailing titanium armpits.
‘Didn’t I say?’

But she’s in a good mood this morning,
Smile a phalanx of filed incisors.

‘Listen!’ she says,
Milk of human kindness filling her wild red eyes;
‘Listen!’ she says. ‘Let’s be reasonable.’

Theorists

The Parisians hated the watery rice,

Lack of wine, civilized amenities;

The marshes were stinking sinkholes;

The muddy fields execrable abominations.

They have friends, they said,

Who would gladly replace them with statues and fountains.

‘And you, my good man,’ they said to me,

‘are a depraved rustic, a semi literate bumpkin.’

Which is true.

Then they smoked opium and entered a trance.

I dug a new drainage ditch and composed six poems.

Upon awaking they snorted cocaine

And fondled one another’s genitals.

Afterwards they left in a railway car

Painted with scenes of ancient cathedrals.

I still love Marcel Proust and Charles Baudelaire,

But can find no solace in semiotics or hyper intellection.

They left behind four thousand books, which,

In an inquisitorial mood, I tossed into the fire.

Now the cabin is warm as toast

And in the mists above the dugout my visitor’s ghosts

Are suspended in a passion of disbelief and weeping.

The next day I leapt through my left earlobe

And came out the other side processed in stainless steel.

I lay upon a bed of nitrogen

Covering myself with plutonium rods.

Of course my earrings were of human flesh but no matter.

And yet when I looked through my enhanced eyeballs

I saw the world exactly as I saw it before!

All that and still rolling in the human bubble!
All that and my nose still exactly eighty-seven degrees from my left eye socket!