Could it be “The Insecticide In Him”? “The miracle is not to fly in the air, nor to walk on the water, but to walk on the earth.” And if you’ve got none of those things going, but you can hum a little, just hit “Tap Here” in the center of the screen and go for it. You get about 15 seconds, and the longer you sing, the better chance you have of finding the song. Our heart’s like the terrier who checks the woodpile over and over for years because once he saw there the shining vole. I am expecting a Tiger Balm intervention any day now. Your bird jangles. I guess someone is a king of France & apart from whom nobody is a king of France in the logical world in which I like to play with the toxic halos. But of course I was born in captivity, having fucked the right people. So tell me, Sun, was it Frank O’Hara or Kenneth Koch? The bottle broke in your bag & you’re getting flammable, very flammable. I have a thousand robots with knitted shawls. Here is what else happened, according to my text message draft notes: “Hometown jigsaw and orbitwheels. The keep-yr-distance-bug-vacuum. Jimmycake benedict.” I only remember what the last one means, because the last one is about food (I raise my hand when Mike Young asks, “Who ganked their metaphors from commercials?”). Don’t need to know, need to relax. In tablet 70, a walrus. A severed walrus head. Originally, this cost US$2.50, but I paid many times that, a dear price, yet a reasonable price for us.
I can do anything
with money
I’ll show you
If you give me the money
I too believe
in rivers
over slogans
define employed
I’m working
on carving
through the earth
my desire-map
Gretel is not among us, never having made it out of the woods. But Hedda Hopper did. Frozen with the admittedly irrational thought that I would be condemned to live in the basement of a mansion on Jupiter Island, along with the rest of Celine Dion’s immigrant wait staff, but that I alone would be ordered to purify her swimming pool under a full moon, while dressed in polka-dotted Speedos, I pressed the red panic button that is hidden under the rug. Suddenly, Manhattan was a desert island dotted with red palm trees and a row of deserted shake shacks modeled after Mitt Romney’s station wagon, complete with red, white, and blue marquees featuring Irish setter logos — a site-specific installation. A band of masked Neanderthals known as “the merry shoppers” wandered in and out of the mall, clutching small pink bags marked “small pink bags.” It wasn’t clear that anything was in them. Professor Hopper slowly adjusted her wire-rimmed glasses with dark insets, and looked up. The air grew still. “It’s as plain as the smirky smug on Donald Trump’s puffy, lying face. To quote Mr. Stella: “What you see is what you see.’ I see the obvious, my sweet darlings. Don’t you?” Dr. Hopper leaned forward. “Soon, you too will be able to connect the dots, all 900 million of them.” On the edge of the lawn four pink noses lit up and buzzed, while a jellyfish went electric. Everyone, it seems, was at the same convocation. I volunteered there, I know their sleep cycles. They move in a giant circle, slowly consuming the color red in the three identical murals, and Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. It’s a theater and they were eating cockroaches. Is it all elegy? Boko Haram bombs kill at least 140 in Kano. Pass me my anvil and thread. We were born at the bottom of a lake. We were born on a subway car in shit city. We smell like all of the trash in that corporate tax haven Delaware. … 1966: The Director of the Museum (largest collection of Dada in the world) out on the steps, wringing his hands, almost in tears, only too anxious to please: “Why are you doing this? We haven’t done anything…” The group, unheard of before this, called BLACK MASK… Next, early one morning, black balaclava hoods pulled down to their eyes, cracked rictus skulls skewered on stakes, BLACK MASK, swollen to 15, marched from Canal Street down Lower Broadway to Wall Street. Throwaways reading Traders in stocks and bones shriek for New Frontiers … Bull markets of murder deal in a stock exchange at death … WALL STREET IS WAR STREET … The cops and the overdressed corporation errand boys plain dumbfounded; the only people to get really uptight were, predictably enough, alas, a group of straight proles … We think how can we explode this? Forget it. The barbarian is a fake barbarian. I have said of being fine, There is good news and there is bad news. There is bad news and there is good news. There is good news and there is good news. There is bad news and there is bad news. Like the ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing? Don’t you just love burning magnesium & being blind? Why must you shake down mercury? Spit in the Lock and the knob turns. This is the shampoo I use to wash my hair a-mornings. Everything is quiet in the moat. I thought, blobs a-flashing, what does that look like in my brain.
[Note: SPD Spring 012 catalog #7. Sources: JBR; Stacy Gnall, as quoted in Jeffrey McDaniel, “Stacy Gnall”, at Harriet, 26 Apr 010; “Chinese Proverb”, tagline at The Drift Record / Julia Larios; Michelle Schusterman, “iPhone app figures out what song is stuck in your head”, at Matador Network, 21 Jan 012; Landon Godfrey, “Vole”, at Asheville Poetry Review 19; Molly McAleer, “Item of the Day”, at Hello Giggles, 21 Jan 012; Judith Goldman, “rotten oasis”, at Poetry Foundation; JBR; Alina Gregorian, “Bark Flies Over Nebraska”, at Glitterpony 13; Mike Young, “dead auxiliaries in heaven, opportunistic comedians in the basement”, at Dragonfly on a Dogchain, 21 Jan 012; JBR; Mike Young, “Oh No: That’s So Cool”, at Coconut 13; James Grinwis, “A New Alchemy”, at Tryst 3; James Grinwis, “Exhibit of Forking Paths”, at La Petite Zine; Geof Huth, “The Regeneration of Rae Armantrout out of What Rae Armantrout Would Eventually Become”, at dbqp, 21 Jan 012; Sampson Starkweather, “From La La La”, at Glitterpony 13; John Yau, “The Immaculate Conception of Damien Hirst”, at Hyperallergic, 21 Jan 012; Cynthia Arrieu-King, “Against the Sight of People Eating Spaghetti with Red Sauce”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Steven Shaviro, “Carl Freedman, The Age of Nixon”, at The Pinocchio Theory, 21 Jan 012; William Keckler, “Healthy Choice”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 21 Jan 012; Gabriel Blackwell, “Why Blockbusters Don’t Exist”, at Big Other, 21 Jan 012; David Batty and Monica Mark, “Scores killed in terrorist attacks in Nigeria”, at Guardian, 21 Jan 012; Ben Mirov, “#000”, at Glitterpony 13; Lyndsey Cohen, “Tonight There Will be a Revival”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; Ron Hahne, Ben Morea, and the Black Mask Group, Black Mask and Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, as quoted in Matt Applegate, “Wall Street is War Street”, at Prodigies & Monsters, 21 Jan 012; Emily Pettit, “Hostile and Aggressive Feelings”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR; JBR, but see dp1974, “The ‘Strange Sounds’ YouTube Meme: Apocalypse? HAARP? Or Viral Marketing?”, at Disinformation, 21 Jan 012 (HAARP = High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program); Bruce Covey, “Plating 1.0”, “Reveal 41: Work”, at Glitterpony 13; Andrew Leland, “Spit in the Lock”, at Everyday Genius, 16 Jan 012; Andrew Morgan, “Lent”, at Glitterpony 13; Heather Christle, “Saturday”, at Glitterpony 13; JBR]
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