A bundle of wind will blow God’s underwear all over the blue grass. Do you even know how to eat a horse? You fry it up in pig fat and add a lot of salt; then you watch a movie with your dad. “But if you’re not a spaceship, how can I ever fall in love with you?” “The truth involves innumerable shakes bullied into phantoms of the inconceivable – / trepanning the subconscious,” that is, “I’ve got only one memory: Hamlet’s yawn – / a song to be cutting up with a pair of scissors,” “Male & female we unmask the ghoon to an inch of his core/ & I warn’t myself as I opened the door.” Who would win in a fistfight, Romney or Obama? Wait, so like, there are other people out there having fantasies about checking the world into the psych ward? Such human-technology relations are often simple – seeing through eyeglasses, nailing with hammers, negotiating doorways while wearing long-feathered hats. See? – I have no horizon! Examples of me penetrate as far as atmosphere. It appears to vanish. In some tales Kutkh is explicitly created by a Creator and lets the dawn onto the earth by chipping away at the stones surrounding her. In others he creates himself (sometimes out of an old fur coat) and takes pride in his independence from the Creator. In some, Kamchatka is created as he drops a feather while flying over the earth. In others, islands and continents are created by his defecation, rivers and lakes out of his waters. The difficult volcanic terrain and swift rivers of Kamchatka are thought to reflect Kutkh’s capricious and willful nature.
#154
FINDING YOUR OWN NAME
Finding
your own level of hell with cultural
signifiers glowing in
the lamplight
giving a safe suntan both
opaque and transpárent-in-a started
picture
of-your-fírst - bánd in a hip commúnity-where áll will be one
-
foréver-in-a whóle-new-cán
better-than-a-dog with a túrnip-and-a bée in the building collecting
money-for-the-French -
overcapacitátion-of-a-secret stár on a
favorite yacht on a ledgelike evening
telling your stories through me
and so on. Push your face up against the window on a dark night & a rain of silent fleamarket objects drifts down slowly through this space like the index of some unreliable past: ashtrays of all types & sizes; geranium in a terracotta pot; thousands of 45rpm records; stones off a beach; money & playing cards; the dustjackets of library novels 1956; black French knickers waist 24; cheap tickets all colours; suits, hats & shoes; bruised cricket ball, seams worn; a porcelain globe five inches diameter bearing a complex design of leaves & tendrils in delft blue; small chest of drawers, veneered; bicycle tire, gentleman’s silver cigarette case, national insurance card: all gravityless & wreathed in Christmas lights like strands of weed underwater. One night you hear Frank Sinatra behind a door to another room. Go the next night, nothing. You turn up your collar in the rain. The card in the window says open but the door is always closed. Ask around, no one remembers seeing the owner. No dust on anything. Open book, indelible pencil on a bit of string. “Sign in here.”
[Note: Sources: Laura Tanne, “The Loot”, as quoted in Franklin Rosemont, Joe Hill: The IWW & The Making of a Revolutionary Workingclass Counterculture; Gahiji Abafu, “The World Around Me” (tr. Matthew Savoca), at New World Poetry, 29 Aug 012; William Keckler, “But …”, at Joe Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 29 Aug 012; Noel Black, “Lord Jim Thompson”, “Huckleberry Finnegans Wake,” in Uselysses, as quoted in Josh Cook, “Black declares, in an almost off-handed way, that poetry can’t do anything important”: A Review of Noel Black’s Uselysses”, at Harriet, 29 Aug 012; Kyle Kramer, “QUESTION OF THE DAY - WHO WOULD WIN IN A FIST FIGHT, OBAMA OR ROMNEY?”, at Vice, 29 Aug 012; Bookbat, at The Bookbat, 29 Aug 012; JBR; Don Ihde, Bodies in Technology; Jack Collom and Lyn Hejinian, “Kindness”, in Situations, Sings; Wikipedia, “Kutkh” (another animal god for Rebecca Loudon); Jackson Mac Low, “#154”, in 154 Forties, as quoted in Jerome Rothenberg, “Jackson Mac Low: A Poem from 154 Forties, with the Foreword by Anne Tardos”, at Jacket2, 29 Aug 012; JBR; M John Harrison, “Little Shop of Anxieties”, at The M John Harrison Blog, 28 Aug 012]