“Then a dark explosion sounded, a light flashed in the middle of the tube scaffolding, a cloud boiled up, some invisible power exploded the scaffolding, easily raising its first level, and the tubes flew up thick from the construction, higher and higher, and when the power which threw these spears started to weaken, the tubes waited in the air, then fell back, and poured down on the area, and the spears became branchy trees, and half of the construction collapsed, and the other half separated from the statue, standing like a ski-jump, it hesitated for a while, and it did not fall down just then. And the statue now stood stripped, stronger and more powerful than ever, it bent forward a bit, as if threatening the city, above whose rooftops now the pressure of the explosion rolled along, easily ringing the bell, and waving the mason’s clothes like a flag.” But now for the important news. Hello Kitty is not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature. She does have a pet cat of her own, however, and it’s called Charmmy Kitty. Mickey Mouse is not a mouse. If you look very closely at him, you can see that he wears gloves. Mice do not have the capability, nor the desire, to put gloves on their hands. He also is depicted wearing a pair of shorts with large buttons, which a mouse would be unable to fasten given its mental limitations, not to mention the fact that it has claws without opposable thumbs. Furthermore, the viewer should not be misled into thinking that Mickey is a mouse because he uses the name “Mouse.” This is merely Mr. Mouse’s surname, and is not intended to confer any mouselike qualities upon him. If you met a man who was named, say, Alan Bird, you would not assume that he was a member of the avian family, even if he happened to have a beak instead of the traditional mouth-and-nose combination seen in most humans, would you? Scooby-Doo is not a dog. Granted, he does have the comportment and vocal characteristic of a canine, but this is, in fact, the tragic consequence of a botched elective surgery that Scooby underwent at the hands of his friend Shaggy, who was briefly enrolled in a plastic-surgery program at a medical school that he no longer attends. Winnie the Pooh is not a bear. Winnie is actually a young man who dresses up as a bear in order to humor his friend Christopher Robin. The most conclusive evidence for this is the fact that Winnie is capable of speaking fluently in the English language, which has, thus far, eluded the grasp of the entirety of the bear population. Winnie’s contemporaries Eeyore, Piglet, and Tigger are all part of the same role play that was created for Mr. Robin’s sake. Why exactly these four men choose to wear these costumes for Christopher is unclear, but it has been speculated that they may owe him money from gambling debts. Those were glamorous days. Clues to kill moles came in the form of crossword puzzle answers in The New York Times. So Will Shortz (or whoever held the job then) was a secret agent man? The cold war was designed to make even children paranoid. It worked. If you caught your best friend scraping uranium off the glowing dials of alarm clocks, you wondered. When President Jimmy Carter killed that … well, his damaged eyelids had to be replaced with tender skin from his own penis. Now when he closes his eyes and sleeps and dreams his eyeballs swell like ping pong balls. Pink person who is pink gunk in a picture disturbs me so pleasantly human being like an eraser maybe punk your pink junk you want to gnaw on its ears very much like an eraser its lobes insensate like a brain feel no pain of this pink gunk person oh punk rock like a masochist dwelling on a pink burnt-out planet here, take a pink bite of a tongue sandwich a fleshy excision oh wobbly I had seen what I feared was a piece of me, but my tongue thrashed then and flipped it, threw it away, and I realized (Thank Giant Piece of Me Above!) that it wasn’t a part of me at all, it was just some gunk that somehow related to Daido Moriyama. YouTube just recommended this to me. It knows I am only at home inside a tree. I feel so alone when I realize nobody is at home inside the tree. I want to put my hands through the tree holes anyway. I want to stretch parts of my existence into the tree, the special part of you that is blind and moist and wants somebody or even some animal to call it home, but then again the bird is in the tree. The squirrel is in the tree. The tree is in the tree. The supernatural is in the tree. People come to borrow things from the tree. Knock knock. At least for now. Even Gwyneth admits she loves reading it. She was so poor that the only photos she had of her kids were mug shots. These were printouts given to her by charitable souls. She put them in frames from the dollar store, and would stare at their faces during commercial breaks for her beloved Wheel of Fortune, which she watched on a t.v. that looked like the Sputnik satellite and dated from roughly that era. My favorite biographical note in the back of the mag was for that seventy-four-year old poet who was going back to school to be a pediatric nurse. It was your last trip. There I bought a cup of Sylvia Plath and also a book of pure Letter shop that of course I asked back to smell what you smelled few months before you leave. You were right: their lives are bright. You were right when you said that they are happy, they are one of the reasons why our name continues to deserve such affection. Aitana is very intelligent, Bidane is shy and ask me to play doctor but in the end do not have time: what it could be found here, and how children could have imagined illnesses diagnosed. Just as well, I say. Just as well. But we played, and we eat fajitas, and laughed with bellies air in a country that is too clean to be real. Carol directs us to the river and prepares breakfast. David tells us secrets that I understand and I tell her secrets he understands, then I do not feel as bad as when they were just in my head. I look at them and are happy. I approach Ibrah. I say very attached to her cheek and looking anxiously towards them: It sounds so beautiful then, outside, is pure horror. I have to show you the pot of colorful straws with which we fed to the sick. I have to admit that the mourners are very tender sip sip sip she does not like the color yellow because yellow straws taste bad. On the way back she showed me a big wet grey toad. We stared at it till I couldn’t see it any more. Then it jumped. I thought of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, how there is One who leads, & another who looks back (wet hair & broad shoulders) to see if another follows. But then I very often think of that. Perhaps this was at last the right time to think of it, though there had been right times before, & will be after. The right time is more frequent than I think. Even the toad had something to speak: Alchemy is the science of finding the right year to be born. What reckoners we are! Runs hits & errors. Secrecy of the pitcher’s mound, the Magus of Tiphareth rears back & hurls. Yesod’s last chance to knock it over the fence, perimeter, parameter, paramita, into, Malkuth, the actual world. In the shell of the catcher’s mitt, demonmask of his tantric form, the Qlipoth wait. So KILL ME WHILE / began to kill one of many centuries, / after seventy, after five hundred, / have to see how far I get killed by the thousands in every corner, / on every holiday, / how to make wages and bones gallon I remain, / how to make dungeons to put somewhere in my pants, / and how to take turns between fat and fat to / see what eye I die first, / but it is / increasingly’m more one of the other, / … / which have increasingly more light, more birds, more flowers on the aim, / that each [untranslatable] anymore elegantly between the irons and summers, / and sometimes they say ‘I wonder to me- / if they no change had better polish and all, / to walk step by step, down lights, / or buy a new blood, / blood cleaner for use on holidays and Sundays. Does that make their engravings less beautiful? Maybe. It seems to me the relationship between beauty and destruction is fairly complicated. As a friend of mine said of the elm bark beetles, “Thank goodness their gallery art leaves us something to marvel at, since there are so few elms left.” Not only is the moon and dew or light blue birds, can also be an old sandal, all bored, all but dead after walking factories, scaffolding and hot roads or hard, I have seen horrible gray earth guys like eating dirt, I have seen there, with his rags and dirt, crawling, and I played, caressing her skin and become angels, butterflies, in September wind.
[Note: Sources: Bohumil Hrabal, The Betrayal of Mirrors, quoted in Studiolum, comment appended to “Colossus”, at Poemas del río Wang, 30 Aug 014 (hat tip John Armstrong!); JBR; Christine R Yano, and Colin Stokes, quoted in Stokes’ “The Truth About Hello Kitty”, at The New Yorker, 29 Aug 014; William Keckler, “Old School Terror”, “Eyelids”, “Pink Gunk Person”, “Piece of Me”, “Daido Moriyama”, “Home”, “The Supernatural”, “Do You Know About Thug Kitchen?”, “Poverty is Valor”, “My”, at John Brainard’s Pyjamas (The Sequel), 31 Aug 014; Luna Miguel, “August trips (II): Munich” (tr. Google), “I’m talking about” (tr. Google), at Luna Miguel, 28 & 21 Aug 014; Robert Kelly, “An Alchemical Journal (2)”, at Nomadics, 31 Aug 014; JBR; Dardo Sebastián Dorronzoro, “Kill Me While” (tr. Google), at Colectivo Ex Presos Pol.Y Sobrevivientes – Rosario, 31 Aug 014 (“Born in 1913. 25th June 1976 was abducted by a Task Force of the Armed Forces. His home in the La Loma, Luján.”), and “Affidavit” (tr. Google), at Wikipedia; Jody Gladding, quoted in Jen Bervin, “Three Dimensions: Jody Gladding on translation, the sources of language, and how beetles can speak of longing”, at Poetry Foundation, 20 Aug 014]