(Enter Ariel.)
PROSPERO Well, Ariel?
ARIEL Mission accomplished.
PROSPERO Bravo; good work! But what seems to be the matter? I give you a compliment and you don't seem pleased? Are you tired?
ARIEL Not tired; disgusted. I obeyed you but why not come out with it? I did so most unwillingly. It was a real pity to see that great ship go down, so full of life.
PROSPERO Oh, so you’re upset, are you! It’s always like that with intellectuals! So be it! What interests me is not your moods, but your deeds. Let’s split: I’ll take the zeal and you can keep your doubts. Agreed?
ARIEL Master, I must beg you to spare me this kind of labor.
PROSPERO (shouting) Listen, and listen well! I’ve got a job to do, and I don't care how it gets done!
ARIEL You’ve promised me my freedom a thousand times, and I’m still waiting.
PROSPERO Ingrate! And who freed you from Sycorax, may I ask? Who rent the pine in which you had been imprisoned and brought you forth?
ARIEL Sometimes I almost regret it .... After all, I might have turned into a real tree in the end .... Tree: there's a word that really gives me a thrill. I think about it a lot: palm tree -- long, high fuse topped with nonchalant, squid-like elegance. Baobab -- like the soft entrails of some monster creature. Ask the calao bird that lives a cloistered season in its branches. Or the ceiba tree -- spread out beneath the proud sun. O bird, o green mansions set in the living earth!
PROSPERO Stuff it! I don’t like talking trees. As for your freedom, you’ll have it when I'm good and ready. In the meanwhile, look after the ship. I’m going to have a few words with Master Caliban. I’ve been keeping my eye on him, and he's getting a little too emancipated. (Calling.) Caliban! Caliban! (He sighs.)
(Enter Caliban.)
CALIBAN Uhuru!
PROSPERO What did you say?
CALIBAN I said, Uhuru!
PROSPERO Back to your native language again. I’ve already told you, I don’t like it. You could be polite, at least; a simple “hello” wouldn’t kill you.
CALIBAN Oh, I forgot... But as froggy, waspish, pustular and dung-filled a “hello” as possible. May today hasten by a decade the day when all the birds of the sky and beasts of the earth will feast upon your corpse!
One of the problems with Hangman is it’s too white, isn’t it? Tupi or not tupi that is the question. In the country of the big snake. [Every country has a big snake.] [Which is why my own personal country has a gray flag.] But for ourselves, we never admitted the birth of logic. The illiterate king told him: put this on paper but without too much talk. So the loan was made. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Screenplays. Death and life of hypotheses. From the equation I coming from the Cosmos to the axiom Cosmos coming from the I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Against the vegetable elites. We already had communism. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notia
Notia Imara
Ipeju*
Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms. I asked a man what was Right. He answered me that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Galli Mathias. I ate him. Only God is the conscience of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of all living creatures. Jaci is the mother of vegetables. *“The New Moon, or the Lua Nova, blows in Everyman remembrances of me” in The Savages, by Couto Magalhaes. [Above, a million ellipses] I have a messed up ankle and I met an old witch woman who told me to walk 3 miles backwards while holding a dead fish. I don’t know why. Maybe you do.
And if I was wrong?
Test positive for
evergreen.
Extrude correlative
life studies.
Voice correspondence
ultimately.
Emit
the other dress.
Correspondences
Correlatives.
A logic of,
on or at Baudelaire’s
spread sheet,
that I’m so huge to the point of dying
like the enormous gray bear that sleeps while it walks
like the enormous black lace cloud fluttering above eyelids
like the dump truck leaking dribbles of oil in the middle of a desert
like the house with rotten stairs and six feet of dust collected in the ceiling
cloud’s nostalgia
I pulled that smelly thing
buttocks-cloud came down from the ceiling
a rope for strangling came down, but it dispersed as soon as it hanged a neck
the walls floated in air and barked
when I sang, all the sweat pores on my body salivated
It was the time before
I was born.
I was thin.
I was hungry.
Her neck was a Rembrandt made out of filth. Blood painted her teeth. Her nose had the same red, but crusts of white and brown came out of her eyes.
The Caribbean
English slaveowners
in the
nineteenth century
had injected a
chemical similar
to formic acid,
taken from two
members of the
stinging nettle
family, into the
already broken
skins of their …
A person who eats even a
small amount of the
tetrodotoxin of the
puffer fish or fungus
feels pale, dizzy, and
nauseous. Insects seem
to be crawling just
beneath the skin. The
body seems to float.
Drool drops out of the
mouth while sweat runs
out of the pores -- the
body is deserting the …
… recalcitrant
slaves. Ants
crawl ceaselessly
under the top
layer of skin.
And forced their
unwilling servants
to eat Jamaican
‘dumbcane’ whow
leaves, as if they
were actually tiny
slivers of glass,
irritating the
larynx and causing
local swelling,
made breathing
difficult and
speaking
impossible.
Unwilling to speak
means unable to
speak …
… body -- the head is
aching and almost no
temperature exists.
Material is cold. All
is ice. Nausea;
vomiting; diarrhoea; the
eyes are fixed; it is
almost not possible to
breathe; muscles twitch
then stop, paralyzed.
Unable to move you.
Eyes are glass you. The
soul lies in the eyes.
The mental faculties
remain acute until
shortly before death;
sometimes death does not
occur. Many many herbs.
In time, like ink on a
blotter, poison seeped
into the lives of the
whites. Poison entered
the apartments of the
bourgeoisie.
These thoughts in the sailor went round and round like hamsters strung out on dex.
[Note: Sources: Aime Césaire, The Tempest (tr. Richard Miller), at First Year Foundations; JBR; Oswaldo de Andrade, “Cannibal Manifesto” (trs. Mary Ann Caws and Claudia Caliman), at Exquisite Corpse 11; JBR; “Prophetic Dirge”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 26 DEC 014; Marjorie Welish, “from ‘The Same’”, in In the Futurity Lounge, at Coffee House Press; Kim Hyesoon, “The Way Mommy Bear Eats a Swarm of Fire Ants”, “Cloud’s Nostalgia”, in Sorrowtoothpaste Mirrorcream (tr. Don Mee Choi), at Asymptote; Linda Hogan, “Tear”, at Poetry Foundation; Kathy Acker, quoted in David Mertz, “Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless. Grove Press, New York, 1988”, at Gnosis Software, Inc. (pretty much as formatted by cutnpaste)]
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