A God Fearing Man’s Guide to the Complete History ofWoodrow Wilson’s Final Days in the Valley
This man is the professor of fine things. This man is Au, Fe and Cu. This man is the President. This man is a preacher. This man is nineteen-eighteen by nineteen twenty-one. This man is Governor for God’s sake. This man is the Federal Reserve Act. This man is the Versailles Peace Conference. This man is no conquest. This man is no dominion. This man is no desire. This man is the lucrative lug nut. This man is a reliable brand of chewing gum. This man is the three hundred and fifty seventh recipient of the Best Posture Award. This man looks like a communist reading at sea, background of waves and blue and thumbprints of white. This man is Spend $15 and Receive a Free Glass, a $5 Value. This man is the noose around the criminal and the author, the felon. They have his vertical leap on display, transcribed on a peach basket, on top of a granite pedestal in William Lee Hall, Davidson College, North Carolina. This man is the beautiful rush of a distant narcotic beach: tides of addicts of methadone, hyper speed and cigarettes beat themselves with their sharpened bones until the sun whips them back to their caves and huts where they have endless sex and observe how the night sky peels the hours slow. This man is a best-selling erotica novel. They say his roommate at boarding school was a Kennedy conspiracy theorist. This man is a name he acquired from town hall assemblies in Iowa also the same place where they branded him the man who drank five hours in four calories to which he replied in voracious oratory, what the fucking shit? They sealed his image for seventeen years on tape and showed the film at the ice cream social on the June-day parking lot of the prototype for a Pro-Wilson Presbyterian church in the city limits of Omaha, Nebraska, it was 1994 by then. He storms out the toilet with pants around ankles making locomotive vowels. He punches his mother, jabs his grandmother, stabs his father in the left leg and disassembles the family Au-en retriever into columns of shiny metals. He flounders down the hillside toward a sound that makes him think death, death, death, then Woodrow wades out like a trout cracking the river open.
Postmodern Social Quarrel
I deleted you from Facebook then I added
you back. You asked why. I said I was angry
and stupid. You said ok and logged off.
Like a broken existential toaster oven
I once again panic in the rain, lapping
every drop my metal tongue lusts. I let my
tongue do as it wants sometimes. Maybe
that’s why we ended up the way we
are now. We are two strangers in an
empty hall. Two uninterested strangers
uninterested in the cinder bricks behind
our heads that are the walls of an English
hall scared deep, deep red – the same color
I asked if your pubic hair was. That seemed
to matter on some dimension for me back
then but tiles apart our profile is now silence.
I Sit in Bracken and Think about My Life
I am four floors above, a view that makes them look like ants in wool.
It’s Monday. I return to the toll booth in my Neuron SR-X. The man
who grovels on duty looks a bit like me: stupid, facial hair that is thin
beneath the jaw, skin showing pink, and shaped like Sierra Leone.
His stupid fucking eyes are too fucking small; he has to squint at me
ensuring I’m safe and not drunk or anything, but he agrees and allows
me to roar the black-top questions again, lodging threats in daydream
skies that show rabbits lined like the gallows pole. I wander away from
the thought with waiting room music in ear, waiting for a representative
to pick up the line, then back to: once I read this manifesto penned around
Yuletide time. Its words wadded her existence north to south…I didn’t
know what to make of that. Simple as hurt people hurt people. How long
do you hurt? How deep can that muted blade cut? How does it hop through
time and space like bums grabbing free trolley rides? Will it ever dull?
Fuck it – I’ll file the claim, my address is blah. Zip code, blah, yes, blah.
I feel like the Peanuts parents are shackled in my wax and anvil. How I laugh.
I’m low enough to distract myself with only phantom views: carbon on snow
and ice, carbon manipulating movable displays, their carbon fingers flushed
like carbon flushes. My carbon forgets the month easy. My carbon consumes
the combustible. My carbon sees itself carried off to some throne of god.
