Award-Winning Delights

Let's help more frail women, wearing buds in our ears and the new shoes we bought. We'll give them new names and take them to stores where they'll purchase things we've never needed, sold by brands we've never heard of. After we've delivered them back to their homes, aluminum sided behind cyclone fences, we'll compare notes, swap playlists, maybe eat something microwaved. If we have it. And we'll spend our time wondering about the whole fucking thing.

In Some New Place

I stand among the Yucca brevifolia, finally silenced
In the presence of the alien I sought.
I invite it in to work some transformation,
I don't know what kind.
Something painless on the cellular level,
I guess.
That seems right.
Then the moment dies the soft death
Which took each that came before.

The Prayer is Webcast

The names and appearances of our failed progeny are valuable assets and the most visible symbols of our destiny. Do not invent words or phrases. In normal day-to-day written and verbal communications, our offspring should be referred to simply as “them guys." It is the perfect cover for the sort of wickedness that reflects the audience and describes the program or entity being named. Avoid acronyms and other abbreviations. They often lead to bad outcomes. It should be emphasized that these children aren’t out boozing it up or drugging, which can be vague and confusing.

Fin and Bone

Party until all of the stuff you fear is far away. Time and pleasure and anger and thirst all knotted in your pocket. Potentially, the entertainments we endure offer some remorseful sense of serene engagement with the families we find alienating, who seem to offer a new rejection in every offer if refuge, who are unaware that their faces have turned inside out, revealing clotted smiles.

A Strange Insect, or Kind of Creeping Plant

Now it happens to one of mine: the vessel of the self falters and fails. Lost and hidden things arrive unbidden and bring nonsense, a beautiful absurdity. I wear masks, each one handed to me with the instruction to cover my face, avoid mirrors, feel the weight of my body on the cheap cushion holding it. When the mask is dropped, I realize that there is still too much locked away, that the mask hides little of consequence. These are our final collaborations. I have heard reports from this frontier, and I find it much as it has been described.

Elliptical Stratigraphic Pulsings of Different Temperatures

This is a kingdom. Some different kinds of animals live where those really big plants are, where there are clouds on the ground sometimes and where there are smells we can keep in the soft recesses of our bodies' insides. There is some water in some different places and when we drink it, some of it helps us see the King's Colors and some of it makes the things in our mouths do hard sounds. Some of the water hides dead animals and food no one wants.

Some of the King's Garments are hot like sun blood and the suffering is intense. The suffering is in the animals and the big plants, in the water and the dead animals, in the food and in the clouds on the ground, and in our softest recesses and in our homes.

We burned our homes and we only stop when our bodies force sleep on us and the dreams are full of the King's Words.

Underlain by the Brackish Water

I took a hole punch to the papers. I use you; you are the map of a fake nation of mangled exiles. I am the meat. I cannot offer sustenance.