1 A Lightly Didactic Prologue Touching on “Revolution”

All practical nudes first hear of their abandonment in the sharply banked replies of bathers once wedded to seasoned scientists, those Persian clowns seated between perfect trees, a room’s skin punctured by the wings of panting women, as each of the three female horizons dress for the wedding of oil-lamped perspective to the over-prospected waves of the standard family, whose common easement differs from civilization by one (or two) oranges whose quiet & internal manner will come to resemble a suburban department store, where there is an artificial waterfall which will not linger in just any 15th century bedroom, or even in a sturdy house beneath a river, or beneath a decade of rivers which we only mention once in a lace-trimmed invitation, then cough, having “made the point”.

2 Fashion on Parade

The post-western suburbs shift beneath each scholar’s mass…those twelve nursing students who sponged up the Revolution and who cradle still in their nationalized hands red cicadas to forever remind us (the paid audience) of a vanished architecture whose devotees were racy dissidents and diffident rakes “or what have we achieved despite the rain” replies youth’s dys-educated brutality. What a charm link, a silver elephant of confidence, a copper dog watching out for affection, and look there at our one bookstore secure upon the airless pampas where the moon unrolls toward our riff-raff with its portable perma-lube strangeness (seen most efficaciously in such constructions as “the light is hospital blonde this evening, languishing upon statues of famous cabbies and the gold paneled kiosks which line the Strand” or “offering shallow wedding totems, peacocked and smoldering temple napkins, the world so taken with tokens or retarded by those ghosts in Eton sailing caps who pimp for the seminally heartless and dream of cell-sprung magicians like beige owls in grey cathedrals stealing forward through the darkness, and those were the cormorants and we are the floor-walkers in perfumeries abandoned by very demure floods forgotten like a book behind the plaza where a general bends over a black radio whereby a keen of questions flavors the whiskies.

3 The Common Barnacle

The common barnacle (Sacculina) begins its parasitic life as a free-swimming larva. The female barnacle (as insidious as any woman!) settles on a crab, crawls to a leg joint and pokes a small entry hole. She then squeezes her soft parts inside (leaving her shell behind) and wends her single-minded way to the abdomen where she dines on the available nutrients. As she grows, she forms a protrusion in the crab’s shell and then sends out extensions – or “roots” – of her own body throughout the crab, even to the very tips of its eye stalks. As a result the crab soon no longer sheds its shell, grows, or produces eggs or sperm. In essence, the crab becomes a zombie vehicle which lives only to serve its parasitic guest. As if that weren’t disturbing enough, the female furthermore makes a pinhole in the host’s abdomen to attract the tiny male Sacculina, who squeezes himself into the crab in the same fashion as the female had earlier. They then fertilize each other for the remainder of their lives, and manipulate the crab’s hormonal system so that the crab periodically scales a high rock, pushes out the parasites’ young’uns, and even waves its claws in the water to spread them on their merry way – just as it would do for its own offspring.

4 Incorporate Minutes

Until we adorn the Project as it adorns us, we are dependent upon the forgone and passing boulevard through Europe’s pedestrian mall, the ideal backdrop to our massive work upon the almost imperceptible climax of the elephant, so – more or more likely less – we can go on dreaming of a grand dispersion of counterpoint while we are still wearing cargo pants, but are we merely reflecting a half-remembered sensual entree when we first uncover the fossilized neck of comfort in an abandoned fireplace, and – perhaps – a new Picasso is breaking into your house, and – perhaps – there will be less viscous exhalations reinstalled within the vulgar, and because of that we do not know if there will ever be any fun at all anymore, unless we admit we started all this (the Project, the New Project, the Recalled Project) to gain quick access to the gym, which from the inside appears to be somewhere in Denmark, if we might (for once) credit the report of a New Yorker boarding a plane to fly to a boat, like a pipe dream’s over-reaction to its own roughening value, and so shall we not all be happy to see the layered panels of daylight and moonlight which will be – we can assume without assumption – see-through and debatable and disposable and inflatable.

Helen of Troy lies down
with Her jug of rich blonde bourbon
in a colossal parking lot
in a fur-covered mobile tent
steeped in a bouquet of pine
undermined by blood.
We always arrive late for Her famous honey cakes.
We always miss the last paper boat
to the lighthouse which is Her eye
at the end of a dimly lit pyramid hall.
Between us and Her flickering body
A thousand arches and arcades
Enchanted skyscrapers
Perversely imploring niches
Tremblant belltowers.
We judge Her intentions
by the variety of beetles in Her hair.
She is breathless in our imagination of Her
and Her heart an abandoned lemon
A departing tramp freighter.
She is the understudy of a white echo
clothing the middle of December
A statue of sunlight
where we most need it to be
in a baby pram containing a blonde scalpel
slithering down subway steps through the bramble
into the closed observatory
at the end of Her arm.

This city is crawling with promiscuous subways
where She calms the waves of Her watery dress in darkness
when She went to visit a character from the Unicorn Tapestry
who carries a piano made from bramble wood and moss.
At the first subway platform
a smaller subway platform inside
and a smaller track beneath a free clinic
on its way to the lighthouse.

Later She rode out to the beach
to the second subway station
to locate Marilyn Monroe’s autograph
in the sand under glass with a metal tip jar attached to the joy lever.
She left five pressed lilies and a change of clothing.
The foolishly departed lurk at the third subway platform
as a piano rolls down the smallest tracks
into the forests of piano bramble and moss.