from ULULU (Shrapnel Scenes)
(Her Anniversary Page Opera—Continues)
The curtain shivers on stage boards—dirty gas on the bare back dust under cover of horse, cloth—darkness to the bristles—broom for a rug over a century (late of sawdust coal ash all stagehands on deck) all rugs from the wings (hand to handing off) rugs unrolling another’s land another lands—a splash of atoms leaping now-there now-then up a wall where skin cells make deliberate portraits tattooed on noises one billionth the width of a vocal cord (and woven for the sake of sound baffled) and sound logic across the divan (rugs and capitalists) swarm to fog the chalky workers (opulent) even so far as a doll’s rug draped over the ventriloquist’s arm—because the herd through a crack in the canyon panics just as a scene is beginning without a mouth moving—a scene without the ability to speak up or well in public (a scene not meant for public readings)—nor to be found anywhere near or about the foundation of domestic perfection; so the rug smiles shyly, sublimating dramatic action
tenderly zooming to size (human) where we find a mind and a rug “to scale” and how pleasantly a girl strolls (barefoot on each of those surfaces) without sensing the slightest prickle from the sub-atomic universe, the particles, or what may come to be known as
Act One, Scene II
PICTURE OF LULU AS PIERROT (IN A BROCADE FRAME)
Since last seen the portrait plays kitsch: ULULU in lincoln log lettering—black velvet airbrush across the bottom, and Pierrot’s black and white costume reduced to bikini poms on the cups of the top—a thin hemp thong through the valley; Pierrot—blond—spread out across a truck bed, poised before digital peaks with perfectly dusted road implanted thru an open guitar—and a frown hidden naughtily under retouched hair. The car is the key, the knee—the guitar the car, the car the knee, the hidden hand of the twin dummy-master through a hole in the portrait where her back sweats, someone’s fingers on the cords. This chrome-framed portrait hangs above the wet bar, mirrored speech occasionally tossing off witticisms—the rugs plush white and the furniture black as backstage eyes gaze to this scene, Lulu alone, amusing herself for the audience’s PLEASURE
AN ELEGANT DRAWING ROOM
Two puppets news/entertain an image-action: Twins, their worlds foremost first and third commingling (and the recording process replaying) the death-news of one in the tethered eye of the other; pitched to whine in her own ear, one of the twins advances a technique of making her smallest Non-News the props possible in the tabloids of heroic action, the husband’s recent death or the magic thinking of the disinformed. The first twin to its cozy mirror—the leaflets from umbrellas upside-over in the flies—drizzle around the stage, so potent her body propaganda can be resurrected in its image, or preternatural powers of national towers, prisons and white paper—white as always a hot forgetting—news reveals self-advertised angles, her expertise in memory as quasi-facts, the once anomalous deeds of legal proof, rendered statuary. So one husband down or up and died, and Lulu warms the audience with an anecdote from before the domestication of the air war, when there were sounds like quaint old sirens, the domestication of the lung screaming righteous saturated instructions. Here, the agencies form like sponges along the flood. A lung fills with the excess pooling of twin and mutant diplomacy.
[exhaust upon the kettle, drums] as
LULU IN A MOURNING FROCK
crushes up the aisles into the cooling breeze steps back afraid of how ugly and fast death STAYS it doesn’t steal away it STAYS it doesn’t play when it really plays it STAYS for a minute the crowd comes down hard in the alley relieved to be in the alley skulking back Hell’s Angels when no one’s pushing them tiptoeing now like delicate flowers and Alwa hurrying upstream confused Composing who came and on the side simultaneous like his sister twin one afternoon Geschwitz stroking too upstream the whole play now swimming or barefoot it seems
in the audience
as a whisper swirls like a dust devil in the dark beneath the seats, ear to crusty ear, thinks suddenly IF (the audience hears it) turns fidgets wonders left and right IF our Dear Girl, eponymous one, hasn’t made the profound mistake, or been simply misinformed to custom, that—
crowds are watching for one glaring reason
and nothing can be in worse taste than this dernier cri of funeral fashion—is that crêpe de Chine?—gathered and puffed and doppled with ostrich feathers? A long mourning veil is a curtain drawn, a shade pulled, book closed—it should never be some Salome-like arrangement to attract the crowd’s adulterating Attention
oh
my
the audience closes its stingy eyes, trying to reinvent Lulu in the proper attire: black crêpe untrimmed coat and hat of plain fabric— That’s better—we can relax for the first three months the young widow will be seen in nun’s veil down to the heels and only later cut to the chin, worn for the next two years, maybe for the rest of her life
Lulu: (!)
Lulu drops to the rug-covered ottoman, sobs, wails, one long leg bent across the other at the knee kohl-rimmed eyes smudged & needless to say all in very poor taste
Lulu: Well . . . I marry the painter, and then I’ll marry your father, and later, I’ll marry you! (winks)
(half-hearted)
LULU LOOKS IN A HAND MIRROR
& Geschwitz thru the crowded Peephole veering through time & the rainy backstage—thru a narrow slice of perspective: fifteen feet from stage door to stage lights, intersected by velvet masking, and three stairs leading to upstage right where a hangnail of audience is visible. From here in the alley, the spectacle becomes apparent as the crowd presses & reveals a line of makeup along Lulu’s soft jaw, the shades of skin tone following her cheekbones to stagehands whispering in the foreground, hanging on the rigging, ready to fly some scenery. From the heat of bodies pressing her, Geschwitz spies Lulu onstage, barefooting in her V—from eye to Vista—stage door corridor and angle—the V in the View spray of candlelight from Lulu’s mirror as she beholds herself—and right to the Countess’s eye. Used to a certain distance from her subject, but finding Lulu’s neck twisting irresistibly, Geschwitz swoons from her tiptoes away from the hole and Alwa like a sudden camel, thirsty with long and heavy tongue, roughening even reddening—reaches to Lulu’s mirror, his mind dry, trying to lick the damp taste of dirt from the tiny steamed glass, a few atoms of her spit, tiny sip of her private look— Away, Geschwitz yanks him:
Alwa-ys in my way, she sighs, elbowing him back, thinks
I’ll have to make a citizen’s arrest for indecency
her self-inspections belong to me!
Lulu: “Adults are so obsessed with P’s and V’s.”
Geschwitz: Let me take a moment to explain what is never a-parent to children.
Alwa: I can help!
Geschwitz: There are vowels that are impossible to say without moving your lips—and you must make substitutions! But we’ll come back to those in a hand mirror. First you have to get the basics of ventriloquism,
Alwa: 1. Think like a Dummy.
Geschwitz: Right.
Alwa: 2 . . . ?
Geschwitz: 2. Promote and maintain the illusion that your “twin” is thinking independently.
Wait, there comes another to suit her!
EVE?
The painter, now in street clothes de facto as THE (newest) HUSBAND swaggers onstage, buttoning his cuffs and impatient to bend his new wife to order (to work her to fit) his recently acquired CASTLE his trousers his hope and purpose to bend her like a rib and ply her young bones gently pushing down on the spine to ease the legs into splits as befits the proceeds of the Professor’s will made her will strong a body takes training or convincing or worse as Eve was made from a curved bone legs wound behind and over the child’s head one by one the Husband must learn to massage her spine to keep it from snapping when slowly the child is reformed to acrobat deriving one row of vertebrae from another the curve of notes the very Rib of score resolved that one’s fortune becomes the byproduct of another’s that one character comes from the interior of head or thigh or spleen so linked that if its part is split and doubled and doubled and bent and peeled inside-out it can never be more than an original piece still part and still in row identified whole at the cellular level as one and the same, as my home is your home, as the man keeps the checkbook hidden—and destroying one character will in some small sense obliterate the possibility, the continued existence of the other.
YOUR SERPENT!
In the front row, house right, half beneath the stage, someone is on book. A little voice calls up the correction in a lippy whisper: “Your ser-Vant!” The audience looks over, and back at Ululu, unsure who to believe.
EVE!
what’s got into you? A name should be earned or Applied like makeup masterfully (deception not tricky replacement) granted If Lulu had a dog to call it would come when Lulu called—respect, not fear or fortune, inspires trust that a name forms something meaningful (not just quickies or pots) of gold not just rewards but lasting significance in areas of influence surrounding the sound of things that can be done and changed of signals that are clear and travel without interference. But if Lulu’s dog thought every name meant kicks (harm or isolated) afternoons someone laughing at her bad French, or throwing rocks a painful punch or (long nauseating) rides or weeks without food or nasty children it would hardly listen to names at all and the song of the sound would mean more than the sense, and wag and swing its tail no matter Lulu sweetly singing, “You ugly monster do you want me to kick you?” rather than “Oh angel you’re so cute, shall I cuddle you?” And what’s in a name is the melody of expectation (some melody) of civilization or the simple way one can hope to be treated—though we’re all so easily duped—evolved to forget all that sound can make of sense.
YOUR SERVANT!
Alone, Lulu wonders about being kept around the house. About personal freedom and the Vote. About going out in her cut velvet mourning frock veil and yellow shoes. The Husband calls Eve ever to her serpent and her unfamiliar area suddenly cools to make him wonder if she’s hanging on to someone else’s hand to hand (the coil of the piccolo suddenly) to appear as Serpent—no more servant suspicious V again a loaded image, the wedge, greater or less than (water pours & penetrates) turned over to seal off the ground, tent teepee mountain summit—where V plugs up a mouth, V is chewable, hard, undisposable. Add a kiss and make it—P.
Lulu: See that—V’s and P’s, P’s and V’s—
Berg: I’ve always suffered a strange attraction to mirror forms.
PUTS THE MIRROR DOWN
No! Practice in it, or you’ll never learn to speak without it—to hide letters—& take heed when the knee is out from under you—& contrary to the words, hows are harder than whys, the additional tongue movements and the illusion of an open throat. Hearing is the least respectable sense while a mirror is uncomplicated, unless you hold it up to a confusing background.
EVERY TIME I’M SEEING YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME
Repeatedly onto the rugs the Painter (Husband) incurably enters while nobody remembers him. He has no counterpart offstage, no patron paying him into the role, nothing historical except some slimy asshole dictator to compare himself to in retrospect. He’s trying so hard to make an impression that nothing much happens. Lulu listens out of a corner of her mirror, and so do I, but it’s hard to find anything but an eternal show tune, beginning again, like a set change put in place at the end of the night for the next day’s matinee. Pasty as gauche on a canvas, his purpose to show off other things. His round shocked face implies a circle of interference—living every moment like it’ll be postmarked tomorrow and forwarded back in the same order.
Pass each moment in joy, says Lulu
so when it comes back it will be joyful.
All we know about this guy is that he doesn’t listen to her advice.
THE POST IS HERE
Returned to Sender (repressed fight, sweet Doppelgänger) & What was the original condition? Which horrendous moment set all of this in motion? To what is this answer the question? The walls roll away from every corner & are inhaled back into the mind. Marriage is the crime-revenge for the association of rug to foot, bare chores of a pretty face, the chores of learning French, the receiving of invitations to a wedding, walking the streets looking for him, and finally finding the marriage bed— What is it in marriage that cripples the artist? The painter was always mediocre, and in his marriage he becomes famously so. So? A woman is brought out to society by marriage, an artist becomes passable. A thinly veiled surrogate for a hospital lobby. The disease must be tricked to be cured. The art is cheerful as you enter. Log letters proclaim the radiant symptoms: what hazardous waste the married mouth pursues, the body fighting itself, a nation sleeping through its wars.
MY PAINTINGS ARE SELLING FOR MILLIONS
Geschwitz has her own dressing room, filled with suits and lacy underwear that cover her mammoth hips. Her hair is thin and cut sharp, cheekbones high. She sits backstage exiled and shunned, giving Lulu dramatic opportunity to lick the bottom of her dressing stall curtain, which is what Lulu likes to do on her way onstage so the crew will laugh it off as just so much bravado. Besides, everyone knows that between the two Geschwitz has real swagger and Lulu is but a Pierrot puppet, twinned as they play it for others. Violent foot-stomping, a drunken hoard, the crowd down the V outside thrills to her dressing curtain pulled open and Geschwitz fucking the pageboy’s brains out before her appearance and subsequent compromise, as though they needed any more, the audience hears Geschwitz warn the Painter to stay clear of representing Lulu’s pantaloons where the real jewels of human flesh are stored.
(PUTTING THE LETTER TO HER NOSE)
Lulu’s tongue flicks from pointed lips and pulls the molecules back: “From Countess Geschwitz!” Lulu exclaims: A “V”! A Vote? A Veto? A Vision? The inVitation, the annual Ball! Musk and inspiring hormone intoxicating smells of women’s armpits and breath like tiny rising sourdoughs—why would I ever want to go to that? I hate girls!
(Leaping, in flutes)
Lulu: Oh, okay! I guess I’ll just FORCE MYSELF to make an appearance . . .
(SHE HIDES THE LETTER IN HER BOSOM)
Ser Vant or Pent? Cleavage leaves one possibility open but the snake crawls up the hologram, some see-through stockings, or Pierrot What other costumes are in your locker? What can we do to see a fitting presentation? Do they sell tickets backstage, the audience wonders . . . how are we to savor the treat of Lulu in dishabille between scenes? To see for ourselves if it’s V or P? What envy for the crowd the audience has—suddenly feeling seats sweating trapped turning pulling their trousers adjusting their corsets improperly impatient too self-impressed to go outside into the drizzling night or run around to the alley to kick their heels against muddy dumpsters, ripping stockings, glasses dropping wallets down the dresses of Lulu’s admirers—that chaos of wannabes in the smearing light of fake gas lamps—atmosphere courtesy of the theater management for post-show recreation & “events”—ad hoc ‘V.’I.‘P.’— Alas! Those in their seats must follow the action of the drama rather than absorbed backstage limelight even though she isn’t even TRYING to steal their attention STOP!
looking at me, she’s thinking
STOP
but the more she relaxes her lips and thinks
STOP and thinks it
the more they seem to THINK of her
Lulu: It’s a law of human nature.
Helene: No, it’s Unnatural. Everyone look back onstage!
IT’S YOUR FAULT
DO NOT READ THIS
Lulu: See my point?
EVE!
Five is the holy number of marriage, of the joining of the male and female number spirits, and five is the number of times Ben Franklin stood before kings, the number of languages he spoke. Five is the Benjamin Franklin of numbers, the passing off of meaning from one to another, the transfusion of blood from society to one man’s aching heart, or less this great man who started the first circulating library in America, where perhaps Wedekind himself picked up a book on medicine, or looked up TingleTangle or Pussi-Willow or any song he fancied. Benjamin Franklin practically started the era of recycling, taking and giving back, taking and giving, his number five, its primeness, its very essential Ben Franklinness, was all he could hope for in his new country, and so because reading was his only amusement he thought books should pass from hand to hand, from mouth to mouth, recommended and spread throughout the cities, and people, living as they do one on top of the other can pass them almost effortlessly! The cities are perfect places for circulating libraries, and this is not perhaps what he had in mind, but twelve-year-old girls need to be taught to read, and taught to take care of the books and pass them around without pages thumbed or dog-eared, how to care and clean and protect the hygiene of the whole neighborhood, stacks and systems of loaning, cataloguing—what Frank himself might have taught them one by delicious delicate one—had not his namesake been driven to do it for him.
Stravinsky: “for at the root of all creation one discovers an appetite that is not an appetite for the fruits of the earth. So that to the gifts of nature are added the benefits of artifice—such is the general significance of art.”
YOUR SERPENT!
the Husband, was Painter, now totem Snake of the Mirror, gets rough and tumble in the morning, so that she complains of waking with a penis wagging in her face—and after, when he’s finished, with a glowing pronouncement of his species and a flourish of his sweating arms and a final thrust—he dares put in a vaginal PLUG to Stop her up STOP all that “thinking” (in other words) his annoying habit of leaving his dried-up jewels all in one place—as though once there he can’t leave without making sure the path is blocked, pack it in pack it out—he leaves his trash. He thinks he can STOP her with teensy STOPpers—balls all wadded up and stuffed in the pipe, thick and sticky. Lulu shakes her head as he hops off, knees crunched together, hand on his crotch, trying to soothe himself from his hurting loss. She snickers. She’s got room still for another few plugs. In fact she’s expecting a few more later.
the piccolo is docile now
JUST NOW I HAD A BATH
To clean the
CANNON
FIRE
herself. A fresh coat of paint on the house makes the sale.
{musical GASPS}
An old beggar (Schigolch now in character) hyperventilates in the crowd and is let through the bodies awking back from his stooped frame and moldy wig, and as though under some sort of spell, the stage door opens and lets him pass. The hysterical crowd fills his wake, sticky eyes to the peephole & glimpses his stop-action parade toward the stage. He stands in the wings just behind the real door hung in a fake frame on real hinges, as all the audience hears but doesn’t notice the wheezing {musical GASPS} scored in—{GASPS} suspiciously like little orgasmic asthmatic all-consuming consumptive breaths. The old beggar stands with knocker ready, five minutes before his cue, like an old hand. In the theater all characters must be in the building even when they’re not onstage.
YOU’RE NOT MAKING THE MOST OF ME
Hmm. The audience is intrigued by what Lulu is implying . . . Here is a HUSBAND/PAINTER making millions from her portraits, and yet she criticizes him for not making more? “You Warhol! You Apellos! You Costabi!” What exactly is she after? That his art factory produces none of her precious alchemy? to tear and bring together to rip and rend Alchemy sex-and-spirit transforms gibberish of earth & spagyric art a prepubescent boy who is mostly a girl flying magically across a bedroom carrying messages from body to head? Such Alchemy reduces to their weakened knees, dissolves a violin into something more painful a solo more agonizing two voices going opposite like harp & hyena in screeches from the pit “Lap at my genitals, lay in my lap” “lapis” plus “lazy” she offers inspiration “This marriage bed this bondage border this lounge act: Here, drink,” LULU always says with hand on her costume’s baggiest parts “Drink this Elixir!” And so many men turn their heads, the women’s mouths dry as they step over, cupping their imaginary hands on LULU’s bosom, outside beside despite themselves, liquid stone flows through silk of the centuries wrung potions of flesh of breasts, spun out illegible instructions for the clay, one loud midday Hypatia served toward immortality and almost worked, except for the rigid impotence of raging—(HUSBANDS)
Lulu: Now that’s how to sell a painting.
Audience: Sold!
STOP BREATHING!
Dear Wife,
I am having trouble writing this long portrait, this history, for at the moment I can’t feel anything for the subject. Once, when I was in love, it was all I could do to keep my hands off—but that was almost two years ago now—and I feel no farther along in either portrait or love. How can I keep writing this when the feelings I once had so powerfully have all been numbed? I don’t know what to call on to inspire the flow of details with which I deal so intimately. It forces me to be a certain kind of brute, from the hate or indifference that replaces U. The container stands empty and is replenishing with lesser sorts of humors, better able to commandeer inferior nests. Can my subject tell the difference between an impassioned and a pragmatic me? I’m not sure you can see the ice floe beneath my skin, my smile. You laugh as you always did when I was in love and you were married (not to me) and could stand my brush & dash around in pretty costumes, your silence as wicked, tongued quick, as though my strokes were still affecting. But the frost has reached a permanent layer, and still I feel obliged to go on. Why not abandon this whole project? There is nothing to do with a half-painted portrait but paint over it. Today like every day I will pretend that this vacant domestication is all part of love’s great estate and wander in the hedgy yard, cut like a maze.
Signed, Walter
your husband
(PAINTER!)
STOP BREATHING?
But his once consumed distractions now his métier, his full frontal main course choked on rich too delicate rare— In my first marriage, I was his every thought’s bride, bird, all his painting’s excuse, the portraits, the ladders and canvas, the paint of course. And now all this fussy whining moping when his painting should satisfy him! His work, his artistic passion! Where he came and set up as the afternoons, now his affair becomes nightly and unsatisfied he cries over my breathing! His portraits turn to himself, watching the system losing energy— What painting the artist finds satisfying? As much as he was painting fucking someone else’s wife. But now he’s off with head in hand, the brush clogged or dried— Yet just maybe the painting and fucking are reversible and right this minute as he’s whining about painting he’s really fucking. Alwa is composing, but right this minute he’s fucking, too. The audience is watching, but right now they’re really fucking. All in all, the human mind is a terrible fucking thing to consider.
the piccolo part perks up
the “act” continues on an “empty” stage
YOU . . .
sit a moment on the rug, wondering why the stage direction doesn’t read, “Lulu alone onstage” rather than “On an empty stage” feeling like the latest endangered creature without a mate, betrayed. Empty is full of u u u, a tiny spot of rhythm, a u and a u, and starting with a jig to make the most of being alone on an afternoon rug before Christ comes around—all manner of orgiastic dancing—giggie giggie trounce, bouncie bouncie rub the cloth—between the breasts, over the legs—mourning frock’s lace cuts into the skin and the garters are tight and the satin is soft over curves of the waist! Giggie giggie genitals, children of Lilith squatting and dancing, hoofing and hocking, bending deep in the knee, vulva almost to the floor, frog-squatting legs turned back and wide apart, dance-hopping her ta! da! against the evil eye, the jealous audience eye which loves reproaches her, take from her cathedral when finally she’s alone in her little jig which cracks Lulu up, exhausted! relieved! The only one here to get the joke, her one quiet scene.
I LIKE WALKING IN BARE FEET
Cleopatra VII lays out a rug woven in her own hair where she naps, the Nile imagined, splitting her mind, draining it, picking impurities from its banks—her river, her best foot forward. She pulls some scratchy cushions beneath her thighs and alone, for the first time in months, touches herself without a breeze blowing, her hands as hot as her skin, harder to tell apart. It’s true: she’d done before what only Artemisia had done before—A Female Admiral—deploying all of her Charisma in the battle for Advantage. But before she takes her life she wants to part it, give her mind to her body freely, so many have enjoyed it (that power was always seductive, she had to use it, she felt typecast) while still of one mind, she waves open the folding screens, and in comes her trump card, Egyptian cobra, yellow and spear-headed. This beast hungers for birds, she thinks, I will be a boring meal, my first apathetic customer! Venom is just saliva after all, a way of eating—she understands. And putting a hand on its simple hood Cleopatra VII promises: “In return for this, let me call you my asp, last aspiration, breath. Your bite will be less painful than the adders they call asps, so language will work to your advantage as it hasn’t really to mine.” And with that the woman with weaker, simpler jaws finds a moment to recline in her famous portrait position, headdress adorned with Ejo, cobra goddess, while death circles slowly around her.
U . . .
lulu through the Looking Glass, right- and left-handed lulus—Beware! If anti-lulu comes into contact with any of her usual husbands she will explode them—the love of mirror forms causing speculation among a coterie of scientists regarding whether or not this gigantic amniotic ANTI-lulu created in the laboratory and kept suspended in space by magnets will combine with lulu on the other side of the rug to achieve a total conversion of nuclear mass into energy—the ultimate weapon!
{BLASTS of Small Fantasy Bubbles, Schigolch GASPS}
AS THOUGH COMING TO HERSELF
It’s the old story samed; to be samed being tamed. Just like El Niño Farini was samed, her original version, maimed for the trapeze, made an artist in mid-century of Lulu’s strange birth. When El Niño grew up from a boy to a girl he was reintroduced by his trainer/father as little Mademoiselle Lulu—the Royal Amphitheater, Holborn, 1871. This was early, before the crowds got the cult of the Kaiser & formerly Hans or El Niño Farini shot from cannons off every factory roof to celebrate the unification of a nation, the birthday of something German—and the birthrate and the birthright of all German twins—samed from some unknown El Niño—moving east or west in the womb—at the very beginning when the stage was still dark and empty, before the first split of curtain from floor, of light from shadow—& all the children were as one. This is the history of joints pulled apart and reshaped to please and amaze—dislocations of children’s bodies is an art form never fully outlawed.
Knocks {GASPS}
A BEGGAR
So that’s how the old swine Schigolch gets through the stage door drunk and late for his entrance, his coat threads tripping up his crumpled shoes, bruising his face. Side to side stumbling toward stage left and falls because he thinks the curtains are walls and must be helped up by Smaragda who almost forgot he was coming tonight and without interfering with the direction of his energy, pushes him out toward center stage so that he’s running and almost flies off the other side but stops caught, legs akimbo, swaying in the fly lines, staring at his precious Baby. {GASPS}
& Maybe he’s her father
(audience, wonders)
but he makes money on his daughters, musician from the days before crowded theater got popular. And often a little agreement paid his drinks and chips as his daughter worked the boards him visiting the underworld and back—simple pimp, stripped of his badge. But she’ll reminisce with him until late tonight because the past isn’t judged as strictly as the present, and they laugh as they remember how he’d take advantage of her talents,
DO YOU MISS THE ROD?
he asks, winking {GASPS}
the audience stares bewildered at the limits of their understanding.
(LOOKING AT HER PORTRAIT)
IS THAT YOU?
Uncanny, the unhomely familiar place we cannot live but dwell,
shocked
To remember
To exclaim our aura in its purest SPLIT
how the oil painting has recently ended
with its era of traded objective conscience collectors ecstatic to be surrounded with sights & possessions. As the disease moves through the continent, however, the warehouses crowd with radioactivity and the industrial call-center neighborhoods stagnate purchasing.
And now the portrait barely resembles my nice healthy girl—
the wasted frame, the withered hands, the broken knees and dried red eyes—my capital lament, my heinous accounts
nothing here matches the depreciation
tax benefits and profit I once saw in myself, in U.
JUST SOME OF MY REGULARS
Interrupted song, Lulu stuffs a V
into your mouths like puppies teething on anything
raggedly sexed with soft hard forked
prick, to her he winks his trade
delicious youth my sour old wealth
happiness is a booming business
He could have had her but gave it up
Sold back a bill of goods, the Beggar nods
suckling down his dinner
toothlessly his dinner more alive than he is
finding a regular menu, pulled down
in the alleys it takes him a while to bend to his knees
& ladies & gentlemen lean back & wait
to feed the fed upon one more Father, later