Real is the Word They Use to Contain Us Read online

  COLOSTOMY APPRAISAL TECH J. R. del de DiCaprio

  SHUNT FITTER Pr4vda Gibson-Panasonic, Shu. Ftt., Jr.

  SECRETATO TO FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA Aristarchus “Dr. Shelby” Norris-Van DiCaprio

  HEAD RECTAL FLUFFER Felice Fiorentino DiCaprio, Rec. Flu

  DOUCHE GRIP Philip Sony-McPanasonic, Sr.

  ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK Dr Kim Sony-Gordon, Jr., Dr.

  DOUCHE GRIP FOR CONRAD BLACK IV Philip Andross-McCloud, Jr.

  etc. etc. etc. etc.

  CATERING Gravy by Medici

  ANAL-LYTIC CONSULTANT Clooney Nolte-Bossert, Con.

  EVACUATOR Ward Clooney, Gr.

  FARTER STARTER Esme Dukakis-Medici-Sony, Frtr.

  LEAD FARTER Kiev Clooney-Dukakis, Frtr.

  KEY FARTER Constantine du Gibson-Gibson-Medici, Frtr.

  FARTER OF FARTERS Conrad Black IV, Rt. Hon.

  FARTER TO FERGUSON CLOONEY-SONY-MEDICI-DICAPRIO CORONER TO FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA diRamirez Kardashian-Medici, Frtr.

  EMBALMER TO FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA Dr. Kim Sony-Gordon, Jr., Dr.

  MOURNERS TO FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA Dr. Panasonic DiCaprio, Dr.

  MOURNERS TO FILBERT P. P. PENETRALIA No mourners

  FRESHNESS BY FEBREEZE

  ...straddling the shadows of glass vases and the outline of the settee’s arm, the monsters made a crooked and bubbling chalice, like something cut from a river’s clay back when clay was the worthiest paper and the rivers carved their own wandering paths from year to year. Bodied in arrangements of drifting dust, they dove into the cup’s mouth to bob there, thrashing, dissolving. Their faces reappeared in the dust-streaked mirror as though twisted by some unearthly gravity, giggling in silence, fingers pressed to their lips...

  THE DREAM OF “C”

  I like my coffee how I like

  my own fucking heart

  full of blood and coffee grounds

  skinned with membrane unevenly

  one cinnamon stick standing

  muscles beat all round it

  and matted with papyrus

  sopping fragments of Linear A

  Half-drunk at my desk waking

  to a night dark as its bones

  harsh cadences dissolving into

  memory like spoonfuls of salt

  the dead oracle’s whisper

  jagged cuneiform stirring upward

  Ursprache a basalt spearhead

  unfolding through its backbrain

  Time’s mitochondrial gateway

  orthagonal to time

  I like the way my coffee

  starts boiling again

  Clay mug sliding out the door

  never waking me

  It counts every broken window

  sliding uphill silent roads

  to kneel behind the water tower

  and work one stone free

  It takes up the ritual athame

  called Finds-Between-Veins

  Now drinking

  drinking

  Drinking itself

  NOT TO BE PASSIVE-AGGRESSIVE BUT

  you shouldn’t cut steaks on that wood cutting board. They were alive, and it’ll leave ghosts in the wood. Worse, they’re the ghosts of Joe Hill. Tethered to the kitchen cupboard with a silvery tendril, they’re following us through the park already, distributing anti-Syndicate broadsheets which collapse into moth-coloured dust and trickle between the fingers of neighbourhood children.

  Processes like these are assumed to be monitored: for every disintegrating pamphlet, another Joe Hill ghost is distilled within a collectivized kitchen at the earth’s core. It is assumed that the Syndicate’s three-hundred-year research program will culminate in tunnel-boring trains powered by ambient geotectic heat. It is assumed that when the ghost distillery is breached, the continents will turn to salt.

  “I’m very sorry,” said the Rifle. Although she couldn’t be, because she didn’t understand. “What I mean to ask, sir, is are you like the rabbits on the wallpaper in the nursery—or the rabbits in the green wood? You have the accent of the first, and you don’t move, but you look like the second kind.” But she fell silent as the moonlight turned to show her the cream-coloured spots on the little Rabbit’s brown side; she recognized him then, and remembered the way he fell twitching to the lawn.

  “You would say the second kind is more Real,” said the Rabbit softly, as though to himself. “I spent two lives following the line of that fence. The Skin Horse was my first friend, did you know? He was soft and gentle, and I thought him very wise. He called it my heart’s desire to become Real, but I never knew what he meant. At night when the Boy was asleep I would listen to the toy cupboard, how his tin soldiers squabbled with his china dolls. Real meant this or that: to have a wind-up mechanism that moved, or red cheeks painted on by hand. For the Skin Horse it was to have your fur worn to patches from dragging in the garden and the hairs plucked from your tail, one by one, in wishing games. For him it meant love. The Boy’s uncle had made him Real, long ago.”

  The Rifle made a little cough, as though something had caught in her barrel. “I think I know you, then.” She wanted very much to ask what had changed the Rabbit, but she was the Boy’s gun and that was her loyalty. “The Boy used to make every toy in the nursery sit and listen to stories of an old Bunny he knew before all his things were burned in the back garden. He said you were the only Real toy that ever was. And the special magic of his youth had been spent making you Real, and now he would grow old. We were so jealous of you and the old Horse, and all the burned toys.”

  “So I was gone, and still more Real to him than you.” The fur of the Rabbit’s shoulders shook in the night breeze. “He has no right to make me the reason nothing’s good enough. Or to blame me when he decided adulthood wouldn’t pass him by. And yet calling me Real is the only way he knows to honour me. As though humans can’t even think without cutting up their worlds.”

  “All week he’s sat crying in the window,” said the little air rifle. Polished and gleaming from stock to barrel, she had hardly ever been fired. “Looking out at the back garden. But when anyone knocks, he runs to hide in the bedsheets. He won’t tell them what’s wrong; they think he’s sick, but the whole nursery knows he only meant to scare you from the yard. He missed you too much to bear seeing a rabbit like the old stuffed Bunny who lived in his bed.”

  The Rabbit’s sudden laughter jumbled the air before his face and slid to the ground, where it skirred in the blond grain of the flooring like water-striders. “So I wasn’t the right Real. And he shot me for it.”

  The Rifle took a long time to answer. “I think I would be angry if someone killed me.”

  “I would have thought the same,” said the Rabbit. “But there are things one can’t learn without dying, and too much of me is grateful. No one needs love to be Real. My denmates told me they loved me, when I was a living rabbit, and my ears were very sharp. But with a pellet in my brain I was not apart from the hill where I lay, so that nothing in particular could love me at all; and I could hear straight into the ground. The world holds itself so close in its darkness. I did not love the dinosaurs, but I could hear their flesh beating in the oil.”

  ...and they played in the negative spaces around the chandelier, building themselves into a towered skyline between its steepling brass arms and cut-crystal panes. In the muted gaslight its edges ran like a city underwater. All at once they swung themselves like dextrous medallions flipping on a chain; now the window looked out on that skyline, but it rose between the tall gabled houses across the street, as though they were the empty spaces and the true city carved from one dreaming block of night...

  PITTSBURGH O

  Calvin: I wonder where we go when we die.

  Hobbes: Pittsburgh?

  strip of 20 Decemb
er 1985

  Pittsburgh, O spidered

  —like Mars!—with

  canals, running

  carb’nated milks of the

  moon—where specters

  don isinglass

  snorkels and dance upon

  tensionless quicksilver

  spumes—out in

  Pittsburgh the stars

  jungle up through

  the dark, like skins

  of white grape

  packed with light—but

  sweeter than grape

  to the teeth of

  the throat,

  and seeded

  with peridot

  bright—

  Iö! Pittsburgh!

  Iö! Bare-skulled

  they blow

  tripletime out of

  sousaphone-socketed

  eyes—jaws

  creak with cigars and

  phalanges uncork to

  that voodoo that

  smoulders and flies—

  and the swinging moon

  flips like a disc

  o

  O

  o

  ball as it waxes and

  blushes surprise—

  Pittsburgh! Each

  rooftop bends,

  licks at the next

  til the street comes

  apart with their

  thrusts—Such music

  unhinges bones

  musty and dry til the

  dead—O the dead O

  the dead—O th

  e dead O

  the dead—O the

  dead re

  mem

  ber

  lust

  ONCE REMOVED: ON TAXIDERMY AND TAXONOMY

  for Luke

  There I was, stitching Percy the teagle together—four

  lengthwise strips, that is, of tabby and juvenile beagle—

  cat’s name was Periwinkle, dog collar said L. Schmidt,

  and I sure might have counted the teeth better. Whole face

  had crept out of order. Like all the wide world’s gingivitis

  united within my teagle to build itself a ten-lane speedway.

  Man deserves a challenge sometimes. You bore yourself

  wrapping desiccated trout around pre-molded fiberglass,

  retouching their goddamned scales Diffuse Moonlight #32.

  Besides, diffuse moonlight’s forty-one dollars fifty a jar.

  We’re fallen back on shellac and ecru house paint…

  You ever seen an ouroboros? Snake’s asshole vanishes

  up his own maw, so there’s no beginning to him anymore.

  Hard knowing how to start... no, I’m shitting you. It’s Saul.

  The ketamine was too efficacious, I couldn’t distinguish his

  galoshes on the concrete from ambient buzzing. Or get the tarp

  over my teagle in time. Abruptly he flaps up—it’s that bad

  yellow raincoat he’s in—and he might be my cousin, but

  there’s birdshit on his specs. He leans in and kootchie-koos

  the unseamed abomination like his own plush Garfield cat.

  Saul would get drinking at dawn. These days I don’t mean

  the clear liquor. Said the fluid would arrest his aging. He

  stopped recollecting things, how many knees on a squirrel,

  and he’d lose entire smokes pouring the molds... Never

  seen so many filter-tip drakes. Friend, even if you do need

  a duck who won’t decay before all human memory lays

  in tatters, you might still take your custom elsewhere.

  Anyhow, I finally dragged Lucky the cougar back inside,

  extracted the milk bottle from his caved-in asshole...

  Hours later he’s doing time as Saul’s hassock, missing

  teeth where somebody opened a beer with his face.

  I didn’t complain on it, just took a blunt from the porpoise,

  got my fuzzy earmuffs and hit the cold room—I wanted

  to organize some frozen whooping cranes and relax, but

  the cranes were already in perfect order. Wingspan.

  Cloacal width. Hue, saturation and chroma. Diameter.

  Cause of death. Presence or absence of vestigial dewclaws.

  I squat down, start randomizing the whoopers, whereupon

  my cousin’s shabby bowline hitch slips in the rafters—

  Bucky the elk plummets twelve feet to the tile, nosefirst.

  Like a frozen pond meets a porcelain piano full of steak.

  So I put four hundred pounds of elk chips in the bin,

  bleeding through my prized earmuff where I’d intercepted

  a flying shard of tenderloin. But needle and thread’s worth

  two doctors, I’ve always thought, and Bucky’s haunches

  were still rosy fine. Unholstering my bone saw, I riddled

  aloud to Saul what kind of sort might need a human torso—

  for instance, someone in possession of an incomplete satyr...

  Now, you can correct an ouroboros with an ordinary pair

  of wire cutters—Shit, though, I’ve become morbid. See

  this lifelike iguana? She’d crawl right off her mount,

  clickety-clack talons on the desk, parietal eye pulsating,

  tongue sniffing for mangos in your ear, right? She’s

  a favour to the best customer we’ve got: Tucker the barber,

  she grew that lizard from a spermatozoon. Better than

  any dog; no dog can pluck no-see-ums from the air.

  Tucker the barber came to me weeping... stray Buick

  hubcap bullseyed her reptile while she sunned herself

  on the gazebo rail. Hands me an old oil bucket, there

  she all is: four-foot leather hematoma with spikes and

  a dewlap. This is ten days later. No charge for Tucker...

  I’m joking, friend. That iguana, she was born a salmon.

  Her jawline still has a few imperfections, but what’s

  perfect? There’s days I can’t tell my eyes to match.

  Don’t know why I bothered hiding anything under

  that dusty yellow tarp. Saul was too busy spilling

  butyraldehyde on his khakis to ever peek underneath.

  Ever seen a jackalocust? —Half jackal, half locust. We

  surprise ourselves sometimes. Catfish, dogfish, geese

  orientated centripetally. Traffic-cone fish—these really

  puzzle the cat. Pear-headed chicken—hippopotatatogriff—

  oysterantula. Gopher tree, that there’s from Genesis 6:14.

  Lindorm—praying manta ray—praying manta reindeer—

  chicken-faced pear. Aurumvorax there needs touching

  off with pyrite. Over there’s the cat, finally at peace

  with Yip and Yop, the Siamese bunyips. You can guess

  where I found the top for my satyr, and his raincoat

  needed no alteration. All the fucker does now is smoke.

  I’d spend nights here, make a blanket of the tarp,

  except I’d gotta fix that cougar. Can’t handle the way

  he implores me from the dog’s-eyes encircling his rent

  asshole, begging for a change of pelt and a colostomy bag.

  I’M NO EXPERT

  but I heard the physician Duncan MacDougall

  devised a sensitive platform-beam balance

  to weigh terminal patients as they expired,

  eventually placing each departing soul between

  eleven and forty-two grams.

 
; I’m no expert, but

  I’ve got a bathroom scale, and I read it before

  I sat down, you know? And when I stood up

  over a pound had vanished. I’m no theologian,

  but I’ve certainly weighed my share of turds,

  an experiment most anyone can replicate.

  You sit

  and think about Plato dividing the soul: reason,

  volition, desire: three perforated squares.

  Later theorists added compassion and stillness,

  microtubules, parallel processing and generative

  grammar; but in 1911, in his backyard garage,

  MacDougall built a transcranial camera to catch

  every last detail staining the bowl.

  Nobody’d call

  me an engineer, though. I don’t know the weight

  of compassion, or what might foil its tendency

  to rise.

  Don’t ask me why corn kernels float.

  ...tucking itself between the copper latch on the little air rifle’s breech and a knot on its veneered stock, a word made the figure of a traveller sitting with an alms bowl crosslegged. As the moonlight streaked and plaited, its long topknot blew. When the wind changed and the curtain’s long shadow fell like a stroke, the traveller all at once burst, nothing but his dark alms bowl remaining on the rifle’s back. Other words joined the game to make ragged pieces sliding down the walls, here and there suggesting crumpled paper as though presents had blown themselves from their wrappings...

  My Aim Is Only To Move Forward

  for Gary Gygax

  another dead hero

  When meeting the Buddha on the road, kill him. Strike with alacrity, ignoring his genial countenance. Leave him no chance to explain. The unclouded compassion of his gaze is mere illusion, one stratagem layered among a milliard: truly does the Buddha tread a path of guile. By all accounts he is tricky to finish, and be the rewards manifold. His flesh separates naturally along the five meridian lines, and at your discretion may be divided into as many as ninety relics. Notably, his skin bestows the property of warmth, and provides guidance in matters of etiquette. His renowned jawbone distinguishes truth from falsity, while the coins in his pocket can return to you when spent. Certain ribs cached within his breast are also considered valuable. Propriety compels you to tug his earlobes; despite an unusual breadth, they relinquish their grasp on the head like autumn blossoms. These segments above all show affinity for the quick-witted and bold, affixing seamlessly to one’s own face. In this manner is the enlightenment of centuries passed on, and a new Buddha inaugurated. Felicity will henceforth mark your affairs, and your reception at social functions will be most cordial. Strive onward with diligence.