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1. |
Scalloped Steps
02:04
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A thousand goodbyes in your incendiary light
The priest with his back to us
Turns his head for the shot
As an arm off-camera hands him a robe
He exits into ordinary daylight without putting it on
On lash-like rotors an amoeba rolls up
It seems to bounce on an undulating strand of air
It hovers like a cursor
A thousand goodbyes in your incendiary light
The priest says, feeling his skin burn
Across the patio at the edge of the pool
Sits Jesus. A reclining thief with his head
In Jesus’s lap and dangling one leg in magma
His hair stroked, gazes up into immaculate blue
The amoeba cycles through shades
Each more pyrogenic that the last
A mini-goodbye in you, he says
A cough at my shoulder: it’s the priest
I sidle over making room in the pew
Across his naked body ovals of pilot lights anchored
Not in time to his movements
He stands, they lift; he sits, they settle
On the altar are synchronized gestures
Table umbrellas blossom in the sun
Folds in the baptist’s white tunic undone
As he hurries down the scalloped steps
It fans out in a ring around his head
And he rushes into the water and sinks
A thousand goodbyes he says
As by the temples he pulls you under
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2. |
#Relics
02:10
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I was buried
With 5,000 strings of beads
And a belt
Of white-furred arctic fox teeth
Somebody loved me
My nostrils filled
With crushed fat
And rosemary chewed
Then sewn in my pocket
The funk of the afterlife
Lodged in my armpits
As you drew eyes
In your high school art class
Beneath my cloak my penis
Glistens with resin
In the corner of my hips
My body markings
Are mandalas
Of the motherboards of heaven
Your grave is filled with used condoms
At the nurse’s station
A room plan for each patient
Maps to a set of vital monitors
Heart rate, bp, 02 sat
You’ve pulled off your leads
But no alarm goes off
There’s no one in attendance
You’re free now to go to spirit class
We’ll meet somewhere
In the industrial revolution’s early stages
Our instructor just back from an expedition
Surrounded by specimens in glass cases
Will begin his lecture
On burial masks
You text my stone tablet
Glyphs appear in my chat
Here’s a picture of me
In just a knit cap
As you can see
Still stiff from my nap
Here’s a heliograph
It shows
A scene of a pleasant day outdoors from my window
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3. |
Anatolia
02:33
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The toddler physicist reaches into his diaper
His fecal equation describes
Certain prismatic properties of time
When it dries he shines a toy flashlight at the wall
Color bars weave demarcations of which he has no grasp at all
Future. Past. Now.
When he presses the key on a toy piano
As he does from time to time
He intuits that in this note a previous note
Is implied, as is a next
His brow knitted, he bounces in his bouncy swing
Working out how this should be represented
Through the pool of milk dribbled from the nipple of his bottle
He drives a mini-truck
Dual sets of curves portray how the Neolithic past
Aligns with future deserts in Anatolia
He is in the ancient city
He pulls a wheeled duck on a thread
That quacks and flaps its flippers
With each turn of its circular feet
There are no streets
The citizens had to scramble from their apartments
On ladders
And walk across their neighbors’ roofs to exit
He knows that at one time
The inhabitants burned their dead
Just below the floors where they lived
He’s in the structure now, floating in space
He is naked on his belly lying on a pelt
Protruding from the wall in the photo is a set of bronze horns
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4. |
Future Deserts
04:35
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5. |
Once Called Leviathan
01:53
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Thank god for little mysteries
Shouts the sailor in the crow’s nest
On the immobile ship in a marble sea
As a beast once called Leviathan
Exposes his belly to the petrified crew
His penis the size of two
Oars laid end to end
Is erect and a female whose name is withdrawn
Rubs herself along his spine
The sine wave that best describes the sound that happens next
Begins with a pinch
An opening just enough for air passing through to whistle
Then a widening curve with a great bellowing reverb that fizzles
The ocean billows with the cloud of his cum
Restructured by a wave as a protozoan mass,
Then as petroleum released on the surface
Amoebic rainbows and paisley pyroclasts
The lookout’s words thud
Like molten crystals on the deck
The first shards of the iceberg
That slices the ship’s stone viscera
From which flows Neolithic ash
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6. |
Firesetters
02:09
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Books log on to the pyre
The books consume the fire
In reds and blues
The fire tattoos
The covers
The fire setters hover
A child’s face
In an air balloon
Is drawn up from the center
And rises to the future fire the books consume
The books are flowers
Of orange and gold
They rob the fire of color
I look at you
At six
Sixteen
Thirty-six years old
What had I meant to do you wonder
Dunes and aloes strewn
across your threshold
It’s the fire the books consume
Wood and paper
Coal and kerosene
The flames have scraped the pages clean
But the books ate the flames
On what burns and what remains
It seemed as if we’d drawn a blank
So the fire setters made a heap
Leaned their chins upon their pikes
And standing in a circle dreamed
They hunted down the books at night
But the books were more clever
And at each step leaped
From the fire setters’ feet
The books consume the fire
Another story won’t be told
To put you back to sleep
The pages now are only light
If my fingers reach
Their surfaces I find
No sentences could I read
I am blind
Will you read to me
Of light and heat
So hot it burned my eyes?
The books consumed the fire tonight
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7. |
Red Omaha
03:27
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We are on a reed raft headed for the falls
Or maybe just the rapids
Or maybe the thousand drooling bullet holes
In the levee wall
One fine morn in 550 BC
Pythagoras passed by a forge
Heard five hammers ringing on the anvil
A sound he loved except for one thing
That ruined the song
One hammer among
The two plus three
was off
One hammer was wrong
The firefighters are in reflective pelts
Ray gun spears in their utility belts
Gone by the light of day
Gone to hunt the levee
Gonna pierce its belly till it sprays
Water on the fire
Water on the fire of the plain
The sound makes Pythagoras want to forget
It jabs like a protractor edge in his pocket
It follows harmony like a predator
Downloading sound files for quality time later
The fire on the plains has spread
The firefighters are backed to the caverns
One traces his hand with a dollop of red ochre
One scrapes shards for bronze age poker
Omaha
High Chicago
Follow the Queen
Pythagoras can forget what he’s seen
But not what he’s heard
And here we are on the plains
In a boat of reeds
Hunting the flood
As the giant we call Levee
With spears in his gut
Relents and the water comes
To the firefighters waiting
And sweeps the hands from their hands
But leaves the hand in the painting
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8. |
Flooded Caverns
02:44
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Hourloupe
Hourloupe: “I associate it, by assonance, to ‘hurler’ (to roar), to ‘huleler’ (to hoot), to ‘loup’
(wolf).”
—Jean Dubuffet
Hourloupe is a collaboration between writer, musician, and artist Frank Menchaca and Anar Badalov.
... more
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