Joyelle
McSweeney
Tempus
Fugit Sound
Like many pursuits it is experiencing erosion.
This bearing rolls roundly off the console to ping against the clawed
feet which curl like currents around three globes.
This wonder of cosmological error has to lean against the wall. The
here, the then, the hereafter—my digestion takes long enough for me to
stretch into all three of them. But
sorry, there’s no gateleg. I’m
making myself up for the scene of representative error involving the
prettiest tree in the garden.
But first, a greenish film. Above
the closed garden which is the staging ground,
the ‘canal’ and the ‘fountain’ and the ‘well’ ride up the
backdrop which is painted in the ‘Chinese’ style.
The heroine takes the stage to run from the cops with a crew of
silk-jacketed opera thugs. It’s a stage on the stage, a stage of the
stage, representing what we will swallow over time.
The trick seas of the moon.
The eroding mouse in my gut-pocket.
In the engraving, I hold the thin neck of the fruit tree in my hand, the
axehandle in the other. My
bulgy breeches, my eyes a-goggle for the acid hand.
A blue bud on a Chinese vase before the real rain
pushing down the femmy branches. A
squirrel digs up microfiche and then scampers off processing the image. Only
to die, his guts stiff for having looked on technicalese or the attaché
shtupping the blonde Friday.
Fasten your robe. You could count sails all day and methodically top off the
ciboria and rewind the leafrecord and not know when the storm will come, and
not know the weight of the bag which balanced against the wind would buy you
out of waiting for the climax like a lump in your breast where the strap of
your quiver rests where the kitestring rests you are flying up into this
shitstorm.
Put another way, eagirlscout, with your callused hand,
brushing down the kitty-kat pony the champeen loves, the negative is
reversible, so your every fated move is also prophetic.
So the fur stands up. We’ve brought our eye-appendages, though, on
race day, it’s the ear that steadily fills with rushing blood.
Like his face of wrinkles that tells the bloodhound
everything he knows. Ask him why he’s running.
In this frame he has no eyes, plunges through the Sylvan world with
the mask of four senses. He
never arrives. Only time would rip the instep away from its happy ankle
clambering up the trunk. As time erodes the modest hand but leaves the
garment apparently defying gravity. It
handles this new meaning.
Like, you never leave the harbor in which you were
unhappy. But I am your new snake.
The Black Death of a
Salesman
The benshi leans both elbows on the melting counter.
Moisture collects on the stainless steel like new colonies and soaks
through his pinstriped smock: the continents form. He is the upsidedown
earthquake king of this part of the country.
He shifts his weight to the demolishment of villages. The flagellate
lifeforms stuff their false mouths with representative food, sparking corn
custard and smoky candy, but he rejects this offering. There is no way to to
propitiate.
The pale parlor is full of grim faces which stop an
even foot below the soundproofed stipple itself pierced as with the elapsed
breaths of the mudpuppies beyond it, rolled in the batter of their bodies,
not caring to extend their limbs.
The benshi looks up to the glazy screen where the match
is playing. It is bracketed to the ceiling. The jerseyed players bicycle
kick, churn, follow a rotating ball in a shot that never cuts.
They follow the ball on a lush green strata that seems to extend
beyond the field itself, beyond the presumptive stadium, down the boulevard,
out of the nation, beyond any concept or ownership, a stripe of green thin
as a wedding table as a wedding band as a wedding song spread wide as a
pampas as wide as a broad palm closing around money diluvial memory.
When the people have used up the last molecules of air
they bow and put their mouths to low clear siphons snaking out of the
electrical baseboard of the icecream case.
There is an orderly hissing as each layer of people bends then steps
away.
On the wall the blue cutpaper woman’s whole body
seems to wink by creasing at her navel.
She touches her sharped raised elbow to her narrow toe. The benshi adjusts his paper hat which is shaped like the
boat of the dead. The spider is
harmless, but it sits so long on the salesman’s shoulder that its long
legs grow into his skin and stroke his heart which requires it.
The firm heart has been storing its resoluteness and now it jumps
nimble as a spider. Where it
leaps against his chest, black fat toothed holes mark his skin, and as it
darts from toe to temple these marks spring up everywhere like cogs and
constellations. He lies there
for days until his body swells enough to contain its former boundaries.
Now he can run on these spinning nebulae. He drives off onto the farthest verge of the highway where
green shades into black. From
here he easily enters the sky where he offers himself to black matter. Thus
the structure did not collapse. The
theater remained as a bowl for money. At
night the temple bats wing out in their jerseys to receive the world’s
offering, which is the world itself.
Apolegit
The drunk saint was found with his liver intact which
was a miracle straight from heaven. My
gumboots caught in the glossies of this fact as I leapt the e-staples.
It was below the e-fold, the intoxification unit.
My bottles klinked like a cabana full of coca nuts and anorexic
soccer goals. My travellin’
man thumbed me over to the ravener who approached.
When they shared a cigarette through the weeds, I turned tail like a
penny.
It made me think of you.
I thumbed and kicked through the flut Seminoles, the
fanning delta like two hands kissing at the crook.
A dog with extra heads lolled uselessly at the Donut Hole.
Give that dog a lemon and he’ll fish for a week.
The white wading bird rose like a flare or a sneeze, the idiolect
Rerun went on snoring at the prow of the punched gut oozing into thicket.
When it broke apart he did nothin’.
As for me, I practiced my Jackie Gleason on the
shoulder in the spoiling sodium light.
My gut arose. I never
got home that night or any, I wore the mark of cane like a gold golf
club’s shaft above the eye. Next
noon, I was hitching the road by Oradour-sur-Glane, the town preserved in
its ruined, ha-ha, state. I
pitched alone, I road along, I was hitched to my own vessel.
I probed my garments stitched around me like character development.
I bled into my car, I caught the runoff in my nimbly seat.
I was like a movie treatment how I held my beginning and end.
How I bargained. My
cruet of plot like ‘cured alive,’ rank as a mount of olives.
It didn’t take long.
I had as good a grip as the stalks. I made a miracle dress of the
dishrag that was a chiffonade in the previous scene. I had ruined the continuity, permanently, and time stood
still in shock.
I reached through to the key in the lock which knew my
secret like a wise child. Like
an old fragile glass that could hold only ghosts shot from the empty stomach
out: the kitchen was a moon resort. Every
surface grey with food substitute. I
climbed into the chiffarobe and made like a stack of plates. I made like a
dusty dress, like an illusion. I
read a stack of waiting plays, thumbed my way through the roles.
When my tramp arrived I jumped the apple cart, a
professional dusty rose. I was
an ingénue again. I folded
frilled and strategically in and out of the doorjamb.
Was I bigger than a breadbox? And the answer was always no.
The answer depended.
Was it always or was it repeatedly.
Goodbye, dusty rose! Our popularity lagged when our disasters got too
polished, the house fell beautiful as a blossom folding open, the ship sunk
like a pen in the breast. I
couldn’t gain money. The
types were bankrupt, as were the banks, going under, collapsing with all
hands. It was the séance
craze, but the bad news glutted space and made the telepaths grit their
eyeteeth.
I went over and under bounds to my post-dated embryo lolling outside the
pitch and hour of regulation play it had been posted post-restante.
Do you mean a parcel inside me or the tissue I was digested over and
over again? In the green box
like a cricket pitch slightly sick from travel, slick from wear.
Drop a quarter in the slot and see the green lady going seasick above
the tilting benches. That’s
your mama. Dripsomania they
call it when you take your sealegs to land.
I paid for it, signed for it with an equal sign, in
that mice writing you picked up in the lycee along with that accent like a
case of lice. I hate how your
words run mealywormed out of your lips around your cigarette like rats from
a burning ship: smoking and bitching.
Dear Kid: I can bitch you out of any state in the
union; today it’s Kansas and France.
I’ve scraped my hair straight back to the skull in stripes and
mounted the bike with my feet shoved into the regulation feet.
In this scene, I’m aggressive as a canker, something white and
stunning the roses in display. They
spot like rain in the black and white picture.
Which is more vulnerable: a glass held up to Nature or
Nature depressed to black and white with the night all around us like a
showercurtain salesroom. In
this scene, I grasp the whisk-broom and lift away to stir the clouds up to
an incomparable engine. This
magic lacks delicacy, unlike that father-and-son team laboring for life on a
collection of smashable flowers. It was no sacrifice to display me in my
first role as Baby Moses. Cough-syruped, I smirked away. I strummed my
ukulele. In my ancien regime, I sang to the stars while they escaped
from the clinic following the leaky bucket in the sky.
Typically, I arrived.
Untypically, I held back. What
jerk would be there with the stovepipe trousers with the piping like: walk
the line. He kept threatening
to come pound me when the ground thawed but I’d made friends with the
haulers all along the line. When
the cruiser docked at Kansas, I stepped down from the stainless steel deck
with just a quick look back over my fox stole.
With the toe of my T-strap, I flipped up the backdrop
and diverted. I found my self
back on the old dry road: Shoebutton!
I mourned like a wolf. I
tied an old rag to my jaw, reverted, foot stuffed backwards into the kiddie
shoe that pinched. Dustamyshoe. Squint-eyes.
Drug my chifforobe up the cornfield.
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