You Were Sightful, Cheeks Bubbling with Bloody Skin

After Scanners (Cronenberg, 1981)





And second let us forget our rags and riches
for one moment--there we are, we are here--
and gaze into each other's eyes (pens discarded),
the apropos bulge of a blood shrieking moment--

I watched you defend her even though she meant nothing.
It was a country you were to die for--transference, energy.

Outside of the film I heard voices complain about form,
form desecrates content, some might say--deterrents,
every last thing on this earth a huge differential force--
variations, subhuman caskets being lowered into the ground--
Burroughs writing about lemurs, hunters, and Jesus--
this is a ghost of a chance I will not remember . . .
. . . meanwhile Saramago tangoing to the white and blind,
while a shit-yard gets trodden and creates such beauty--

Force me down with your mind like pulsations like new places--
we are organic, yet we penetrate computers like terrorists--

Let us forget our rags and riches and form and content
and line length for one moment (for one moment imagine voices
swallowing into one another like the shore's ocean or a stranger
clicking her heels on the street corner--that bloody street corner),

and think about the van spinning ever-so-illogically onto its side,
sliding forward into the record shop and spilling vinyl everywhere--

and I walking later on this evening to buy a burger and
hear a band, buy cigarettes, smoke them, drive home, not lonely but
ready to approach these paintings I painted while watching this film,
check out this dark painting, all the arts, the news websites--

While I watched that man's art I imagined being in the asylums
where the insane salute the flag, the allegiance's morning pledge--

Obama took a train through this city, Philadelphia, earlier today--
our minds are more shattered glass than ever before while I work
and try to forget but fuck up while processing through memories--
(forget the angry streams of motifs of the Beats--forget the Chilean
authors and the Portuguese and New York City, too--forget
potlucks and danger, the men standing with bombs on their backs--
your own bomb big enough to blast buildings into forever ago)
every process becoming a great, rosy, puffing acknowledgment--
(the Twin Towers forever old, forever gone, forever geldings,
the twins in that pornographic video streamed online not even
attractive enough anymore, even when both fucked at the same time--

there was no dance scene during the film--it was all cold and dark,
the eighties seeping through its cracks but not its soundtrack--
I couldn't wait for it to be over the minute I started to hear,
and now I wonder if it will call as I wash my brushes in fear--

(sweating palms and a watch that ticks till a still death--the
death of time, the death of you and time and a coffee mug dirtied up)