Writing is what happens after death. —Kathy Acker
There we were: two narcissists chewing burgers: (one lamb one cow)
in the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue. The phrase—damaged negative—drifted
from the gallery wall to our table’s cluttered surface. The henna-brunette
frame of our 1950s table kept mirroring our mouths—warped with our baboonish,
Baconesque grins—stretching like a nightmare between the salt shaker and the ketchup.
A trail of black sky—coiling zephyr—cascading from our glossy table like a disco
queen in silver polyester glitter shorts, rolling out of 1973 in blue velour skates, but
vanishing she kept vanishing—saturated with corrosive oceanic residue—through a
quick sketch (dank sphere) of my consciousness room. Damaged negative, why do I find
you beautiful? You’re just a phrase, a fragment, a failed narrative, a farce that floated
around the dented and oozing crust of a strawberry rhubarb pie—waiting dutifully under
the tent of its plastic asylum. Finally, O my fugitive phrase—like a failed finite number
refusing to solve the equation—I watched you settle down onto the chrome casing of
the malt blender like an inebriated wasp. I called you a Jew. You called me a racist.
Then we began chewing our burgers again retreating into our naturally narcissistic mode
of being, which is what egoed the first artistic invention. My mind conducted a convoy
of speed-screeching violins—guiding the fragmented tornado in my consciousness room.
The violent river of my mental pace— —went zooming out the diner window fusing
into an SUV taxi. After my beautiful suicide, damaged negative swarmed the shadowed
gusts of my ceiling’s interior space. I decided to tag each gust with a predatorial thunder
in the key of lust, perforating death’s mismedicated farce with the logic of trust. Then
our thoughts reeled from fantasy and we swiftly snapped back to our eye contact above
the diner’s glassy table. You said the movie star boxer was a bad bottom. I said the
cheerful werewolf was worth San Francisco. Forgive me my love: I am presently
involved in the conscious process of dissolving a 30-year lucid-coma.
|