Ronald Palmer
Livid Hieroglyphs (R:evolving Triptych)



                                    A scattered chapter, livid hieroglyph,
                                    The portent wound in corridors of shells.

                                                            -- Hart Crane, (At Melville’s Tomb)


1.

             Inside my soulfilm—the idiottour will begin in five minutes—

             Open my sternum: a new star plunks out—rolling like a pewter tooth

             onto the glass breakfast table.

             I’m a ship captain’s queerest fable,

             gelatin scan: I’m a snapshot of a man.


~*~


Gammaburst: I will not be a man made of ifs: that’s me in the black sunglasses writing:

Dear Kathy Acker: this binaric heteroclite is killing me! I’m often (B):lack and (F):

emale inside these robotic tendencies with anus puckered daunting wound, sore lips;

A cinnamon hawk just flew his sensorial eyes zigzag flapping through eucalyptus

trees flashing silver wings while the lake is busy thinking heavy with fish & secrets.

A rower (size of a water bug) pulses the distance, lunging between lake front houses.

I must keep failing.

All those miles talking to myself on snowy highway: were you in my obsessive lap

Invisible passenger? Intimacy’s prowess, chewing your cowardice, spinach vegan wrap?


*~*


My adorably diffident acupuncturist bends to whisper this very sensitive then tap-tap

Tapping with her tiny plastic hammer inserting the disposable needle like a mini-javelin

Tortured into my right (twitch twitch) temple. In the evening I unwind with a bulletproof

Tinderbox of yearning and a new reality war/show, wager-less I drift to another naked

soldier, burned, hung in soulblur, crowdbeaten to slow stir, disemboweled, skullcharred,

This green zone section barred

where the tanks are symphonious,

now that’s a protest I want to see,

where Iraqi wailing is euphonious

amid recent rubble,

I don’t want to make trouble

with the sad mother, watching the television set

as her child’s picture is flashed for one second of silence:

national collection of mother echoes: humans love a storm and live in it.

Let’s slow dance in our candlelit living room.



2.

              “Essence can no longer be “hypo-statized” as the pure, spiritual being-in-itself. ”

             –from Adorno’s Negative Dialectic. here-here, wet wolf head drags a cigarette

             then floats out the living room night window moaning out vomiting: Mother!


~*~


             If I had a twin brother I’d name him Ronald so he’d be a doppelgänger,

             a father

             often who failed and so did I, yes it was nice talking to you too, dad,

             I mind-sprint the periphery of this stale thought—

             self portrait with imaginary brother—

             pencil sketch: I’d play go fetch:

             remote control him:

             blinking
                         shitting
                                     speaking
                                                 ejaculating doll

I’d fuck him good too like the whore he is walking my 12 year old lunatic
through the lines of apple trees, (why are you playing horsey in your airplane seat?)

My self as younger walking through Blue Jay Apple Orchard where the farmer has a gun
and cerebral burp—

             Ginny the neighborhood slut is showing Mark the neighborhood soccer stud her
giant bignipple breasts and I see him sucking them (dalliances) then weighing them in his
brown palms within a circle of pines—

(daredevilhives): absurdity eats the crown of regret. In short, we’re living in the body of
God—(time = nothing)

             I promise myself a summer burial—all sticky with kerosene and yearning—

             Ripping through your hairdo angiogram.

             We’re going to descend now to avoid further turbulence: instantly reborn:

             Who do you think you are, Lena Horne?

             The werewolf said if you get fat I’ll divorce you, greedy with growling, as I
             shoved a second chocolate cupcake in my mouth

I pluck your resent from a barrage of assumptions: like caviar it makes champagne sips

Taste better. Will you reveal the secret to remaining desirable feeling attractive after 35

after 45 after

55 after 65 after

             75 after 85? What would I do with four sons?

             I took the twin head in my hands and kissed the space

             where the slipcover soul had been sung.

             Can you tell yet that I’m living in the 21st Century?



A cherry popsicle perhaps? Everyone relax into your suspicious radar blips:


~*~


                         Spaceshadow,             Jitterphotostat,            Handvein,


             Spiritrauma,                Deathabacus,               Slipcoverskin,


             (Please point to the moment when your whole existence proved imaginary)


                         Firsthorror,                  Doublesoul,                Ghostmomentum.



3.

             Putrefy, perturbation: I cannot chase this cheeky political out of beauty’s room:

contumacious: like a teenage whore who absconds with his John’s wallet all theatrical hand

             crawl under Boston hotel bed (bitchysmirk) my own multi-tonal moaning again

dissolves the hooded chase: when I turn suckerpunching a performative Christian

             spinning in his paradoxical playground coasting through narcoleptic twilight.


             This new monkish Pope will pull the sad century lever:

             Sever my quick and clever serenade draped in infatuation’s red blare:

             1960s Technicolor: John Jr’s beautiful head brown-thick-hair

                         (tumbling like a hacked watermelon through bad weather)

             Falling from the ill-tampered Atlantic sky. Mirror Mirror: Temper Temper (dare):


~*~


             Gelatin shred your innards with deductive reasoning.

             Lime’s elision offers a gestureless leer,

             compulsory ego-syrup: there-there:

             Time’s liaison tastes delicious (esp. with the pepper (black lemons) seasoning).

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