The devil came to my house

The devil showed up and he stood outside the front door, a little impatient I guess, I guess I could read that in his posture, his black hoof tap tap tapping. He seemed generally displeased with the state of the sky, which was end-of-the-day electric orange fusing into bottom of the ocean blue. His bright red body held itself quite still, unnaturally so, most likely I figure because he wasn’t breathing, because he didn’t have to. He held a small naked boy’s hand. I was shocked, for obvious reasons sure, but also because I knew that boy — he was me, or I was him, maybe I should say, some thirty plus years ago. Down to the last detail. Same birthmark by our lips and in our inner thigh. I knew this from photos better than I did from memory, which made sense because in those days we were so rarely outside ourselves like we are now, always able to take a look at how we are reflected back in the digital mirror. Plus back then, just looking at me, I remembered all these feelings I had forgotten I still had somewhere buried in the under-used configurations of my brain: how big the yard felt, how crisp the air this time of year, how long a month was, how impossible that the decades would change, how I couldn’t wait to see what it felt like when we moved from 89 to 90; how no separation existed between the creative impulse and the act of creation, no art to make: instead days and nights to shape,, how I described God clearly to my sisters; how I dreamt for one whole week of every episode that would air the next day of Looney Tunes, and was right; and here I was, nude under the hyper-present sky, and the devil was standing there at my door with a bunch of papers and a pen, impatient, waiting, all I had to do was sign and it would all be back again, I would be all mine.

Check Please!

There was philosophy, and then there was philosophy. That’s how he explained it. With his mouth chewing on a mix of meat and bread. He pointed the fork at you and swallowed. He wanted you to acknowledge that people had a hard time making choices in accordance with what they claimed to believe. You had two glasses of wine in you, red from grapes grown just about as far away as you felt from him, psychologically, at that moment. Maybe, you offered, softly, so not to alarm him with your disagreement, what people believe is more like a goal that guides them toward the kind of person they want to be. Like a lighthouse, it keeps you off from rocks of real bad behavior.

“Real bad behavior?” He said it and licked his lips clean of that last bite, but you could tell he liked that. He wanted to know what you knew about quote unquote real bad behavior. So you told him about some people say it takes a deviant mind to understand one, and whether or not that was true, in your line of work you it was actually — literally, you said — your job to understand. Or at least try. In his line of work, he designed abstract structures that moved information from one place to another within a network of electrical components. It seems unrelated, he said, but actually we are both interested in eliminating bad behavior. In computer programming, we call that debugging. And maybe you as a psychologist or therapist or whatever are also tasked with designing structures that intervene in the electrical components albeit biological that make up a brain, thereby removing the “bugs” — he air quoted that phrase loudly — in human behavior. 

To which you replied with a big old maybe and debated between a third glass of wine or a check, because you suddenly felt tired from all this. You knew there was a moon outside, above your heads, and it was practically glowing it was so full of silence. You knew you could take his hand and tell him he was a genius, that his smarts were sexy, and if you lowered your voice you could ask him if he wanted to see real bad behavior. Then when he assented you could take that fork with the glossy shiny of meat grease on it and plunge it directly into the flesh of his hand, and maybe even hard enough to pin his hand to the table, and casually ask if he liked this kind of bad behavior, if this is what he meant. Because it was your job to understand, and understanding requires identification. You had to get him by seeing yourself in him, and sometimes there was no better way than going right inside, past all the boundaries, and watch what comes rushing out.

The Island

It was right there all along. I saw the sea, and the twinkling lights that stood for the spot where land ended, where the boundary between things vanished whenever you zoomed in. It was December, no one was at this end of the island. It was the kind of island people forgot was an island at all. There were too many rooftop bars, penthouse apartments, tall office windows where the lights never went out; and then down on the other side of things there were gutter villages, temporary cities of sleeping bags and dogs, and markings on the underground walls that you let you know it was possible for life to drag you down there. There were places you couldn’t get into, and places from which you couldn’t return. I thought of all the bodies, beautiful or unloved, in various configurations and contortions. None of them were here tonight. I breezed in the sea and it became me. I breathed out and for a moment I was gone; I had evacuated myself; I was free.

*

They were closing the prison. The prison was an experiment in an alternate form of society, and it failed. So the prisoners were going to become prisoners in other places, smaller prisons, scattered across the island. Inside the prison were places for solitary confinement; inside that were men inside prisons inside prisons; inside them were thoughts, feelings, and impulses, which is how life happens — by which I mean, how God muscles out intention from the dizzying electrical ocean of neurons fire in the brain; how the brain collaborates with the gut, which itself is another brain left over from when each of these men were still in the womb — when their bodies were folded in themselves, and the matter the became the head pulled from the center and left neurons wrapped around the gut, which will continue thinking for the rest of their lives, no matter what spaces they are enclosed in, no matter if they ever go outside.

*

“I like your tattoo… what does it mean?” he said. She winced. “Ohhhh-kkkay there…” She froze me out. He felt belittled. He felt small. He tried to joke. “You don’t know what it means?” She said nothing. He left the store and waited. Her shift was the last one. When it was over, it was easy to follow her into the subway. It was easy to take the car next to hers and watch when she got out. The city was full of places to hide. She didn’t get her keys out in time and that was that. He knew in the long run, he couldn’t get away with it. But the system breaks down if you don’t think in terms of the long run. He left her contorted in a position she never knew in life. He thought about that when he went underground. Suddenly everything was possible. There was no way to know the boundaries of the world until you pushed on them. Some walls were doors. Some people still left their windows unlocked.

The Women

I heard the plan before I knew what it meant. “And that’s when we finish her off?” “Yeah, that’s when we finish her off.” Two pairs of eyes turned their lights on at me from the other side of the diner. I turned away, put coffee in my mouth, and wondered if there would finally be a consequence to the games I play in my head with strangers. Over nine million people in this city — how many have I fought, made love to, fucked, or killed in the span of a train ride, over the course of a block, as eyes locked and left? Never a consequence, not really. Once a woman switched train cars because I kept looking. I felt who I was in her eyes and didn’t like it. And now who was I to these two men? They were a collage of grays and eye slits and stubble. They were knife wounds for mouths. They stared to colonize my space and I felt a loss of ownership over my body. I thought of that woman again, the one who I made uncomfortable. If she had confronted me I would have apologized. I would have said, I’m sorry, I was just thinking how I have a similar sweater and jacket but never thought to wear them together. I would have presented as hyper-soft to excuse myself from the image of myself she gave me: a colonizer, planting the flags of my eyes in her flesh. So maybe we were not so different, these men and I. At least they wore who they were on their skin. I crossed the diner. I sat at their booth. “I want in.”

Here, again, but.

She has come to purpose without passion, he admits. This decision is not one that is taken with little caution but one that should be taken with much caution. Again, she has come to purpose without deliberation, without poise, without thought. I am not inclined to consider, she mentions, casually, but there is nothing in her that is not casual, without plan, without place. I am frightened by this child, no longer a child, now an actor of decision, too old to be contained and coddled and told. This is our passage, eventually. I ask her, then, as I am inserted intentionally into her. Is there direction in your intention? And there is no direction. But she has come to purpose and pointed nothing at nothing and expected too much from it all.

For we are among rocks

Right. For we are the fingers on the right hand. I have had little babble in the country but I did find among the rocks that indeed I could find among the rocks great things among the rocks (among other). But I was little concerned then, as I am now, about what opened wide up in front of me so wide up that even those rocks, even those among the rocks, must have misted over, clear over and said in little voices that they were truly among the rocks. And that is right, dearly right. I am here among the rocks.

Gown Blowing, Hi-ho.

Laudable, at least, from the edge - she, alike in hair color, to the growth: it was, perhaps, moving, in and out, up and down - she watched and considered: Oh, how nice. It was going to kill her, then. She was unattached, aloof, and foolish. The apes had congregated at the far end of the field.

And it was unbearable the howling. We aren't even paying, Mars said, disgruntled. His distasteful demeanor suggested coming torture. We would all pray for that. I didn't choose any of this, none, blindfolded and formulaic, disposed to cheat and scurry under the mattress, I over-cooked myself: how fabulous.

A + C * (2y - 1) = .

the argument

don't point the wrong end
at all the people you love the most

the sky is full of stars and their ghosts
the singer says wo oh


speech is the flower blooming in silence

I enjoy remembering when you ran your hands through my hair
it isn't there
now it isn't there

and the sparks from the subway flash like a camera;
congratulations - you are famous today
today is your day
today is the day

7 plague forecast and the man on the train knows whose to blame; the black, the Jews; I was in a
sad mood all morning coffee full of holes and I could not
remember my own divinity; like jesus and the tree
driven to cross the space between you & me

as the porch light goes out and no song (no song) can turn it on
and no song (no song) can make it right
no song (no song) can save our light
the father is an echo of the father before him
back to the first word ringing out from the lips of our Father
who has always been there, will always be waiting for us
to come home

the mother is an echo of the mother before her back to the first mother who birthed us all

Me at 3

Walking across the garden --

this is a memory, and that is what scientists say looks the same when observed in the brain as does the future does when we imagine it--

I found no place to stand but inside the tomato plants. Everything my eye went to --

full, ripe & red --

was what I needed. I filled my mouth with answers, I was never hungry.

Meanwhile, on the other side of town...

http://makeyourselftransparent.tumblr.com/

The Bible, as read from a text file, displaying the bytes as colors : "In the beginning God..." to "...morning were the sixth day."

The Bible, as read from a text file, displaying the bytes as hexadecimal values: "In the beginning God..." to "...morning were the sixth day."

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R-etur-n Monster (ab-ab-baab_esc1`)

Banished, most suitably, by the posturing elite, expansive in succession, following, meekly, but a casual and fortunate power siege. The hordes, Sheila exclaimed (yes, Sheila, the heroine princess, rejuvenated by the irrational reappraisal - the haunting taunts of ubiquitous fetterment). I will not be [slave], yes, I will not, she continued, her English but imperfect. She is conned, hmph, mislead by intonation. A far unusual excuse. We have returned, dear martyrs, to plant this filthy sword in the washed skin - no one is to hijack the purposes of our novel journey.

Earlier, deposed by the starlit interrogator, she proposed, but only in hint, at a collaborative piece of journalistic expose - ultimately, a short fact-based (meandering) perspectivo. How dear! The proposal, authentic in its bold and humane intent, was flatly ignored and later discarded by each member of the ruling parliamentary. I am freezing, she admitted later, smoking, outside the embassy, embarrassed by her freakish tanned skin (in the kremlin).

The opening prescription, prompted I am certain, by the disillusionment of the state (yes, yes, by the aging and fretting male population), called for a disarming of adequate and functional communication assets. In a nutshell, Sheila shouted (you pigs!), the racist fringe has demanded a reduction and elimination of the overly archaic scientific process.

It is our return, consequently, bridging the gap between two generally opposed but progressively united counterparts that posed as the reconciliation of the red block, the iron curtain. But these were just feeble interjections, anecdotal in that they witnessed the surface, irrelevant in that the surface was no longer dictated by governable laws but instead, of course, by visceral supposition.

I suppose, really, it is not possible. And I am only crying, Sheila announced. She was bawling and had two hands in her pants.

How I Live Is My Masterpiece

I.

Calvin, having recently received notification that his long poem, "How I Live Is My Masterpiece," would be published in the New Yorker, went out for a walk across 5th Avenue to feel the snow on his face and more generally life itself, when he started seeing a swarm of black dots filling his field of vision in the middle of which there appeared a light a little too white and rapidly expanding against the swarm. The poem began like

I am quitting my night job
of tapping words together to make heat
because the bodies on the train today
made me warmer than the mind is wide;
wider than the sky, sure, but not warmer
than blood, so let's go for a swim--
who's with me?

and ended with a rapid succession of imagery, including:

...of lightposts, broken arms, the watches we left behind, the wallets lost, and every argument and mending gone up to heaven on waves broadcast in every language to the black space beyond heaven...

which he liked. Calvin knew that he never could have gotten this one in, not right off the bat, not even close. But the other publications were opening doors and those doors in turn opened even more doors, so it was more like running through a house and turning on every light, only to find that the neighbors were doing the same in response, and their neighbors, house after house until all the globe was illuminated.

Years ago, when getting his eyes checked, Calvin was told by Dr. Harrison to watch out if he ever happened to see a myriad of dark spots swarming through his vision. Dr. Harrison was a good man; like most doctors he believed in benevolent deception, such as when he deftly and without explicit consent inserted contact lenses in Calvin's eyes after Calvin hit an internal wall he was unable to push past by actually touching his own eyeballs, badly as he wanted contacts and tired as he was of the fuzzy border of the world always peaking in beyond his glasses. None of this went through his mind, however, as he fell into the snow, which it turned out felt cold and painful on his cheeks. What Dr. Harrison was warning him about was the possibility of retinal break, given that Calvin's FBN1 gene was mutated, like his father's, and that the resulting condition known as Marfan's Syndrome left him at higher risk for a tear in the retina, which experience is accompanied subjectively by rapid onset of photopsia. Dr. Harrison's own son suffered a retinal break at an early age, after years of what Dr. Harrison sadly realized only later was obsessive-compulsive disorder, in this case the behavior being a compulsive darting of the eyes every night before the boy could fall asleep, afraid as he was of a murderer or thief or after watching Fire in the Sky, an alien's strange face suddenly pressing itself against his un-curtained windows. The memory of that night in particular, and his son's horrible insistence that his photopsia was in fact the light of the UFO coming to get him and "take him through the walls," as the boy put it -- over and over again, wailing actually, "They're coming out of the walls! They're coming out of the walls!" -- was why Calvin was warned at all, and why Dr. Harrison, deceptive or not, was a good doctor who did not see himself exempt from the physical failures that paraded before him daily.

The odd thing is that what did go through Calvin's head as he thrashed about in the snow were the nearly same images that came as if from outside himself not quite exactly three years ago, on the famous night that Calvin first pulled over to the side of the road and went running through the woods and which lead to everything else -- the poems, Lauren, and everything that he didn't know yet was coming. It was the same sense that the earth was in danger, and scenes of trees burning, and children's hands sticky from chemical burns; but now this time there was also a satellite exploding silently in space, and the face of a man who looked perhaps Korean laughing in a way that left Calvin more disturbed than did any other image or foreign sensation. It was all in the poem, one way or another. Was it unforgivable that he caught himself thinking, well, at least I'll get another poem out of this?

*

Several hours earlier, Dr. Harrison sat down with a new patient, a walk-in actually, but anyway his last patient had cancelled and because he was not a man who went home early when someone was waiting, Dr. Harrison had Sheila prepare the file and send him in.

"You live in the neighborhood?" he asked.

"I just moved here."

"Great, great... Hm. It looks like you wrote here under current medical conditions -- am I getting this right -- anophthalmia...?"

"Yes, that's right." Dr. Harrison stopped and looked at the patient.

"Anophthalmia?"

The man looked back at him, blinking.

"That's what I'm told."

"Mind if I take a look?"

In the waiting room Sheila thought she heard a sound like a tree snapping, but then again the radio was on, and though it was low it nonetheless filled the room with waves of various frequencies including those which when translated sounded like

ah ah ah
I got you I can't let you go

to Shelia's ears and brain.


II.

At home Dr. Harrison's basement is filled with stacks of cassette tapes. Above ground, there is a long narrow hall with slices of sunlight and paintings on the wall which runs past the bedroom where he and his wife sleep and up the stairs beside which hangs a painting made for him by Mark Rothko, who always wanted to say things simply even as he felt his pictures impaired by vulgar eyes and cruel powerless people who would extend their affliction to the world. Here is Dr. Harrison's studio. Here is the wide canvas of yesterday's work. Here is the sun coming through the skylight, which is cloudy, and here are the paints spilled on the floor. Calvin might say, ah, those accidents are your masterpiece! Stare at the sun and close your eyes -- whose art is that? But in the cabinets that stand in the corner of the room are more tapes, and transcripts, some typed on a typewriter and then the later ones printed, of words from people all over the world who heard about what Dr. Harrison does and sought him out so that they at the very least would not feel so alone. Of course they really wanted answers.

Before Rothko died, he promised that if he chose to commit suicide, everyone would know it. But no one was sure afterwards, when he was found on the ground with cuts in his arms and his glasses off. It was this last thing that threw off some people; he was severely myopic; how could he have killed himself if he couldn't even see?

Questions

Coming down the country road, wide-awake even at this hour, Elsa took a turn a little too fast and found herself take flight, like a giant metal insect, over the sharply rolling hill. In the air there hung innumerable stars, sure. But she knew in the back of her mind that the question of "what hung in the air" was answerable in different ways, depending on one's perspective: danger, romance, molecules, probability waves, time, pollen, dust, pollution... fortunately for her the car was not an insect, and not meant for flying. The moment passed. Everything changed, including the questions.

Rogers to the Rescue

"Johnny."

"Johnny."

"Yeah?"

I said his name into the phone.

"There's been a problem."

"What kind of problem?"

"The kind I need to talk to about in person."

"It's too fuckin early."

"Fuck man you have no idea. Get up and come meet me."

"If it's so fuckin important you come here."

"Fine."

I took off towards his place. I had Cliff in the back seat, breathing. His eyes were open as if looking out the sunroof at the early AM sky. Except they were looking red and dry.

John Mitchell Rogers M.D. was a friend of mine from school. In the very beginning we used to get high once every few months and though we hadn't done that in years, there was a bond. He once told me if he knew he had another life he'd spend this one stoned. Instead he was neurologist who liked to learn functional programming languages for fun.

I rang and he opened the door.

"What is it?"

I showed him Cliff in the car.

"Jesus, Klein, what are you doing?"

"He hacked into the dream machine. He took it from my office."

"Hacked into it?"

"I know, I know. But I need him to get out of this. I don't like not knowing what he did and where is."

"Where he is, is lying in what could very well be a vegetative state in the fuckin back seat of your car. Your car, Klein. What are you thinking?"

He leaned in over Cliff and looked and listened.

"If I were you," he said, "I'd wash my hands of all this immediately."

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I'm the one who pulled the tube. While he was in there."

"And now you want him out."

"Yes."

"And you want me to help you."

"Yes."

Forget what we said before: Cliff is staring at the sky. A flock of birds pass overhead, splitting up and then coming together. He watches them, and inside his skull dense patterns of electrical activity move that way, just like that.

(...)

Uncertain what to do, we smiled and shook everyone's hand. Instead of complaining about the work, or the weather, we took careful measures to say only what was needed to build hospitals out of thin air. Now everyone comes around when it rains and we turn no one -- not even the pigeons -- away.

reboot

Bum bump -- bum bump -- bum bump. This is what Cliff experiences next. There is a sound like pounding on the walls -- can you call them walls? they look cold and wet to touch. He can move his limbs, this is good. This is good, he thinks. Then he is not so sure.

Across town Calvin is in the back of a police car.

Dr. Klein is not sure what to do next. Lauren is gone and I am gone. We were never there. The world closes up around our bodies and we become something that can never be spoken or imagined.

So he turns toward the light. The computers are emitting waves at irritating frequencies, it makes his skin itch. I am too late, he thinks. The dream machine has clearly been altered. But how? I thumb through the notes but it is like hieroglyphics, Cliff's writing, and I can't tell what is idiosyncratic and private from what I simply do not know enough to comprehend. I look back at Cliff's body. He looks dead but there is smaller machine displaying his heart rate, which is fine, good even. But he's like a dead man. He won't talk. I should kill him but I won't. I need to know what he did, and then I need to undo it.

The cops lets him sleep it off in the jail in the morning Calvin is out, blinking at the winter sun. He moves like a deep sea diver through the subway station. People's faces open up with a touch of his eyes. Everything feels Too Much.

At the end of a hall, if you can call it that, is an opening and past that the walls narrow considerably and Cliff has to wiggle belly-down through some strange wet stuff. It's vicious, like hair-gel. It doesn't smell. In fact, nothing does. Cliff realizes this as his head suddenly feels like it's being drilled clean through and one eye goes out and then the other and then they both come back. The walls keep beating, massive muscles, carrying him through a chamber like someone's giant wet heart.

lyrics without a song

You won't believe but I did it again, I'm not sorry this time I have to say. Because there is someone waiting inside me, that's who I am today. All the teardrops all the years pooling at my feet. We believed yes what did we believe, what did we believe my sweet.

Take, your hands, off me. What we did we believe?

Take your hands off me. Off me.

You won't believe it but the astronauts in the space, they get paid to do the things that they do. Hard work, a little less complete, I am either contradiction and complete. (or perfectly consistent and small.)

take your hands off me. are you incomplete?

what did we believe what did we believe.

I believe I am here to say the names of everything that comes across my face. I try I will try to touch I will try to make it all a part of me. All the teardrops all the years, falling like a rocket down through space. did you believe what did you believe take your hands off me I am complete.