New Title

Observe the new title:
A CABINET OF ORDINARY FEROCITIES.
Everything else remains intact.

fragment from a contest

[Translator’s note: My fear has stolen something from me. I am afraid of butcher’s aprons, cigarette lighters, dust, halos. I am afraid my mind went walking. I am afraid of hubcaps, burlap, pennies, dusty jawbones, metronomes. I am afraid of worms and pavement cracks. Anaphora is a form of fear and so: of moss and ivy, cornerstones, inscriptions, marginalia, graffiti, enclosures, broad sheets, variable spellings. I am afraid of yogurt, toy rocket ships, eye pencils, toothpicks, gusts, metallic, funnels. I am afraid of starts, coughs rolling down long dark hallways, the bells that always stop at seven, staplers, gods, hollow gods, stapled gods. I am afraid of tall men with one eye, ghostless dead, wooden dogs, the word ‘Peru’, men who do handstands for their children, microphones that smell of iodine, iron lungs, watercress, I am afraid of all that calls to me in this new world where language has been mugged, and kicked and punched, and skewered. I am afraid of chicken, turning on its spit. I am afraid, shivering, pullulating, obverting, reduced to pork, afraid. I am afraid of old keys, slippers, fruit flies, tennis balls, turnips, orange peel, lavender, forests, canoes, soprano saxophones, minnows, fishwives, wrist bands, bee hives, torture chambers, walnuts, chipmunks, bears, viral video, bare-knuckle fighting, assassins, marshmallows. I am afraid of tea stains, yellow teeth. I am afraid of the walrus if the walrus is Juan. I am afraid of mold, mildew, showers in basements, resumes. I am afraid of touching your wound, your monkey, your toothbrush, your ordnance, ordinals, ordination. Stairways that go nowhere and stairways that do. Rusted hulls, gulls, gall, gills, gaols, goals. The ribbed portion. The level reading. The heavy air. The humid light. The desk of the dead man, where he slumps at his desk, translating. The dialect of what matters most to those who live in now. The now. I am afraid of this moment, the next, the next. And binary code. And the plumber’s assistant of the strange milky left eye, wandering, appraising. I am afraid of diamonds, jewelers. I am afraid the arc of this hunched convulsive art, dream versus nightmare, locked, invertebrate. Your name, my name, her name, their names. I am afraid of poor typing, poor spelling. Ugly things. Beautiful things. Plastic spoons. Dental hygienists. I am afraid of argyle socks, pipes unattended, old studies, bookshelves, carbon dating, cross-eyed women doing the splits, shuffling psychos, absinthe, flying saucers, Bigfoot, bowling shoes, arcades, old unused diaries, panty lines, nuns, folding bicycles, wet towels thrown on the floors of change rooms, low tide, peanut brittle, middle-aged figure skaters, finger puppets, Punch and Judy, wires, dried turtles, physics equations, rinds, fingernail clippings. I am driven to a ‘kind of pseudo-afraid’ by bass clarinets, one armed drummers, death metal performance artists, videographers, sentence parsing, jelly fish, greens eggs and ham, the word ‘homoeroticism’, the word ‘plankton’, the word ‘watercress’, the word ‘plenitude’, the phrase ‘coming of age’, the word 'slack', the word ‘moist.’ I am made afraid, raised to a state of ‘fear fearing itself’, by barreling bison and erupting sausage. The Sieve of Eratosthenes. One or two or three or seventeen things. Of which I am afraid. I am even afraid of that of which I am not afraid. I am afraid of everything that is actual and everything that is not. Everything that might be but is not. Everything that will be but won’t. Everything and anything. Anything and nothing. Nothing and everything. All things that are, are light. And light makes me afraid. Omnia sunt, lux sunt.]

***

The above post was reposted by someone -- with minor alterations -- to a website with which I have no connection whatsoever. No permission was sought, nor was there any attribution. All my attempts to have my work removed from this website have thus far proved futile. Attempts to pursue this matter further have led to me to the point where a message reads: 'This user has decided to delete their account and the content is no longer available.'

OLYMPIC TOOL & DIE CO. BY THE SEA

I didn’t fully understand what I’d been told,
but galloped ahead. The lash I understood
to be the first step, unleashing and re-threading
of a turbo-charged hand-scallop. Next I hauled
the lanyard about two feet. Gave an extra six
inches for safety’s sake. No sweat. I broke for
five the better to appreciate and review what I’d
accomplished so proceeding would be smooth.

Hephaestus gimped by. Bullshit, he spat.
You know it, I echoed. Away he humped as
I renewed my purchase of the task. The pintle
chain was tangled, so I untangled. Applied grease
to the sever horns. Used a winch to tighten the wing
leader up to about the head of the weighted grim.
Nicely done. Then Aphrodite sashayed by,
diaphanous Aphrodite from payroll. I paused
to admire her magnificence. Her liquid rolling hips.
I jerked myself back. Again to my blackened paws

I drifted, gripped the south yaw, wound it once twice
thrice about the stud pin, extracted its center gort,
which I half-noted was missing several punts and
heavily pitted. This is where things began to go south.

I don’t know why I figured a compass trout was plugged or
that I could re-route the trundle-set anyway. I pushed
at it hard, using my hips against its frontal globe.
Across the shop floor, reflected in the walk-in freezer door,
I could see it, the grind prop sheathing in then out,
far into the dock-niche. Suddenly in one long
loud unforgiving crack the whole thing shuddered
to a sickening end-stop. Silence like a flood. My heart
the single pump. Just then Hephaestus leered
around the corner. How he lived for
this kind of shit. Guys blowing it, fucking up.

All I could think to keep myself from losing it
was Aphrodite, transcendent Aphrodite,
acutely sweetly imperiled, while I balanced on a trireme’s
oar-lock tearing my coarse shirt, set to leap overboard
to save her from that vast tumult of wild dark water.

PALL MALL

I visit the gun shop
to look at death poems.