•••••
the memory machine is ready to fire
I define 'susurrus' and 'oubliette' with my Massage Harmony pen
and on the rooftop across from me the hands
slowly add hundred dollar bills to the incinerator
while the last hunter-gatherers
glaze a memory bowl
to hold what we can’t know
but what fuels our days
jagged vibrations
a sound shaking from the mirror in the shadows
forming one tongue one future
one relic one chain of cities
in twilight cast by hair
silhouetted against the origin
demons smoked nutrients
to find us darkening in the womb
the mystery handed him a piece of paper
jailbait saved him a seat
the Revolutionary Guard promised him a delicious dessert
those librarians sold him a ticket
those pilots don’t own a single small textbook
psychology has some clean guitars
I have a strange suitcase
this is Iraq’s screwdriver
I am offering to play behind the post office right at this time
the students very often promise to laugh
doesn’t Jennifer need to pray?
I ate by the sea
I am division of Christ
multiplication of enigma
history displacement
extra tongue
the Romance languages gathered
and called us the holy criminals
and in order to fit our infinities into the finite
set our intellects on fire
I’m incomprehensible
though my tongues are easy to pin down
I who have tattooed onto my pupil
an image of Quetzalcoatl swallowing the sun
and we live in the quake verge
on unquenched plate
the inner outskirts
where all languages are broken
by what? by evolution in medias res
by your eye medium rare
like a vision in Gaza
like fucking the inside-out James Dean
yeah you believed the nomads
who baked crackers from my skin
you got wet in their gargling vocabularies
then they pinned you across the roofs to dry
like crumbling I spoke you rivers of oblivion
watering your fatherly gardens
where in a gaze softness wades
out of the old lakes
the keys tired of playing will
chop off the fingers
their blood waters the raisins
their life of itching perfumes the open doorway
don’t let the shadows open and close
your eyelids or the doors
let them win and lose tiles
overreaching the avenues you never will
conceived of possibility
as batter-drenched girl
planting mandrakes in the river bank
during prolonged burst of resemblance
only skin and volition
flash across the familial pulp
warming the earth that satellites
shadow from their oblique stations
enigmatic hand signals
the Indians on the dry lake bed flash
toward the motorcycle that circles the outskirts
searching for a forgotten radiance
to us only praying to ocean currents
in the baking interior of a car
parked uphill in a metropolis
could ever be legitimate
embrace my celebrity where I’m unknown
among cave systems and sensual chapped lips
skim book written by my doppelgänger
“Death is the Adventure” tattooed on my eyelids
agnostic about my schizophrenia
crucified on acrostics
I may yet palm the finch
and DHL my tongue off the peninsula
- Nick Schiff - photo by Alice Pedroletti