Based on a line by Mats Söderlund
1.

The figures on the doorframe appear to be

part animals, part unwinding swirls.

Behind that door I am polishing my rifles

recording Exile on Mainstreet

for a future without butterflies.

When you’re in the shadow of falling towers

the sun tends to look rotten.

Therefore I’m telling you: Never trust a foreigner,

they have no interiority. They traffic in inflation.

I can’t hear you. I’m collecting flowers in

the underground. My torso is best photographed

in the shadow of falling towers,

surrendered to flowers, surrounded by white.

From the bark I guess that the flowers are poodles.

I’m rethinking environmental aesthetics

with a hood on. Getting my killability on

for the poets who still think there’s a place for them

in heaven. There is a place for them

but there are many poodles and poodle fur is best

photographed in a butcher shop.

So there’s that. That and the fact that

some of the best poems are about war,

and some of the other best poems feel like

breathing underwater. Next stop: The Orient.

I’m watching a movie about innocence: it’s wordless.

It’s called Suicide Inflation. It’s about rats.

I’d like to dedicate this poem to the rats

and to my daughter who is knitting something

vaguely anatomical to alleviate her anxiety

about her horrible parents. This poem is also

dedicated to Clarice Lispector

because she posed the question: “Am I a monster,

or is this what it means to be human?”

To be writing a poem about music

while polishing one’ rifle in the shadow of falling

towers: It’s not my fault. It’s my scam.

There are no triggers. I drive a truck full of

chicken carcasses out of a sense of obligation.

The economy needs my beautiful eyes to be blind.

I used to be beautiful but that was the cold war.

Now I sleep in Los Angeles and listen

to my wife’s nipples. Protest art.

All I do is protest. All I returns to is a home

that’s turned to debts and snail shells.

I’m in Hong Kong with my nausea. I write

hate poems in the harbour the hour

when the the ship comes in. I bat my eyelashes.

History has too many dead fathers.


2.

La la la, I can’t hear a thing.

The rabble is at my door.

When these figures ask for music

they’re really asking for a kind of silence.

I want to silence the rats gnawing in

the basement walls. I want a rat silence

in my home but in the butcher shop, I want

a silence that is utterly pornographic. I want

a silence that will go with my torso,

an underground silence that reads like

a prickly wreck or overbloomed flowers

leaking fish roe on the bodies of the rabble.

I want a silence that smells like sweat when

I write poetry for a sick nature.

Nature is disgusting, because I’m in it.

I stink like sweat when I’m silent in

the underground blowing my ridiculous flute.

The rabble wants a different kind of silence.

The rabble wants me to kill a girl.

She loves to take images of herself

wearing a malignant trousseau

with an effusion of contagious folds.

Due to this trespassing business, I will now

venture into the underworld,

but I’m already in the basement,

invoking rats instead. The whole plague thing,

the whole inflation-currency thing,

the whole my-torso-is-porn thing.

I’m great at blowing into the femur flute

at fascist rallies. And I’m even better

with glass shards in my hands.

Each shard has been inscribed with a flower,

the skull-cap, named I guess after the skin

conditions of certain infants. Each flower

represents a different rabble,

each infant represents mimicry.

The rabble hates mimicry and flowers,

and they hate foreign currency because

it crosses boundaries. We’re on the same page,

a stained page of foreign currency. Rat currency.

I too hate it when those pests are photographed

on my torso. But not because I hate photography.

I hate the plague because I’m in love.

In this plague business, I sell the rabble

to the rabble. My fingerprints are all over

the rabble. I’ve been fucking around

with bodies again. Atrocity dummies. I can’t

sell them. In forty years

we will meet again – you and I, the rabble,

the girl who takes photographs of herself–

and we will have to balance the accounts,

but for now I’m the star of this empire.

I have to be softer, softer. 



 

3.

There’s always insects in the corners of my eyes

when I go back home, or when I go to Hong Kong

Nature betrays me. I have portrayed raw flowers

on the grave of some imaginary outside

where we can live. It’s always about sex

and language. Why talk when you can fuck?

Why fuck when language means something different?

I’m playing down my own desire for obliteration

because I’m in Hong Kong of Death

and it’s beautiful to see the fish get chopped up

like how in the story about innocence

I constantly rewrite that satanic travelogue.

The compulsion may be caused by the rotting of

the sun or the shadow of the falling towers

or by how beautiful the male body looks

in the cold war. When I travel to foreign places

I always think about childhood.

I picture it like an effigy or like 7000

dead sharks. I ate at McDonalds this morning

because I don’s speak Cantonese. The crime

of art is like the crime of the tourist: we don’t

have children here. We have children

in the underworld, where we eat squid and listen

to drone music to drown out the sound of

the bodies drying on the lawn. It’s against the law.

To make dioramas about history, make sure

you use the right stylus. Speak the language

of hangings and ride a motorcycle with a swan

etched into your left calf muscle. Kill the cows

with the diorama and leave it at the scene.

Make a scene. The threat of language comes

from inside of it. How it may turn into nonsense.

My brand is crisis. I live on coffee and flowers.

I belong to a stabbing, showing off my bikini lines

to the soldiers returning from a dance party.

It’s the 90s, it’s always the 90s.

Can you tell that I have ants on my skin when

I write this? Don’t go out of style. Take your style

to the next level: the rotting sun

has been lit up in the strip show. I can’t fit

any more shark carcasses into this poem,

I can barely fit my fingers into it.

No offense but is the prince dead?

Is that why I can’t wake up my friend?

His visa is denied. Wake up, Ali. Translation

is a crime. There’s blood on your hands.

I’m reading your anthology of Iranian

underground poetry. The venom is starting

to take effect. I’m playing with

the black puzzle. Nostalgia.