Rae Armantrout

The palm tree exposes a large number of loose, carved spines out of pleasure? Boredom?

Strand. String. In this dream, the paths cross and cross again. They are spelling a real boy out of repetition. • Each one is the one real boy. Each knows he must be wrong about this, but he can’t feel how. • The fish and the fisherman, the pilot, the princess, the fireman and the ones on fire.

What is a brand? The hopeful tag on the tan underpants that reads “Metaphor” leaves everything to the imagination which by now is plainly exhausted. I could describe these tags as so many flapping tongues, dropping hints about a foreign designer, himself largely a cover story. Someone somewhere must sew a shirt made entirely of red flags. Untiring, music rises then falls through its imagined past.

1 We hoped to see things as they are by which we meant without us. We thought once we stripped away smell, taste, color — anything improper — leaving only location and number, the thing would be naked on the teeter-totter of an equation. 2 Then Archimedes told another one. If I had a long enough lever and a fulcrum, I’d get a high resolution image of objectified bodies and hoist myself on my own petard.

1 I held the framework of my life in mind with some precision. I knew when I was where — or where I was when — but not many incidents of my past had actually been preserved. Instead the frame served as a cargo cult runway, forever inviting the future to appear. I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension. 2 The creeper lineates the wall. Flowers as punctuation? Can you elaborate on the passage? Double meaning, superposition: hair standing on end makes a creature appear larger, more ferocious.

Record breaking Thriller dance attempt. * Wolfman Jack style dj in the video game says, “This is Wasteland Radio and we’re here for you” * You are here maintaining détente between the voices in your head. Immediacy is retro, says Lytle. * Nostalgic/futuristic scene in which we can read the code— green flowing algorithms. We can almost slip right in.

1 We like to think that the mind controls the body. We send the body on a mission. We don’t feel the body, but we receive conflicting reports. The body is catching flak or flies. The body is sprouting grapefruit. The body is under- performing in heavy trading. 2 Reception is spotty. Someone “just like me” is born in the future and I don’t feel a thing? Like only goes so far.

The very flatness of portraits makes for nostalgia in the connoisseur. Here’s the latest little lip of wave to flatten and spread thin. Let’s say it shows our recklessness, our fast gun, our self-consciousness which was really our infatuation with our own fame, our escapes, the easy way we’d blend in with the peasantry, our loyalty to our old gang from among whom it was our nature to be singled out

For WCW Sorrow is my corner store where jack-o’-lantern balloons get high on the last helium. The endcap is gold today with numbered bags of Werther’s Original. No one is Werther. Last night a newscaster mentioned an “elderly victim.” Don’t call me that. I’m old and obdurate.

What if the ability to capture emblems in the wild won’t validate us? What if displaying our embarrassing flaws won’t save us — say being dead but kittenish? • I can’t show you anything new, not even an empty room behind a velvet rope. Least of all that! There’s a Lexus spinning in a parking lot because a mountain road is “so cliché.” It’s throwing up dust, then more, but you know the car’s still in there somewhere, still voguing