Sandy Florian

A character representing sound. Or. A machine invented by Thomas Edison by which noise is recorded and reproduced. And. An instrument capable of being attached to pianofortes and organs by means of which they are rendered. Melographic. Capable of writing any music played upon them. For. If the instrument makes probable this oral hahucination, you spin the record of your reddened choice. Or. You mimic the melody and its blank harmony. You accompany the symphony with a tenor of all tomorrows. While I, lost in the Maze of Mirrors, ask you to tell me again the story. You say, First. You say, Make. First, make your mouth make a sound. Speak into the mouthpiece and cause the tremors in the thin diaphragm. Then. The steel point makes tracings upon the hard wax. Fix the thing upon a spinning cylinder. And. By means of the tracings, the diaphragm will repeat with perfection your original voice. Or. The echoes in the mountains of your lamentations. As. Cries in a haunted brothel. Or. Whispers in a ghostly tavern. The instrument has spoken in our hearing. Listen. It is a natural outcome of the telephone. Listen. The old man's laugh comes to us as out of a phonograph. I say, Perfect. I say, Yet. This instrument warbles. And. This record is warped. And. The tongue of this snake. Has scratched this disk. For. Your voice is skipping. And. As I put the conch to my same hear, I listen to the echo of. I listen to the echo of. The raspy susurrations of your adieu. Applied to a person or thing that exactly reproduces the utterances of another person or thing. Hence, the transitive verb. To report in Pitman's phonograph. As. It is a great loss to me that your song was not phonographed and preserved. And. Whether it be so, it is phonographed in the mind of the mindful God. All out of sync.

Our big city is a city of big bombs and big bicycles, we hire grafters for their pretty art. To force a shoot inside a shoot, to grow an apple on a crab, to grow a plum upon a leprechaun. Dyspepsia is often grafted upon hysteria. To grow a boy inside a belly, cutting capers. Words, through grace, are grafted in our heart and the orange bears a greener fruit that blossoms as it swells. With imperfect grace from that perfect grace from wherever that perfect grace may remain. To paint half a man on a half a horse. To paint a dolphin in a forest. To color feathers on a beast. To grant a maid a fish's waist. To graft or to wax, whether clay, whether nether. As men graft their gods upon empires. Then we build mirrors to better understand ourselves, to better understand our souls, and we ask ourselves reflectively, Where? then Who? Woe unto us, we are building our city from our urine. Maintaining it with our fardels and with facts. The burbs we raise to the ranks of birds. Then we furnish them with words that wilt, like oak and elm and ash. Busily we build our city. Toilsomely we lay the bricks. Men of the six-clock give way to those of nine, those of the nine to the generation of twelve, and those of the twelve tend to disappear, making room for the more fashionable folks who make the two-o-clock noon in the middle of day by the greedy ill will of pills. Toilsomely we build our city. Burdensomely we tow the line. Those ministers who refuse to tow we quickly omit. Then, when the city is complete, we sit back in the stadium bleachers and wonder how the generated world can be so excellent. How the emulated world can be so grand. How the phone pole stands in for its form. How matter is glued to the elements of ideals. Then, when the city is complete, we sit at the edge of our great new void, like frogs at edge of a pond, like birds whose nests are littered with knots. Here, we live here in the syllables of our screams where vowels hang like fish hang on hooks. Out of the water. Like consonants with their scales scraped off. And because we fear our world is growing weary, we fill our homes with booty and with loot. Then our big city crawls into the country, dragging its mountains right along with it. Like death that extends itself with golden planks, we hang ourselves by silk, by twine, by telephone cords. The religious tongue becomes the last supper that we swallow greedily and without chewing. Like death. That is the supreme fortune of man. This is a studied and digested truth. A couple of hours later, we find ourselves at the junction of shanties where prairies host the sprawling city of Denver, that long lost city of long lost ghosts who haunt the long lost plains, that lifeless and wifeless city, in contrast, of course, to the Big Apple, that city of violated treaties, that wailing city set for the protection of infinity, so like the city of the seven gods, so like Rome, so with its epithets, with its alphabetical locomotives. There, only dogs can find the grisly burbs where the grisly grass slowly grows. Where savage canoes now blossom into lilies. Montgomery says it's not a place of roof and of walls, it's more like a company, it's more like a corporation. But what is the city but its steeples and domes? What is a city but its spires and its clocks? Time, the people of the city. Time, the bluntest eye, the lion's padded paws. Sea dreams and my flowering germander eyes droop at the factoried gloom. Bank rates are a codex to the cross. This is the religious box body. This is the largest corporation in the world. This, with a sprinkling of poetry and a poetic moat. Sea dreams, a new born clerk, all raised and bred. A maze of cuneiform streets spread like a spider's web. Not dapper, but cricket-like. Not coned, but molded. The lot is posted for the dock. Violets are sold at a hundred a piece and marshals ride on horseback while Homer makes his slow way home.

But this is ambiguous and so I will clarify. Last night I dreamt of a lake on fire. A lovely woman tapered off into a fish. I wore an owl mask with the desire to avoid use of his sacred name, and then I came to those minced pronunciations, like gad and gar and ged and gog and goles and golly and gom and gosh jolly and gud and gum and adad and adod and bedad and begad and ecod and egad and gadzooks and garzoon. Because gar is only used by playwrights who put it chiefly in the mouths of foreigners. You said, Oh god, my god, good god, followed by a good wish, to that god of my ever-closing gaps, for I receive god only ghostly, that goodly god that guides the globe, that god of love, that god of war, that god that blesses the god-blessed and the god-forsaken and the god-damned. My god, my shame is on me, I said to the painterly painter, My god, my shame's inside me and must go forth my body, this beastbody, this dogsbody, this stony and bony bodykins that my god has plunged my soul into. Last night I hung from the vine, from the branch, from the noose, until the sun stopped and the moon stood still, until my nation took vengeance upon my enemies. Last night a piece of cake tumbled into our city and struck our walls until they fell. Then it rolled around and around until the entire city turned upside down. Meanwhile back at the lake, I lapped silver water until dirt came out of my wounds, until dirt came out of my mouth. Then I killed my lover, Montgomery, in a new scatological satire. Last night nature ran hastily into its din, enthusiastically into its prison, wallowing in the flood of its patterning and randomness. Bedlam elected himself umpire and stood quickly in the midst of it, arranging and disarranging the very laws of nature. The earth vessel itself he plunged into the green and uneven horizon, and all at once, we entered a whole new world. In the beginning, the heavens and earth rose. In the beginning, we gave birth to the tiniest of errors. In the beginning, we watch for the rest of eternity as it blossoms and it blooms.

A board. A slab. A draught. A frame strewn with sand for the delineation of figures. A sandbox. And. Geometrical diagrams. Or. A frame divided in two sections and in which round wooden plums slide upon parallel rods. For performing the functions of arithmetic. Finding mechanical solutions to mathematical problems. Addition and subtraction. Multiplication and division. Both square and cube root operations. On numbers. As. A set of positive integers unique in meaning and fixed in order. But. If the value of the plum changes according to its position on the rod, you find that I am divisible. Can be rendered invisible. That I can be reduced, diminished, and deducted from the larger quantities. I am trying to discover the value of me. But. I am dumb to the wonders of your great numbers. A child puts a penny in a penny loafer. A woman with two broken fingers carries three bags up four stairs. Five or six men stamp their feet in the snow. And. In the middle of a rectangular room, halfway across the world, seven empty chairs form a circle. For. A nine inch statue portrays a man on the back of an ox. And. I am trying to accrue. I am trying to accumulate. But. You have given me the gift of two glass eyes. Or. You've added eight and subtracted ten. The word is derived from a Semitic word ibeq. To wipe the dust. And. In architecture, a slab on the top of the capital of a column. In the Ionic orders, a square flat plate. In the Corinthian and Composite, variously cut and ornamented. See. You are bedazzled. You stand at the edge of a hundred horizons wearing a thousand crowns. While I, in this world, am slowly disappearing. As is this image of you. For. Any number times zero. Always equals zero.