Monochromat

what has happened is occurring, and I have some difficulty in understanding single words, strings of single words in flat prostration, who caused them, where, departure place, locomotive verbal power, embalmed definition of words known, these strikings, blows, heated cold swaying alteration, I am sliding, on a road sliding, blood-streaked bearings, but, ailments, the disfigurements of my attempt, I understand aggression in my fists, quiet now, and blind, prostrate too, the aggression which disembodies the turned-on world, desolidified places to move in and to move out of, dully, inch-moving, a pretense of response, a motionless inhuman inflexibility, slaps on myself, a delight in the black sand shores of insectile displeasure, I'm sent to the edge, just anyone, just send anyone, help, I am water sand rock cloth bark tar steel, carried by the random currents of each material, mental parentheses constitute my regular thought, the dead is a page's end, again and again, these are the evenings, the mummified arrests, the flood in wait, next day, annoyances become possibilities suspended in the glass of magnification, uncritical, bugs, oddness of utterly physical suspension, rhythms too fast to conceive, I, the hybrid, the shut closet, urges now, a hurry in my throat for something I cannot ever utter, fragments ascending, grasping at outbursts, the next instant, collapse, negation of ascension, I sit as a deformed jumble, a large river of liberation flowing past beyond the effort of a single reach, the bit by bit upward friction awakened from reminiscences, pangs as I lie stretched out, it is secret, its center, disasters of ambivalence, pleasure rakes me, slashed love, the window space, every protection abdicating, ejaculations dispensing nothing, the nausea of nature, perversion, slavery and hot decomposition.

(ten feet, just an angle of measurement, 80 degrees, the chair swivels releasing gravity from my bones, an odd atmospheric habit, the neck, incorrectly tuned, squeals, and I watch much of what is upward, soundings, elephantine footsteps in black, broom-sweepings, clay across cement, what or who, is this a pattern to be , to continue to be, to be my own question, my hermetic event, never discerned, back to it, mine, the game, the o channel, a devil's voice tickles my ear across an angle of ten feet, switching to an unmotivated intention, my brainstem wriggles, the colon spasms, the chair disinvents itself in a series of shrivels, I collapse, I feel my hair & watts webbing through my scalp, what's this, tone or dispersion, frequency or collection, the casting off of a cathode war, I, the electrified, inebriated matrix, I cannot think in this way, because this is not my own venture, there are ones similarly entuned coordinately mindful of the vicious circle, error, erasure, try the mindless road where a draft of stale dough lulls even those cornered by mandatory suicide, it leavens into an invertebration, a brown can, this, my nourishment, I have enough when I have had all of it, don't let me in on the plan, give me the substance, allow me the time, plug the thing in and in and continuing in, my fingernails cut themselves, my hair shortens as I dream, there is a color vacuum, a reversal of equilibrium, and what, what I must do, to be hungry, hungry enough, enough to continue, the forest, the silver and soft blackened forest, beating the water, the tone gray water with a flat palm, I have a hollow hand, that is a surprise, I have a sooty, humid draft running through, where's some purchase, or to purchase, the impressions on display may cause anesthesia, disinitiate your fortune, do not look, there, do not enter, there, keep them out of the way, I have no time to divert, no desire to speak, I am off, in pitiless opposition, quelled by the color-blind transmissions, rays of the forlorn image, the very saddest gray sunrise you may ever witness, on a duo-tone beach, watching the dead bodies maneuver in the washout, spear in my iris, download, download the field of vision doctor, I see no wet or bloody organs twitching in red emergency, I exit at the toes, into the carpet where below men grumble and jab the stucco when I capsize in chronic, midnight regularity, in position, rested, outside a vintage rain on an antique earth, this my etiolated kingdom, the night moves and wanes and the days draw ash and meticulously bleach out, that is, with my jet and glassy breath)

copyright Bill Nathan, "TALISMAN: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry and Poetics", New Jersey, 1992;
original illustration by Cooper Nathan