Eating, Being Eaten

A recent rediscovery. Don't ask.

(Looking through the early stuff on a cue from a reader I found this old thing first published in something called Paper Radio in 1989. Before some of you were born I guess. Paper Radio was one of the great old altzines of the poetry slam era and was run by a fellow named Neil Kvern, if memory serves. Anyway, see what you can make of it. I have no idea what I thought this was)

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EATING, BEING EATEN

Vote for 2;

1. You will find yourself wrapped in Indian blankets and buried from the waist down in a barren garden. Ernie Kovacs appears holding a microphone and begins to question you on your impressions of a parade. A circus pitches dirty orange tents in the empty lot beside the crumbling church. The first act is monks beating themselves with whips before portable shrines to pinchbeck gods. A man in a blue suit hands you a ticket. The clowns draw your attention to a three-armed woman doing handstands on the back of a marl-colored stallion. Her white sleeves sizzle electric in the ultraviolet spotlight. Someone whispers her name. It is the sound of neon. The third act is tigers roaring in continuous wet screams. You walk to the gates of the city. Seven shots are fired from a passing car. Your body lies dead in the sand, ignored for days. It is the electrum et cetera. bronze you. Brass things this is not.

2. Buses float in the street like parrots. Big yellow parrots that suck lines of people who go willingly. Clusters of people gather in sporadic gangs near the storefronts. Their mask of cult. Their secret sounds. Warning others away from their piles of beads and shells and carved idols. The air beats with the stark drum of cannibals. Muddy rivers of blood move through the course of their veins from every heart. Open hearts like throbbing liver, rancid and queer from dead animals. The floorboards creak. The planets turn. The buses return in the morning like quiet inner bleeding, warm and comfortable.

3. An unarmed man is born half dead. He is shot down at the gates of the city. He dies understanding nothing. The passing caravans ignore his corpse for days on end. Eventually a reluctant official has the body shipped back to his grieving family. There is a funeral. Leaving the scarred and ancient church, one of the pall bearers slips on the ice. The casket falls and explodes on the edge of the broken steps. The head of the deceased breaks off and rolls into the street. His mother screams. The priest, who doesn’t see, is heard laughing at a joke. The air hangs like ammonia. A young woman lifts the softened head and stuffs it in her bag. She boards the bus at the corner. The funeral party shouts after her helplessly. The monster’s ass fires a noxious trail of vapor into the smog and turns the corner forever.

4. Safe in her apartment she immerses the head in carbonate of soda in the manner of the Egyptians. She fills the brain cavity with wax and dips it one last time in a pot of warming honey. When the coating is dry she places it on the shelf above the mock fireplace beside the others. She prepares a bowl of duck-blood soup with dumplings and prunes. She snuggles into the soft couch, warm and comfortable, and studies the new face in her collection, dark and twisted near the end of the mantle. The right side of the face gives the impression of a man who could be moved easily to violence. Step wrong, insult him, and you may die. But the eye looks over her shoulder, not willing to confront face to face. His thin, effeminate lips are far too sophisticated for the heavy, straight nose and high forehead. The left side of his face seems to want to be understood. Wants to find a way to communicate. Doesn’t want to have to spank. Seems to be worried about her well being. She pictures him late in life, had he lived. A man with head bowed, smoking. “They wouldn’t listen. I had to do it.” So tired. Three-quarter circles like furrows dug in loops beneath his dimming eyes. Lips gone. Lips sucked away with regret. Quiet and serene in her reverie, she watches the buses float beyond her blinds like green lizards. The scattered gangs along the street pitch their dirty orange tents in the gravel beside the storefronts. A search for food on the moon.

5. A large black bird flies into the living room of a house that is vaguely familiar. A tan grub worm dangles from its glistening yellow beak. On closer inspection, the grub has intricate markings of red and blue like an Aztec drum. The bird hovers cautiously near a row of mummified heads. Wing-sound like brown helicopters. It lowers itself slowly into the palm of your outstretched hand. Your fingers lightly clasp the skittish, quivering body. Careful not to crush it. With only the slightest pressure the bird cracks open like a delicate egg and drips a multicolored ooze down your arm in a thick, crawling stream. A man in a white suit asks for the ticket.