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--- R O N   S I L L I M A N


Mediocritus: where there's life, there's trope. Emporia of the possible abandoned to floods, water swollen, darkened with its own life force, surging, sullen. That which is merely personal soon rats. Charles Bernstein wears khakis. Cello Jell-o. Full functionality metaphors. Fifteen foot roll of ortho-glass. A player may not untap more than one land during the untap phase of each of his or her turns. Sign: opposing traffic has longer green.

Before dawn, a kitchen light casts its dull glare out over the snow. Sense of panic in a dream. In the bank, a large woman hands me my money stapled together in an envelope. I'm pulling my children through the streets on a sled, waiting for the street lamps to come on. I wave and realize I'm alone in my bed, then see her asleep wrapped in some blankets on the floor. "Brittany," he shouts when I ask him what breed his dogs are. More snow begins to fall.

The bones that remain retain their pain. Sawed-off shogun. Why did the chicken cross the node? Popping the touch-me-nots. Lynda Hygiene. Robot comedian in an empty casino bar, lights darkened, tells jokes to the empty tables, laugh tracks ghosting back. Peeling the wrap from the CD. Seniors in the class alas. As Barbar and his young queen Celeste age and have first triplets and then a fourth child, Arthur, the cousin who may or may not be Celeste's brother, remains permanently an adolescent. The republic of paragraphs.

Rethink everything. The old man & the alphabet. The hush when the dryer shuts down. This street person's tethered three shopping carts into a train. Play-dough's Republic. Condensed music (add milk). Had Ike registered Democrat, what then? In On Beyond Zebra, Seuss (Zeus) invents twenty new letters, including um, quam, thnad, snee, yekk and spazz. By the heels at Milano (Vendler? Hollander?), spiked, shining, snazzy.

Waiting to inhale. This crowd is a system, heated to the max. The blizzard of is. Only the passive voice rings true. God as a toddler. I wander thru the ER waiting room lost in the daze of my own world barely conscious of the mob (house explosion in Waco, Texas, kills two). Inaudible umlauts. Tea at the bottom proves bitter. Prism mouse of language. Mistah Gates, he dead. That raised, passive view (black & white) of the security camera thru wch we see over & over the shopkeeper shoot the teenage girl. Reduced instruction set.

Thin blue linebreak. The higher the snow, the simpler the landscape. My ear instead of an onion. Sun's sheen vibrato. Thixotropic. Containers atop flat cars roll slowly through town? Which is the magpie? Age at which a cross-eyed man begins his passage, the new work, the same thick scrawl at which, at ten, I drew every letter.

Begin again, in again. Fofo & Yoyo (spelt "Jojo") in search of the authentic. Lady Shakespearean seeks a tattoo. I in the bone yard amid rubble for the perfect line. Wonk / don't wonk. Five beeps, says the microwave. Nonreturn to zero inverted. SKU wars. L'age d'Or (garage door). We who are narratively disadvantaged. Randolph Dud, he never did.

One doesn't wake so much as realize that one hasn't been asleep for a long while. Fin de siecle swims. Write in any state of mind, Montana, ache in the calves just shy of cramping, deltoids and pecs sore with labor. Language is ice (melting), flight (molting). Livermore (kidney less). I find a lima bean, mysterious on the linoleum floor. Sign on this cow town's downtown overpass reads "Fight for the Rights of Preborn Babies." Dwarf dressed all in leather. Wading through the low brush, wishing that I had my binocs, trying to determine if this large, still, distant white elongated graceful bird be egret or sandhill crane, a red fox bursts literally beneath my feet, leaping to reach the road. The brutality of the book is that of the dream abrupted by the roar of the alarm (I'm searching the narrow streets of an impossible steep Paris for an inexplicable Holiday Inn, sun setting, threat of rain, surrounded by familiars of corporate life, Wells Fargo, Baxter Medical, Harris Pharmaceutical, Glaxo (already, awake , I'm inserting the known world, the real Paris, deleting coworkers who have no business in my sleep). Bronk / don't bronk.

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published in association with the |
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