--- 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.