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#065
Michael Borth
Rubella
I sense in the world a great sadness.
In the rubella and fractured sesamoid bone.
In the blue-eyed soul and the six nations
of the grand river the alba madonna stands
the heat-sensitive loreal pit organs and the
interorbital scales to ask but to what does
your laziness contribute. Power is sent to the
rear wheels. His divination based on where
the spine of the book cracks. Waving chibok
schoolgirls with the composing stick and urging
them to invest in gold and coffee. Tuning the
shadows to arrive in recombinations of my
imaginary citric bars. In the decorum of the
days I find postulated in my being a vague
yet certain knowing. A hatred for the fruits of
travel. As Genet wandered the rushleaved broom.
As the mage let the sap dance in the sugar pine.
As tango waits for you in the vermouth halls
of Argentina. Like when I read about ants in the
Newburgh diner or conjured from the weeping
of the valve cover gaskets additional women
from Florida to remark on DMZ and moringa.
And when I close my eyes I see the night city.
From the palisades and the patrimonial highway.
In the smell of register candy and industrial grade
sugar goods. As long and vast as the horizon of
smokestack and radio tower and black antenna
to trust me with their making of a grim cosmogony.
A symbolbook of the comforting evil of angled
and curved forms like the spinning of toilet water.
The potpourri of the tank and the industries for
women failed by the victory of their individual
happiness projects. Cookie cutter and a vestibule
of rose-colored display cases. Like a lubricant made
from the body oil of the public phone. By all those
towered exit ramp lights. By the sexual atmosphere
of a truck stop washroom. In all the blitzkrieg of speed
wattage. The tape snake hissing dreams in a Lexington
bedroom. Of rich and diligent moss and leaves in the
window. In coolants of the cul-de-sac. In the hippie
house that let sleep the young mother of the eaves.
All of us not too proud to give. But the spirit lost
in the latenight yellowtext of infomercial coins. Rare
and gleaming in the waves of butter and halogen and
among the mausoleum ivy lay tangled the rookie cards
levied by the targets on the staff of five lines. The world
in its clarity is a lineage of increasing illusion. Spoken by
the lessons of each awakening. As with each step my
soul leaves a cadaver standing on the evening grey panels
of Olazábal. On its way to Harmony Bar and Restaurant.
Sick of myself. The promises of the world have become a
neon litany smoking in the drunken snow. Piscean flirts
in the young blizzard. To live to shop for the perfect lumbar
pillow. Ragged truing of the bouquet of instruments and
friends who spawn children in random sent photographs
as men of the street sing under the Libra full moon. On
Passover. On the edge of the center of April in the only
country that ever asked me to change. I text a late happy
birthday to hear he is finally getting serious. Like I told
her I cannot have another decade of intoxicated nights.
How much to grovel for a compliment. We climb the
ladder to the ember shield behind the last line. Each rung
an act of kindness. A statistical error in the plateau of
famished reasoning. Of status adjustment and the fever
of a solitary indulgence but with what else are we left.
The machine is never profound. The golem never quite
imported machine. Your face in the logo shine. Afterimages
unite fantasies of the pedestrian bridge or a shining revolver.
Smelling the ash in the footprints of the ceremony. To stand
in a circle around the burning body. To reward its bland
resurrection with black pepper on the booth eggs or another
young beautiful woman who realizes she is not special. The
gravity will assert itself. Will whisper through red keyholes
each mote a spaceship. A haunted orbital drone imaging
the ova the currents of gas create in fiery slanted writing.
I only ask that you first dip your finger in the oil. That you
offer to seduce with me the Mediterranean youngbloods in
their tapestry of blonde hair and bright laughter. But who
knows where they come from. Who knows where they will
let a child crown in a floating statue garden of lamps and
teal curtain. Or so I have heard from the porcelain. From the
shapes tapped onto my right temple by dream errata. Syntax
removed by the disarray of the shrine. Beckoning cat. Glue
of the incense chamber. In the sunset football fields certain
areas of the ground become favored and burned. Cigarettes
under the bleachers. A joint under the pines. When the boys
would wrestle under a sheet who could remain stoned until
we made the rosary with butcher’s twine and two binary dice.