Blackbirdan online journal of literature and the artsSpring 2012 v11n1
poetryfictionnonfictiongalleryfeaturesbrowse
 print version
NORMAN DUBIE

The Carceral
     after Tan Lin

It is a zero complex of numinous repetition
massing where
the lawful face of the girlfriend
dissolves beyond pixels, our nipples
hard for an angular
cheekbone we will never
touch or kiss in an obligatory steamy kitchen
with fresh vegetables.

Arbitrary zero-anus squared moon-house
of another Pluto derivative
of the burning parallax disc, sun or
hay barn.

I had fallen in love
with the pink stamp
many times before the still life
with pears turned to a rotting
battlefield in Algeria. Her corpse

stood and adjusted a yellow apron,
wiggled once
while substituting, Liam,
who cares . . . I’m not, who’s next?
Who’s x, y, or z.
Greta Garbo was a Zombie—not an
original solemn thought
but consider the moment!

The word must be us, the word
must be empty
because it gazes back at us
with lust.
I know, let us return to the fair breast
suckled in late shadow
on a wet cold Sunday
in the seventeenth-century, Scotland:

The Latin lesson, all
lessons in dead languages
are beginning, a past-time

and now our language is among them.
Please repeat after me—

Marcel Glau, you can kiss my fat ass.
You can try! Anyhow.

Garbo thought she was
indifferent in bed, not unlike
shellac drying on a military mustache.

This is another conflict.

I’m sorry that you are just some
stupid colonist
journeying
to the lithium work camps on Mars.

The strength to our desperate prayers
is rooted in a flawed existence
we’ve attributed to our Creators . . . ?

All the kings of Scotland lining up
to fall into the dark
with Greta Garbo
who we must insist is indifferent to men
in lost mining camps
where the air purifiers
are being hand cranked by red-haired chimps
who whisper to one another:

garbo is a cold fish, we think, cargo
ellipsis. Dead from the lips down
like, flagrantly, like
our masters
in the Central Intelligence Agency.

Mundo. Coma. Olundo and out.  


return to top