The Starlet Is Dead

The Starlet is dead, we’ve seen her in the pool

and we’ve seen her in the gun shows

they were playing shitty 80s music and crying

because once upon a time she had been

their beautiful Starlet. But not for years.

For years she had been shooting films that look

more like the lustgardens of suffering

or anatomies viewed through “private eyes.”

They look like torture, said a cop who interrogated

me about my role in all of this.

My role was her secret star.

I was the Duchess of Malfi

my body was smeared with apricots.

I am the Duchess of Malfi and nobody forced me to be there.

I was at the party that the cops are re-creating with

new and less infected toys.

I praised them for the realism before I left.

They praised me for my foreskin.

I should have told them: Picture yourself

covered with cake, imagine how much it hurt.

They will never find her killer.

I hate cake.

Pretend I slit my wrists with nightingales.

I did it while listening to the Law. I did it to my wife while

all else failed. I had a tantrum but nobody died. I lied to

the camera in the Starlet’s masterpiece, The Crime Flower.

I described a pair of beautiful panties

and the skulls of pigeons.

The panties belonged to a beautiful homeless

person I fucked with my left hand,

the pigeons belonged to capitalism.

The Law Against Foreigners Involves Mostly The Body

I should know. I’m a foreigner and I want to live in Los Angeles but Los Angeles just wants to take photographs of my body when it’s all dank.

That’s the weird part.

It’s also interested in my body when dogs bark at my genitals but it pretends that’s just evidence of it’s social conscience. It wants to find the human in me, even if it takes ripping this lamb mask into a thousand shreds and hanging it up on the wall.

And feign outrage when I go numb.

I leave good “teeth marks” I’ve been told.

I take a bad photograph because the model was hurt.

Poetry is like a bad photograph because the camera doesn’t work. Or a child is caught stealing from the candy store. Caught fucking a homeless person.

I have a social conscience too and it makes me want to burn the sheets after sex. It makes me scared of lice.

Poetry is so beautiful when it involves gasoline. Or when it gives you a gun that clicks. A dead woman is the most poetical topic in the world.

The Rotten Heart Of Sin Is Exquisitely Mannered

Homeless people are good for images, photographers love them. I find them disgusting when they get killed and when they fuck they smell really bad on your dick.

Swans on the other hand are beautiful when they burn in crime movies.

In this crime movie, we’re at the shooting range again. Imagine all that apricot mess, all those ridiculous ornaments. All that pork. We can’t leave. We don’t have the proper documentation.

Images get in the way of dignity, the poets tell me. Poetry gets in the way of money, the whores tell me. I fuck both and I don’t even have to pay. I’ve got that card: Get out of jail free. Exterminate the brutes yeah.

*

I write about spectators and use the same rifle on sick animals.

I love movies and my son’s body ticks like a movie.

I hate the movies because it is cold in here.

I have cancer in the movies probably.

A woman gives me a scorpion and children give me cancer.

I really only live at night, I’ve been told by the movies,

which is ridiculous because I use my hands to make the signs: wrecks, chandeliers, hotels, decades, ownership society.

It’s ridiculous because nobody can drive a stake through a sack of locusts.

Part of me wants to be paid for the meat but part of me wants to give it away like a whore.

The whores wear oriental robes, it’s all the rage.

Everyone is angry in the movies.

Everyone is scared in the corridors.

I tell my son to stop ticking but he can’t hear me because the whores are laughing too loudly and the plague makes tokens of itself.

I love movies and perfume.

It’s the new double, made from tiger blood.

It’s the new breakthrough, made from tiger blood.

Milk is the weirdest when you’re having sex.

I’m having a milk heart and that’s why I can’t watch the movies

without getting scared. The milk gets all over. The deer gets all narrative.

I turn on the surveillance, the heat.

The effect is ominous: the reverse wound.

I look horrified in the image and also “satanic” due to the milk.

You spumey fuck.

My Sperm Gets In The Flowers

I woke up from the girls tearing apart orpheus dolls and spitting the seeds out the window. The prostitutes cheered. Now I’m wearing my Orpheus head like an illicit sign from the underworld.

The whores think I’m a pornographer and that I would tear their heads off.

I probably would.

What’s the war with my wife and I? We lay killed-like in our den, our bodies covered with sugar and sperm. Who are we at war with? Baghdad, of course.

Baghdad of silk and ceremonial daggers.

Baghdad dolls with limbs that burn safely and with smaller dolls without heads.

Baghdad porn: We watch it until we vomit and then we watch it some more. We’re embedded in art. We close our eyes and let the light wash over us.

Everybody is always talking about “gratuitious violence” and “gratuitious sex.” It’s the only kind.

It’s like when people say “Porn hurts everyone” ... But most of all I’m eating another dripping burger.

Flowers are the most violent props.

The Starlet would not have approved of us killing butterflies with cigarette lighters.

It’s Christmas Eve.

I’m writing a novel, my wife is listening for the words “pionees” and “lillies” on the broadcasts from the underworld.

Instead the broadcasts tell us that they birds are “thrashing around the hole.” It’s of course Hollywood speaking in tongues. Mother tongues and moth tongues. Tongues that tell me to name our next child Nico after the underworld. After Baghdad. After our favorite actress who is totally shaven and nameless.

Maybe we consume by looking but if so, consumption is a very fragile thing.

I color my hair red as blood.

I cover the street with dead girls.

They are all ready for war.

I’m already famous.