Heir Apparent

Issue #34: April 2015

Asheville | Anselm Berrigan

hiding to let it work a sense of hoping to lose it to refuse its performance its conditions

and explanations tattled in rainbow loom doom strolling by the fan cave cue red receptacle

for used blood endowed in prodigal sucker perpetuity modern bleak redemption opening

the cinema for dumpy-souled laugh orientation at which (tires squealing) you could play citizen

scum scoring a reset hallway heretofore loading adjacent polar vortex muffling bears inducing

a transaction counter an incessant speed of affection to upgrade the trag-affect it was all splices

of enormity dunk-blocking the precog’s morbidity incursion duking it out with scrolls and skrulls

high places in friends & the speed of promised growth in a version of

the present architecture dog shit meets used cracker at the site of eros

the local branch a person changing its name from sovereign to salamander

I give the guys with bad backs loose change they renew the visual sense you

know the weather’s so lovely the rats can’t say no we found their treaty with

the squirrels under a fake rock compromise in Tompkins Square high yield

checking to beat off rent bombing the fuck out of fuck it’s adopted son clarity’s

what you say you think it’s the emotion of cutdown day

getting in the conversation ray’s mock-up of unilateral

securitay’s breeding sites groping for intimacy between

poisons a sweetness picture picking off points for measure

preseason heroes know it’s a feel-space legacy the decision

to decide when to make a prior show of showing prop up

the present with an ugly hand according to a composite mouth

& having invented your own logic

 you can’t use

 walking with you

elevate your friends into strangers

a moral suspicion

 in every layer

of evolved definition

abstract concept overload

  again is always something

I respond to arrangements

to replace my blank spaces

you remind me often

of a desperation      to make brief

 those blank spaces

someone adds an extra silence I felt-tipped it down the cross-hatch

went infinity flow my tears the policeman’s neon blue fingers still probing its sass

I do not remember technology I do not remember my father’s entire body

in exact detail I do not remember most of my education but all of the feeling

all the endlessly fucking slow layering of every minute micro-jolt accreting there’s

not much about money to tell you don’t already contain in your bulby knowledge

shell the boundaries of boredom I found myself nodding against a grain

pangs of reality inside another fully beautified escape from daily to daily

particulars shit on canvas (see Breughel at the movies) an addiction on discount

how that goblet get from there to there curl of a demon scream for rasberries

slumming with the counter-reformation among rainbow plastic sippie cup palettes

walking with a confident paranoia on retractable leash here hold my annihilus

the projection of luck onto others a ghastly utopia so says a bold divergence nudge

an American reveal a cop decked out in complaint to avoid this fate we must

strike against sleep

voxily benumbed

connect yr charger

it in fact is hard to touch you

true, our history a series of

assignations the utility of personal

difficulty & its attendant logics

breaking up into mutual doses

of rejection. No more poetics

a binge of opening acts splits apart into Orders of Experience:

what are your reigning rules for yourself mr. hard playa on the less than average

arbitrary temporal marker of the over-processed moment? Grainy drowning bat

in underground lunchbox? Paranoid crab pincing toe chubs from eternity’s

couch-thing? Seaweed dumps under layers of biodegradable friendship collections?

That magisterial pounding just out in front of your skull to the right is your source

of tangential authority, ready to self-skewer your dingity when politics require you

to pull the old blankie out from under your feet? Your electronic self-image array

remind you of the knowing dirtbag teachers who’ve never understood one fucking

thing you’ve said? They’re still better than the baiters of bears waving structure

at you disguised as wit and fortune, no? You’re forty-one. You dunked your children

in the grease holding them by their faces. Everything charging up from behind

is unhinged and consoling. Fortunately for the times you despise explanation

partial azure balloon stomp doggie popped out back

you put these tiny flower bugs in your pocket?

the distance between

 those two positions

is a little immeasurable

but I miss the absence of the person

  who filled the absence of

another person – I miss

the second person

& that missing sucks to say

 here we all are leaving

 “to be”

      here

a year later I’m where

the light is right

to prepare for introduction

as a fixed act

which renders demotive

  me a non-unified

significance ahead

 of sanctioned leeching

wrap the box set book addiction in transparent dragon skin after hiding

the sea horsies’ eyelashes in a too-big stroller’s expectant demi-grime thank you

for the nod out in collaboration with medical relocation I’m always a touch late

to ten baroque minutes away from a bad repair job in gravel kittywalks where

unnameable fluidity unlimited only by the flow of your distressed clarity of material

curated in absentia

by a fondness for absentia

we must liberate the still

from their tempos and stories

for a bio the ghost wrote an

approximate likeness of a voice

a blocked punt could paste a face

onto so many books to stand and read

in aisles and not quite pay for stewarding

homelike a fella in his mutterings can’t

believe they don’t drop bombs & grenades

on this place & he’s a follower & I avoid him

by standing right in front of him my fears are local

the big guy’s muttering stink shaped up once in awhile

is no headlock inducer I’m worried about boys who

can hurt me and not being any good at anything

so reality turns out to be a little more

convoluted than its agencies

the desk form virgiling itself in a video bank for macro-minor instance we get to disbelieve in surfacing

lording critique over death

let’s shuffle our personalized logistics:

at home exhausted warmth on the street

business ephemeral concrete mollified innerware

I do not have persona stamina

micro-cottage industries of we

bleeding out from waves

my hand is alive says a phone

near the intersection of 9, B

& Charlie Parker Place a hell-

sun limps via intervention

into dragon-form pre-pick-up

auto-perspiration downwind

from dog-run alone between

steps with my man-thoughts

my clutzy wager thunks too

much white in the sky-motion

pleather heaven falcon scores I missed a walk off wild pitch struck aquarium

with laconic emphasis a turning point witnessed avoiding masses in my habits

accreting metal staring up at shoe gazers & searching for Udhiri poets greeted by

perfect realspeak on no-fault divorce I know the wrong eight hundred years ago

its default user a forward collision warning sigh to shake down whitey apocalypse

twins rapture mutants to Jupiter the eternal executioner choppable by Norse axe

confused about what to cop piling down first half stats wrong’s extra-secret wrong

but your spliced idea of life demands turns hunting down a drunk pill to split

new year’s resolution go full blown cheeseball tweak tenement rooftop wind supplies

readymade answers all non-thinking elegies emptied in ignorant lists sliming the otherwise

bottomless beading secret lover of pigeons throw glasses I mean skyscraping needles

phlebotomizing the uptown skyframe I myself heck in a cuff the plain dysfunction

of inevitable decay-reversal turning ploy a stance on potential self-approximation refused entry

to that shipwreck in lift-off if you’re trained as I can’t be to steer vehicles one compromise elides

another one death-stick weakens selection (panel yet to be colored) why not be exuberant typed

the career diplomat like stealth has been an inspiration (raw materials: hot rationales in astroturf shirts)

all I ever wanted will be ceaseless vibrations warding off resentiment behind the plain layers in view

finishing studies insert flyleaf

 the shumpert jersey marches off

  to intermission the platitude dome

   an arming of character into arenalight

    I’m a reel-to I know this propping

     digital light & she will have her tree

      just behind her name carved onto a

       passable rectangle solidity feints

        wearability are there any donuts

         to shake into view from the art shop

          on this sublet of a mantle? I say &

           everything wrong in slight enigma

            launch parsing sensation to loosen

             shivers from a coming bundle of ofs

              wrapped by gift certification: 30 at

               grassroots, ten at st. mark’s theater

                25 cents for bengal stripes on

                 a bottle cap’s inner lid one brings

                  a processed mistake to temporary

                   home & unleashes elegaic sentiment

                    (the art is in the arrangement)