cryogenie blues

this is a hand-held text recording auto-zooming with palimpsests of past recordings even if you're headless / a tasmanian devil enclosure say / or rose baby-shaped blancmange sucked through bic pens / taste of the same breath? / run / a tail itself lashing to rain the corner your eye's painted in / it is rain falling upright? / the way it fills to your gills and like a coin never coincides may as well be monstrous / a fine film of appetite over / exhaust you cannot taste all along the lines / a staple ape horizon / latent stem soldiers / organ donor kebabs / floating love that hurts without a loved one / plastic cold war unicorns squared on a saucer in the kitchen /

so i rub as every night my souvenir shaker dome with its one vehicle from each emergency service plus confetti / not tonight / no taste but texture / chalk milk aerials / sausages of sea / a stale domestic surrogacy / too blue in the face of the spilt milk that cries not out / so i rub rub as every week my cryogenie into being / outside now a shush of rain / he grants me three cold spells but suffers premature dimensions / perhaps the auto-focus is out of focus every time he appears to be? / come rain or tail / every time he spills the spells before i can convert them down the line / hands dividing back to childhood from themselves as obsolescence / i would shiver and ask of him take me away from all this death o cryogenie / even down along the line / then find i was quoting mina harker in coppola's remake of dracula / uh oh / something twangling here

run / now catching breath / the barely audible sound of holding pitter patterns / the same bone stems blooming into both eggs and sperm / as wind churns a poplar into a couple fighting for a bit of space / surely they should be after an anaesthetic of the subprime in a nutshell? / no needle really has an eye which is why you must keep entering your pin /once i felt me zoom right out of rationed ratios / glimpsing a different holding like domestic outer space / a waiting on television hatched by pig-nosed turtle eggs / only when the rain comes / it felt the right disinterest to let happen /

soon all cells will be monitored for training purposes / no outside of the sex / no not a shocking karaoke version of suspension without suspense / so many voices calling in other awful renditions / fresh orders / not mighty rationality but rendering of tender meat / held neither dead nor alive / the copy running / freezing you inside / or kill it into being / feeding down the line / down the line / no reason but reasons / bundles and bundles of reasons with the same same breath

Hue

it's good to be addressed as 'Alice' so close to the bone / in the kitchen of last night we ordered things differently after we sampled every shingalingaling boiling down to a pageant of action / no way! we said before making it up to each other / laughing is air-lung butter / eating is waves of mouth-beef / kissing makes mouth-mouth propeller / but this felt flabby compared to Vietnamese / every word a syllable housing a family of unrelated things / take ma which means ghost, mother, that, tomb, horse, or burgeon depending on how you tone it / i dare not try / i've grown mother enough since she died / besides, the Miss Universe parade was now upon us / police keeping all but tourists in line with cattle prods / their congeniality isn't universal / not like Miss El Savador's / despite what all the yawning awnings aim to 'equitize' / chic and kitsch / the rain's high time /the crowd now fine lines in our hotel room on tv /

we switched to a pirate dvd / Shoot 'Em Up / cockney accents with english subtitles more a system of secret tunnels / 'my god' / make hurt / 'hugs and kisses' / i guarantee that / 'e was a lousy tipper' / he is British / 'there's nothin on tv about this' / what do you like Taiwan casually? / 'yer 9mm is empty / you are the people I killed / 'you know ow to use this, right?' / with it / 'this is pretty fucked up' / first and so on / 'thass quite alright, doctor' / you should heed this Mr Facial / 'forensic behaviour consultant' / i do not hold hope /

let's call all that a sketch of local investments / thank you ong Vu (Mr Rain) for showing as much in explaining the death day feasts / scooters tvs and fridges of paper burned as offerings to ancestral spirits / the import of Hue as former capital / the import of burning facsimile dollars / not just for ancestors / also for ghosts of wandering strangers / including GIs killed in the war / then your delicious fishcakes trigger the frog by the perfumed river / hiding in my hand from my hand/

i imagine my 'health' is not my own / plays a major role without being real / just like the rumoured 'state of nature' / within the imperial citadel all the bullet holes are still where the coy carp feed on frenzy / JPAC teams scouring the hills for remains / seeking their own mitochondria to bury back in America / tomorrow maybe we go to the man in the market to bargain for Ganesh / everyone keeps accepting my hand! / it's been such a strange honeymoon / and when we're home we'll help amass the town square for the New Year / city after city on a big screen / writing with bits of ourselves / counting down / happy with second hands / our turn to go up in smoke

the identification

this morning my face is so not to be seen in the motel mirror / in its place the sense of some film screening as vamped-up steam / thinking rooms come fully furnished with yourself is any mirror's auto-cue / a floating 'Me, Me' you appear to slip on like a cloak of gelatine to assume yourself ossified inside / buried in an open album / sound / safe / no key to the skeleton you have and have never met (other than not getting caught in the act of tripping up its steps) / buried open sound / an ossuary of ears / dreams of personal archaeological digs / so the world turns flat again / after the recent regional earthquake only broke a lone chimney breast into news i overhear this on the street: / 'has anyone ever really roasted chestnuts on an open fire?' / 'screw you, Josie' /

winter and winter passes spring / the tension pulpable / but this morning has hit on some late shift key / some face not seen to be in the mirror / everything in the room turning a gaze to white gauze against its window / if it's a good film it should be watched with one eye on your stomach / one on the exit / one on the soundtrack / like crickets going at heat hammer anvil and stirrup / like the crickets outside chirrup to run through traffic with your hearing / listen to them cross by accident now while so getting away with you /

as loss is more than it was / something in here tapping / yoked / eyes buried in a sack of earth as lightbulbs? / i've heard such feelings make a hard case about a person / as a pupa preparing its larva / it must be a cheap film / can steam do the noir of detached smoke? / next comes detachment of the retina so you can be in the dark like feet of a chair / to occur to us now an event must screen under cover of darkness to make its impression / a bikini of trees or a glass of helmet / Alain Delon's secret pockets / hard driven cigarettes / so cases and furniture fall to throwing voices / suspension as form of solution / sentenced / feeling itself to be

here / maybe now this face is prepared to step back inside? / and when i do even the street will be in it / floating credits / sprung / splayed / while down the end of it plays the friend I love too much and never see / the friend who is open as fire / smoking into some hidden cache inside me / soaring sunward with portable memory / taking off with the smallest keys / bringing a little life to life / i so hope he'll accept the visor i'll need to pay him a visit / to see him put out my hand before i know it / my dearest love / you bastard

Ouarzazate

the accounts of the meltdown were not the snooze button we'd hoped for but lifelog rhythms were on the way / 'privacy may turn out to have been an anomaly' / all hail the future ulterior / when he suggested we 'sandpit' the reality-mining idea i took sick leave to train myself to bear it / (my pet death is a pug named Heel / heel Heel / heel you brute) / we are talking mobile phone location data / the pollen count of your body fat / the gait of my water / the breath speeds of affairs / all calls to a mass / the time from now / can one multiply through subtraction? / how about hard cell searching? /

so here i am taking time out to be alone in the desert with my species / thank you Ouarzazate for your empty 'Museum of Cinema' set against your rosé dunes / Marrakesh kept going on about my confusion / blood from my nose clotting my stomach / iron kept in its place by skin / baggage home-bound by plastic pastures / the saddest donkeys trying to be trucks / orange blossom exhaust setting pyramids of steaming snails / satellite dishes of monkeys in nappies / the mere sight of concavity was a sign of the reality-miners working out of our tracks / i sought solace in the prayer-raid shelter of cafés and found myself penning my own entreaty / 'if love is blind / love me blind / now shield me god for i am four' /

it's true i'm not alone / i came with my friend who invented the autoseismograph / when on a car plane bus or train hold a pen relaxed on a pad and let vibrations register fact to draw you out of resemblance to it / yes just as you are set dear Ouarzazate / let's call the finished product the 'motivation' we're bent on / the museum is an exhibition of what in the end has left it alone / rich care comes in a cream for careless people / but you are a jam that offers salvation because you cannot be 'wherified' / a series of empty sets / not a screen in sight / here a desolate village of Joseph that doubled for one in the The Exorcist prequel / here a Pontius Pilate chamber of Asterix / here a fibreglass tomb full of sparrows singing the hungers of two stray cats / and everywhere Mary is washing her hands / the hands of these sands that staged New Mexican horror hills the battle of Tafas and blood in Zucchabar so convincingly /

i know you want me now to take my leave / thanks be to you Ouarzazate for showing me how it's possible / back in the Marrakesh time-share maybe all masts and waves will have washed out against the fibreglass tomb within me? / perhaps i can build another one out of them? / in the market of Djmaa el Fnaa i saw an exhausted cobra sleeping in search of its fangs / beside it a man selling second-hand human teeth complete with fillings / 'this one tells time / makes signals past space / also BBC world service'

© Alex Houen 2009