John Sullivan 🔈

1. #

The Houston Ship Channel rots between its banks (documented by greedy LiDAR / for so-so many shredded moments); it slows down my pulse to nearly stone-dead (our newest trending symptom) these days, & we lay here on our own wet / moldy mattress, & listen just a little, but mostly lie straight through our pearlies to buttress that fake (sigh!) gone fat-city world we can hold, now, only in our heads, that slow haze & wheeze of fog breathing, curling up off empty water, unfurling like a Jolly Roger, calls out to us.

2. #

There was once more – is that still true, fool, or did we bend the mirror backwards? Back once was terra-fluida, pools of tar & bygone bones, or so we hear – then we geared up to frack, rock, wrack all these sediments where we back once walked, played kick-the-can, we’ve ginned up hours of cough / cough / cough, hacked up soot & gloom: filled this river up with sand, traitor-secrets, (proprietary) doom-poison turns in our ears, now, like old milk turns rough (scabby!), sours under our dirty southern moon.

Now sunrise, also, comes too soon, the sun stays up too late, & glowers back, the moon sours pretty quick, too.

& my lie-eye needs more distance (just!) for (simple!) looking, more & more of it to keep an old lie’s shine cooking, an old lie’s skin so sweet.

So I leave my own skin on but I still shiver, listen: how bats crash together, all night, flop around, noses buried, fuzzy all-in-white damaged inner-gyros / inner-clocks screwed-on backwards, flying all antigoglin (crazy!) outside when they should be inside, soon, they forget to sleep, forget what to eat & when, forget “how high the moon?”

3. #

Is this all written down in a book, somewhere, by Sad Giants with febrile (little!) brains?

Maybe, a lost book, a last look, maybe a fugitive, a feigned feeble SOS sends out its tired echo-beam: a nervous quirk of a nervous planet?

A cute little robot (startled “I”!) calls out in a nervous (recurring!) dream: “Mama, where are you? Why must the ‘crown of creation’ die?”

So Little Sister cries out, too: “don’t you leave us here like this.”

So, also, Little Brother screams: “our dreams are some real-bad prophecy. Our dreams are no call-to-vocation / no place you would ever want to be.”

Is it all true? Is it really better? Does it still (or even!) matter? Is it just a cover, or a tale spun into butter? If night air is a (cold!) wet shroud for each stale day, then you might best wear it just that way.

And Little Brother’s sad, unraveling the years & years of don’t even look, don’t ask nothing, don’t tell nothing, too: just let it ride.

And Little Sister’s stretched inside-out, fit to burst, like to shatter: “Your dog-days dining out on young flesh, robbing all our shit / chewing up / grinding down / doing all those cutsie little murders like you do,” yells out she, “are so done, so quit, so gone.

It’s (so-very-much!) you ancient clowns don’t mesh or matter now. But when are you gonna' settle up that open tab, that planetary grab-it-all,” so say both, together:

“when are you gonna' pay your money down?”

4. #

Benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene: parts per million drool down like fog in all the low places, all the shallows, (pools!) on all our faces, too, when it rains / when it bakes.

That shadow you buried, that ancient seed, what you thought you meant once, back: dig it up (quick!) now you may need it. In your palm it seems to wink back, bunch & bristle up, (calm & cocky?) like it knows something you just don’t; it seems to glow, wicked like any isotope, like any secret (X!) marks the crime, like any wild hunch, however strained, however mine, however like a zygote (or illusion?) of some even stranger (très louche!) mass delusion machine.

5. #

But there’s heat here, too, a’plenty, there’s no time left for nothing but the bare fact of grace, there’s whole neuroses of no’s, there’s that same screed / same world, (yammer / yammer-on, it does) sham as always, we still hold it all (only?) in our heads, now, just a trace, a worn-out creed, & an end, maybe, to that same-same human show, maybe, the beginning of a better act – say: what’s need, here, (really!) need, now; say: what’s not –

Containing only that, nothing else, no Omertà written in blood (always / already vanished) & dried-up seed (bitter curse / persisting backward / through antiquity, or?), passed hand-to-pocket (& then, again!), no seal no more on lips, no locked-onto hearts, nothing preordaining nothing: in all its fullness, or in its lack.

“Now, we got to do what we got to do,” Little Brother says. “We’ll get it all back. We’ll write down the how / clock the why / while we do the what.”

“Don’t forget you us, and we’ll remember you,” croons Little Sister – just to complicate the knot. “That’s not so cute or so funny – is it – when your own house is on fire?” so says she.

Again: “Is it, now? Or what?”