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CHAPTER 1
Looking at Schnabel's The Death of Fashion with my son
As we stood In the unreflective Pall of the canvas Neatly pocked by broken Plates, light Swallowed by The sickly sweet strokes Of crap paint Clumsily Slapped across it,
The speaker's feeling of loneliness is profound, or I read the lyrics of the emergency
When I picked up my son From preschool this Moment willed itself Into being
Mothland
All along you were Right, they were Flanking our house They Documented you taking off Your clothes every morning I requested these Documents & they sent someone's Illicit hard drive I fucked with the commandant Nothing that mattered Continued to happen into the Nothing that made us laugh like Gas does Most of us went WYSIWYG Which meant sand kicked In our face &/or our Life was a fracking disgrace I know you lived mostly Desirous of desolation A kind of Interior branding a Lesbos of the Soul Let me introduce you To my friends Who fry bacon & Spumoni de Kooning cooling limbic An astral fryer Thomas Mann Spelling out things I exhausted I falling down On my face the divorce Anything but legal Just shame & egrets Shitting the windows I realm I record Life begins to get in The way the life Of a novelist Which I assume is not Only more comfortable The advance is ridiculous But strident The perqs develop Their own antiquities I always go back to my Preference for medications that act swiftly I don't do time-lapse So well I get hell I focus my gaze On Takashi Ito's Structured vision Of the not this world But space is the place Where we can mace the strangers walking into our loathsome Into oblivion The usual I refuse My son Wallows the smooth Tallows of the luxurious paradise of Time to spinneret to Pearl the moustache I get that You falsify Perfectly you stream experience Like a coin you toss Into whatever Fountain I still Believe the poem Delivers a brutal shrill lust for streaming Cusps your romance With écriture If my mother were To read this How much shame Would envelop Her I'm Sure you assure us Reassured all of us Which might mean Write out & out & out else Make this a god Or homeless People to shine a light On a poem amending The title Intended to circumscribe My mother's loneliness I am thinking of My mother a lot These days which Pass in spasms In theory If we are anything If we have nothing else uncommon My mother Finds comfort in Planting bulbs each fall She left me a voicemail Message for my birthday Several days late to which I never responded I didn't Listen to it for months I can't remember If I did listen to it Fred told me he couldn't Get over a line from the Poem I read in Chicago This summer from a poem that shows up later in this book
"Look, I've loved my mother Most of my life."
Its permission to admit why the anxiety Over mother love Why depict spiders skittering All over our dreams I didn't mean I didn't always Love my mother her Name is Robyn same As my wife When Oedipus says I get The feeling His dumb Luck is his fortune Is his is Oedipus Reminds us to behave Better in the future Which his motherwife Reminds us is unknowable Every memory I have Or choose to have Of my mother saturated In the blues of a Dusky sky I should Cry I should inhabit The clichés entrusted to me To exhibit A lonely boy ill Treated defeated before Birth exiled from Chance When I Remember my mother Crying I don't remember Her ever crying She loved me I'm certain As she loved her Spring tulips not unconditionally But with proper proportion Unhappy that I cannot heave My heart into my mouth I Love your majesty According to my Bond no more nor less the man standing Next to me inside of me in Permanent ecstasy the cyphers Scuttling under passing cars Unable to find A shadow to Dissolve Into The barrel Of a gun twists Back at me I lard The scene with A company of C's I see the scene in every Register but time-Lapse returns No favor The mother coma The mother comma The various strobing Or phasing The clock dial is a riot Planning itself Years in advance Go quietly address The vending machine Snip wires Stare at Pictures of you Jolted twenty feet back onto The hood Of a viper Flicking its Capital relentlessly At the brine of these new centuries Erupting like nothing You or I know I pick at a scab I develop A hankering for Insta for gratification A door that slides Shut just As invasion of talk Of jetties & molly & away To Somalia As if you could evade The glistening Of your Fund which powers up In a shadow Enciphered this cruel media this papering Over & proxy servers & Anonymous nerve Tapping to allocate resource Assuaging Assange Buffering Beyonce Journos Copping a feel In Ferguson ecstasy of Entering the Gilgamesh Dying 'neath the heath Hammered to a tinsel thin Instance of justice You don't belong To tribe always acting as Leering at The contents of the mirror Mirroring the Warhol Insistence on or the Basquiat Keith Haring! Nauman walks in a square that Occludes race & class Privilege preening or Peacocking Queer Theory rasterized Resisting salve of Semiotics Your brother arches His eyebrow Thought This true & u spend so much of yourself Spending credit scores & fantasy The vale we Vulture in our waking dread Waxing what You examine with your niggling X-ray You my standing Camino All the world's nostrils flare & Zenith & zeroes shiver Me back into my car & I Drive home totally
Champagne Dawn
Cassandra wrote To tell me That my
On a Clear Day
Just imagining The inside Of a triangle.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Attributed to the Harrow Painter"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Nick Twemlow.
Excerpted by permission of University of Iowa Press.
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