by Ouimette Martinez
If exile is the only war beside death, not beyond. And, the fear of homelessness keeps up the terror and saves it for ourselves, so young a nation and beautifully scared, it is in these words, naked nude with new work, that you took your turn, for my worst is my best. Then, it is wars I fear, more and less. Endlessly, it was the way their smell crept corpses and their stately ears kept opening into other eyes, a nightmarish kiss. Reverberated exile stains on the dead idea’s lips, a fugitive itself, the moist thing’s insides, an idea and it can’t cut it out without bleeding over there. Thought. Exile is on the way! Say, “I have time for your sleep too,” if you have a few words. Here it goes, I am on the American plains, throwing schizophrenia’s tsunamis into tomorrow’s nudist beach and we can’t cut it until tonight is unafraid with silent passages of power. Wake me, so I can write like its my first breath:
I am the prose-poet that votes! I am the mourning person you quote! And at night I lie open next to my thoughts about you, I do! Opera the way out young! Don’t wait for a song!
You see, in common conversation I have a giant elephant as my only fantasy of your republican memory, one that tames some other animals’ images, yet how elephantine to be the size of remembrance. Laugh, no? Prudence! By the way, how is the past disposed of by the terror of your memoir written on twin towers: Who’s war will speak? I can’t see the future over seas anymore, yet I have met a junkie whose animal-spirit’s name is “Reform!”. . .Still, his true friends call him “Franchise”. . .he is close and out of luck. Imagine being a veteran! He, who quotes wild birds of prey, and priests that pray, and with the smirk of a priest asking for another drink he told “a story about drunken exotic fish,” fish caught somewhere between the River of Now and the River of New, fish as drunk as the drunk that slurs to his friends, “I was drunk as a fish last night,” and into the morning we spoke of twilight politics, all murmurs between friends and language haloes in camouflage. He was homeless as he saw the fall, those twins in the heat of incest as slow as know-nothing spectators are to their own seemingly innocent eyes of broken mirrors. . .as I heard and as luck would have it I sat next to a television for awhile, just after...It was at an urgent point in the story that he, the homeless man, spit on the ground, while under one cloud. It was clear, as his words move, now, like the alien land of a curious archipelago of ghostly money, as if “Manhattan” arises in earthly sexes and rests, rebellious ghosts taking possession of the imaginary world of beasts eating away the shores of the East River’s speed, beaches of need, waves made of the low tide of greed, and a stir of the priest’s drink, jihad shaped ice cubes, drunk in his Atlantic soul as he said she said I love someone else’s God, who cared about all he knew as he said the elephant’s tusks swing at ivory hope and the junkie’s dance on the sidewalk feels oceans away to everybody else moving out of their civil way, one way subways into cityscapes torn away from the work of all human meaning, where eagle eyes speak of how a person cannot live on heroin alone in the coming shape of a homeless junkie’s reflection on the stained glass windows of an asylum, formally speaking to himself, under concrete overpasses for the rest of his life, perhaps it is better to listen to the radio and not have these thoughts at all: The world city of poisons living in highrises, buildings melt like sugarcubes on an island tongue, the choke and the breath are together at last in freedom’s taxes and their poorly lit clauses of our foreign-ness: Though everyone asks, “Who won?” and stares like they’re a neighbor of the new things I sold. I guess they’ll live with it. Advice.
I’m touched.
However, that next death is coming our way in an oil spill of the homelessly democratic waves. I have been touched by your religious health, urban exile. Have a home! Wage slave, war saved, wage war. We’re at war! Shouts! I am mad and the junkie is dancing on the elephant that faces east, it appears that the sun stampedes up the middle, I see all the president’s shadows fall on their knees like priests. Priest as metaphor, what a sound. Some men and women and children live anyhow. Why don’t we laugh in the sunlight in a way that is too weird for words?
I rent on one side of the Williamsburg Bridge. Do not own some of the smiles we know: I’ve paid in other ways, more than one. Rentingly, I even take my heart to be cut into spacious apartments, units, you name it environmental causes, beliefs in genes, meanwhile the idiot inside speaks to an object beyond good plumbing and city streets, even the miniature scientist inside awakens a cloned image of myself, so easily seen though I’m not there, I get up and the labored scream aloud into the thin air out in the burning judging burning of judging in order to donate an identical heart and all the boiling ideas in the world feel bloodied in clots in unequal arteries of peace, a vast cityscape canyon citizenry thrown down amongst the hard oceans of wet skies. To cure and to burn, love. After all the earthly experiences in the world it rained, acidly so, there were toxic ashes too, I held my famous umbrella. A woman on the train asks for food, she has twins too, the metro moves. Stay calm and commute! The germs, the germs, the germs. On hiatus from ourselves with war. Will it be nuclear winter that will expose itself and absorb bright springs, dull summers, fragile autumns, and it’s older dead of winter?
And, where democrats stare at clouds of elephant formulas that don’t exist I secrete secrets, benefits, that you are not my best familiar vacancy ever, or my paradox of the liar, though I’d never cliché-ridden an elephant to the Whitehouse as an aged refugee will to work with you listening to the latest news about natural disasters and other easy worldly stars, I know that eventually the elephant becomes sickly green, and will have died before our eyes. Your skull and bones, leftovers.