Monthly Archives: January 2012
Last Drink Mechanical Bird Head
The coffee-house looks like a photograph, Pre-digital, a faded more-than-real. Espresso and two cigarettes: a meal.* Reflected in the window, I’m a half- Step out of synch with moving in the flesh. Barista croaks “two lattes”, bobs his head, His long beak hazed with steam, his eyes dark red. The tip jar fills with cogs … Continue reading
Reclamation
The leaves of the tree wouldn’t have moved if they hadn’t been programmed to, but the light breeze caught them, enameled brass so thin they barely weighed more than a real leaf, and they rustled, glass-like against each other. Nearby the river rushed in whispering, rasping gouts, tiny quartz beads thrust into cataracts by jeweled … Continue reading
Clockwork Argument
Jorge sat down at the breakfast table. He was feeling good; he had slept through the whole night, and woken to gentle rays of morning sun curling their fingers around the window curtains. A bird sang in the distance, and even though it had been programmed to sing this song, he found the rising ditty … Continue reading
Dust Jackets
The 1977 film Capricorn One posits a flight to Mars being faked on a film set. What Dr. Robert Pritchard’s book presupposes is, what if it were a hoax? What if this movie was, in fact, never filmed, and the true hoax was not the flight to Mars but that someone hoaxed a movie about … Continue reading
The 39 Fluid Identities
The Scene: An isolated manor house on the windswept Yorkshire moors, 1920’s. A: Don’t you realize, Margo, that this sarcophagus is the very one stolen from the British Museum on the same night that the dastardly master criminal Rene Dastard escaped from Reading Gaol? B: But Lamont, surely you don’t suspect… A: But I do, … Continue reading
This Whole Idea
Ron Paul quotes: This whole idea that the whole Muslim world is responsible for this and they’re attacking us because we’re free and prosperous, that is just not true. This whole idea that we have to be in 130 countries and 900 bases . . . is an old-fashioned idea.