Because the Universe Is a Hologram, I Will No Longer Pretend, and: Sam Says Why Are We Doing Hamlet Again, and: O Cartoon Tongue I Am Your Lips I Am Wrapped Around a Tailpipe

Because the Universe Is a Hologram, I Will No Longer Pretend

The dog gets Ativan when it’s anxious, when we think it’s anxious, rather, he is anxious, or, we are anxious for him. When a friend calls from the nuthouse, from ten years in the past,

and says: The present is an elevator. It can’t stop itself. There are no buttons whatever. The dwarf who works the lever is drunk. He says you are not in an old film but you are. Everyone has a sad story now—

Yes, I bark, and the dog barks too, and I take him outside, and we bark together. Everything I tell you is true because everything is true. In one sad story you say we are lost but we aren’t. We undress each other on a stranger’s porch.

We undress in a sculpture garden. We turn into nudes. We are stones. Planets. The dog shits all over the house when you’re gone. We piss in the park together. I wish we were all death, all stone.

Sam Says Why Are We Doing Hamlet Again

I say how did you get into my house     Didn’t I see you in the creek belily’d—

    Sam is looking at her nails which are the color of nails and she tells me look at my nails     I do and I guess I do it like a girl because Sam

    says so and because my palm is facing the floor She laughs and her breasts move  like dogs quaking through a storm     But still I am looking at my hand and I say       how did you get into my house

She says I’m tired of the drowning  except when I’m tired God you’re just so boring when you’re like this     all     fixed       O I am immovable, I say

Sam is making a sandwich of things that shouldn’t   be in sandwiches  my hand is in there also   there’s a bit of map  and Henry James and she is in her   clothes for once  only it doesn’t matter   because they’re soaked through  and her lips         are still red   even when they’re blue and she mouths the color blue   and it is blue for miles

O Cartoon Tongue I Am Your Lips I Am Wrapped Around a Tailpipe

If I would lie I might tell you Sam’s doing ok  You know I saw her in the elbow of a waterfront dive    She was drinking Negronis and kerosene      When she saw me she spat & the place went up like dry pine If she saw me it was through the ring under her rocks  My face Parmigianino’d    glass-bent & circled ’round Only neither of us said nothing    Later and out of doors I went down and angel’d the snow It came flitting on me and my bare face I said to myself  What matters now is that you keep doing    Though you’ve been obsessive and only in marking the transits of ev’ryday clouds         Nothing but flyaway paper

      What is unsaid :

The scientists at Chauvet Cave they dream of lions get the odd fear-clench twixt hip ball & sockets from the dream sound of them  Me I dream of boxes unmarked left  by strangers  I twitch in my sleep and wheeze the death of lions  Still there is no end to illusion  It was myself I saw in that bar Myself through a ring    Fain I    dream I shudder  Don’t wake me     Not for the lions    Not for nothing