SLENDERER JAY SNODGRASS
DIRECTIONAL
Where are your hands, nimble thumbed, cordite blue? Where are the starlings, sky-wrung, stretched to do? What softest trees can beg, barely breathing out? What churns in the horizon, selfish, boiling spout of braided water? What steady, knuckled-threaded glowering shimmer shook down from your head to praise and paradise and be entwined in wood and wire?
A birch and boarder of lava, a rumple of skin and an edge.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna.
A birch and boarder lava, rumple of skin and edge. The border today, with the roof of tomorrow’s fire, eats away at circumference, hard marked by pledge. Where but here, in the despairing order, long strange, what but through strangeness, grope and perspire. Because the clouds bend back to hum and crush, whatever is in love, despairs and stings.
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COW I watched an unnecessary program where scientists tested the hypothesis that cows tended to organize along magnetic currents, field gauze and lid veiled prelude of milk torrent, poor pre-homogenized the dialing of the heard leaned line-ward.
GOATS
Goats they say, will eat anything. Â Rust, also devours barbed wire, do we still use barbed wire? Points of deterrence, edgewise align the perimeter of hay tramplers, barn glued to shade, dizzy with munching, what could be the problem that would need barbed wire? I want to eat you, vast constable of the tenuous. Â I do not want to eat you, tumultuous, grievous field changer, wheat grazer, here in the hot, fly lidded field, tail swisher, herd cobbler I have eaten you, with my eyes and my fencing, my landscapes quilting manageable horizons, I know you know this by the look in your agreeable eye, glossy and exactly pulling me toward you, a magnetic gaze, that pricks me like the nib of a rusted fence whose poison makes me tight jawed, unable to speak or chew.
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CONTACT
This city is a beautiful Satellite array of cold trees and miraculous brick. I have left it so many times before. I say Bye-bye again to it now, to its porch tether, to its foot crank. If you listen you can hear thunder knocking mud of its boots on the stoop and rattling its keys. The houses are so old and made of wood, such old wood every movement is a heavy foot fall, the most nimble cat is stomping drunk, lousy with future and dread.
INTERACTIVE 3.1 The Pattern is Rain
Cracks
Code
Meanwhile, the bus bench listens, pot holes connect to tire and suspension, and wear like the needle and button, a slither of the telegraph snake, and the bull of a pickup truck’s horns and cascades, a cold message of redemption, the alarm of a thirteen month billing cycle. Some people never leave, they never let go, they stretch out to hold, to embrace the rusting wrought iron, the receding gables rotting like a balding man; The nighttime is supplicant, we beg like dogs: Let me go.
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The darkness is vast; does not reveal itself. Constellations are masked by television data streamers though brick, old wood, lassitude, threads of connection bobbing the way a child’s kite lists, a delicate filament.
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THE FLEA It may be that the flea is my benefactress, my shared lover, who squeezes and pops. My sanguinary punctuation.
She says, How can it be Ludwig? I adore you, I abhor you. I meet her equation. The golden apple is digested, plunging my colon as bare as beyond the horizon. But when it comes to blood, there is no easy X upon the door, no cross over. Ludwig says she can’t say what she doesn’t know: the swelling reaches its conclusion. The blood of the body bursts, but as in love, the head is still submerged in the equation, still sucking at nothing, the sound of nothing is compulsion.
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NUMBER OF THE BEAST The surgeon’s hands are ruined by prophecy which comes from reading the furrows plowed in my brain, not from surgery. The prophecy is received by laser beam from outer space. It reads: The end of the world will be counted down by cutting off six fingers.
INTERACTIVE 5.1
Digit Severance. Here is your notice: cut off the impairments, slip the finger-ends. Yea, (six) I raise this dollar bill’s loose edge like ends of skin, loose buttons used to protect the brain’s landscapes which your face counts like digits. Sweet Colors
But they appreciate the received mud.
Missile
Evolution
The fingers are made of a sludge, their thinking is brainwet like cardboard, thus they delight, trembling as the surgeon presses deeper into the hole, using rubber gloves to dig around.
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Doctor, tweeze these cracks, clipboard these digits here, glue the thighs closed. Sew up my mutant desire because what I want is slippery with latex gloves, and wet with big mouth surgery like the church who ate my dog then sent me a bill for tears.
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T h i s c a r p e t o f s a i n t ’ s h a i r Doctor, tread gently, inside my brain, upon this carpet of saint’s hair, these golden strands of with burning. Doctor, when you walk, upon my thoughts or when you press your prayer digits together, or squeeze my teary napkin, wringing my sniveling, then, just to lay your confession down, give it an end. The golden strands will knit close the hole, it’s the surgeon’s secret. The clouds will wither like the sugary letters of holy heaven melting from tears.
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I sky-write your name in great loops, great puffs rising as though from a giant chef ’s pan, or powdery loops of sky intestine draped over the ends of high-rises like pasta. I point it out to you from the street, from the longest line at the amusement park, I point with my gagged single digit, the one I jammed down my throat to regurgitate the noodles of holy vomit, the puddling spool of my brain. I am sorry for wanting the end, for receiving these detonations, for improvising a roadside attitude from my brain. I am sorry for blowing into the sliced off ends of my fingers and inflating my wrists into this balloon of holy fire.
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LUDWIG MY BARONESS On the way to this country for a sex change Ludwig wound up at the wrong airport and was forced to face the memory of Uncle Hugo penetrating him through the haystacks. It was the height of Minsk.
The next plane he boarded  on appearances alone, forcing his way into the lavatory where he copulated with the relic of a stainless steel ashtray it was forbidden to use. He was escorted away to the dinner table where he made his announcement to never again sign his name with a pen.
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CANTO VAS Make a display of this. Bomb them with letters. A jetliner cuts nightlong across the ocean. Trucks heap themselves in defeat just from looking. If you are determined to reach outer space you ought to get some microchips inserted in your brain. It’s the least you could do.
INTERACTIVE 7.1 Canto Vas
Look
Asleep High Water Mark
Outer Space
Click Here
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What I can’t remember shudders the ocean until carnage, until the fields lie – painted signs – inserted like razor blades in apple cores, playfully inserted to clean the tongue, to wedge the awful looking boil of protest signs, sprayed slogans in oceans of trash. Dear Bastards, a robot’s smile would never do to cover how you spell derision in letters leapfrogging through persuasion’s open space.
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Her hair, scoundrel-loose, her face dim and spacey, strewn with the overtures of wreckage, with marks inserted, like cars and trucks trash-spawned, with banner high letters of the billboards on her face, rough sand looking to form bunkers where only walls would do, to hold back all the cars and driving and trash in the ocean, to fight over where the waves, like dogs, snarl and ocean-snap.
I stop for gas as the city turns to space, gulping for air, fish faces turning blue. Trucks, I think we could do without your personal derangements. Instead, look how dawn wears a frown of ferocious sky. I’d say it’s looking grim for you. Even in the light I can’t read your letters.
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Maybe instead of looking like outer space, what you can do is write an ocean of thank-yous, and enjoy the traffic and letters, we made it for you.
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BREAKDOWN The mechanic hands me the bill for repairs a long tribute to paper written on the heels of the desperate. You cannot die if you keep pace.
Through the latch a swiveling eye, memento of streetlight and the brawny transvestite who always says hello at 3am, his toe nails are ingrown crescent moons to soft flesh, no one should know that my hair is white when the car fails, nearly drifting in to a cotton harvest. My mouth is a strangled brother of white sky which is the soul of an empty city between empty buildings. Often I’ve wished to scurry and so make of the feet a hundred skies of escape.
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I reach out to touch you. Reaching out to touch you is like reaching out to pray, to touch my own hands together, to cling to something. I interlace the fingers in what wrestlers call the hammer, I want to bring this down on something. In the opposite outspreading: here is the church, contaminates, commingled, gesture of yearning, everyone is powerless, every square roof tile itself equals spreading, covering and shivering and protecting the equation. Â The equation herself calculates the hour of death, the equation nurtures my featherless arms, pours her milk onto my paving stones. What a shame this book bite is closed like a snake in my hand.
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If you suck hard enough you could draw up all my poison. You could pray with me as I babble beside the spilled radiator my guts everywhere among the car parts, where the hair will not grow over the skeleton.
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Out of these nurtured furrows I fell into your night the wet field and your scabs smelling of redrawn earth, mapped. The wind lifting your nose then fading, the crop bent and ragged. Stubbornly, one horn into the other, the goat rams the fence where the highway blooms her flags and dark breath all night pumps the sky lifting lungs like balloons. Don’t you want to eat the dirt handfuls at a time, hear the clamor of the horn on metal, it’s that goat again, the wind breaking stalks, the beginning.
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