Raymond Farr

Look Out Toboggan Here Comes Persephone in Her Boxing Gear

They call Persephone Persephone’s-shadow run-ning-a-bath. They call her “fire crotch” & leave her to her own devices. Someone requests a Daniel Boone story. She cuts them off short and leaves them to die at the Alamo no one’s supposed to really know about. All the boys love how she melts away stress & her many positions are reason for fanfare. But she is just another woman excited by her work. They call her work Downward-Facing-Dog & her style of writing they just call it Oreo-Cookies-&-Milk-After-Lunch. & she is the prize that everyone seeks & no one takes home. What is the difference between cutting & pasting & just taking a look at the shop keeper’s home page? She vacations in the New Hebrides where something is always amiss in the pockets of Little Roy Akins, whose tagging along, holding her iPod. She hopes to video the tall cliffs looming above the quaint & dangerous banana boat seas, approaching Absolute Zero with caution, a glob of SPF 60 on her face. Her nose out of joint, she orders a clam shack to bow before entering. For tourism sucks down in the tropics. Or wherever the hell it is that she’s landed on this map. Little Roy’s skeleton makes music out of keys. & while he sings, the question of shop windows, to undergo the interrogation of shop windows, the exigency of shop windows cuts him the deal he so desired to cut. But Flora spots Munich licking its wounds, its one minor flaw, keeps time on a sea gull. But why does Flora’s dribble glass never dribble like momma’s glass did? & why do they call her macaroni of the Côte d’Azur? A dial tone she’s never realized perpetuates a ghost: This is Budapest and cookie dough enough for the entire 6th floor. A building as tall as the name on the door. The entire kabuki theater is spell bound twice ago & never rewound. While chewing Persephone’s mythic enchilada, her eyes are chimichongas filling the absence of scatological baking pans. She grips Medusa by her hair extensions’ tips. (A little too real for Cassandra’s taste.) Her gift is her lampooning. The ability to initiate a drum roll in posthypnotic docu-dramas starring Fi-Fi Ontology, poolside with the locals. But never a decent retrofit. Neither does she draw it full size. But it is a new world, a new look for a new you. She calls herself “you” now, goes out on a limb overlooking the graveyard. Her cat is a phenom driving a Hyundai on Hwy 200. & after 3 crashes, she splashes/not vertical. A person referring to a person in second person but not the self. Who then? & all the while something blue & ivory as a Papa John’s pizza counts backwards like the blind knife of a genius calculating the pi of pizza pi in reverse, using all the ingredients an artist could wish for: black olives, red onions, green peppers, blue cheese, Canadian bacon, shitake mushrooms. For the radius of a circle makes a pizza a pizza. & I heart et al: & aka: escapism expands keeping life nerf-y, running wild on the tarmac. A bloody English bloody pudding seeks bi-curious bi-girl willing to participate in S&M games & recite classical Greek poetry, accented in the original Greek, for a large yet intimate audience and live video feed. What Persephone precipitates is a lack of scale. Flamingos go straight to her head. She has to be told again & again: no peeking thru the camera lens or these birds go extinct. These Greeks, she observes, are no comedy either. They love a good bird’s nest where a tragedy will do. She’s advertised her organs. But what of esteem? The mad jackal at midnight roaming the kitchen? Who is stirring the CHORUS into a frenzy of Russian roulette or Ballet Russe if not the children of the Russian Revolution starring in a film directed by Warren Beatty with Sam Elliot as Carolina Jones, the marriage guru who speaks only Russian in the life boat of the grand ball room? He is the essence of a quote by poet, Tan Lin: the Charles River of poets (& insane, which proves he’s just a bit saner than the Rumpole of the Bailey. Or The Fixx on tour in skinny minibuses raiding organs for a skin bank. His Bugs Bunny progeny, belabored by Styx & Jagger of The Stones, is trapped in the labyrinth with Jorge Luis Borges): and not much later (11:52), out pops my pencil. My body is warmish. I feel stale. I have lost my job but not my teeth because it is Thursday. For every volume that falls off Cassandra’s shelf of a mind, Persephone commiserates. Her radar full bloom on the trade winds of cliché-looking pederasts is nothing but blip blip blip echoing thru halls like the haunting breathing of a ghost high on the products of the mercantile system. & doing business, day in & day out, she holds her first born son like the football of an accolade.

 
 
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