Raymond Farr


Investigating the Future Tense on a Road Trip to Clearwater

I I have a bucket brimming with future tense. & in me stars. I am swinging on over to densely packed fields. Including Io. The brightest of these shall become the poet Rumi. & Goofy is Rumi in shed instance after shed instance. Falling crepuscular hands from stars. Dormant fog-bound car & stop watch to beat a record time. It all plays out on some highway home. Buzzed on future tense. & all the way back we seem one thing alien to the world speeding around us. II The buildings shall become familiar at the outskirts of Clearwater—an ocean sandwich, believing might makes right, spirals out across windswept beaches. The lunar rover’s spiky toes…what is there to dig into but sand & wind? Our long hard days & nights shudder while half asleep in the details of a chance methodology, suddenly arrived at, tattooed on the hours’ scars, softer than sexual breath. & us bathing our eyes in the soft gels of dusk. Each hour, softer than eyes, is our waking’s upheaval as imagined by PHiSH. The logger trucks heat past us, climbing a time zone at the death knell of noon. & then some. Hauling off the pines one by one. Losing us in dreamscapes while cars pass on either side. Are we a single character in a play? The art of the stunning bozos? Acting the “self” while comedy gets busy fucking tragedy en route? We are overwhelmed. & if so. This face we must face is a broken handle that opened a smile on some blue Sunday morning coming on. III Keyless entry while trees doze in the shadow of billboards. I shall be snoozing in Barthe’s monologue on the death of the motor court: MC (motor court) plus D (death) equals CC (cruise control). Something like a fraud controls our schnitzel, darling. We smile on a stack of Hallmark greeting cards, swearing we hadn’t & never would only in America. IV Our time line of invisible ghosts, marching in tandem, murmur & babble, while larking about, conspirators of the page without sun or rain. Cohorts of a document, without threat or promise of sun or rain, are cutting up & pasting Idaho potato chips when we arrive. When we arrive you are holding up a black & silver DVD. Our lips such a monkey of twelve beautiful cars on a car lot in Salem. & so much indebted to the songs we hear dying in the spectacle of tired road beds. & wrong turns getting us lost. All this stuff I am writing, careening, gets in the way of our getting ourselves past this. It requires inflexion, a certain point to recall our end game’s existence. Our end game’s existence has passed us, undeclared. V The next sentence appears wrong on yr screen. A voyage on yr monitor. But please, Madame, I am venting vehemently. Something terribly scarred. Such as momma’s little iris posted on line. The number of our face muscles laughing yawning straight or crinkled up wryly. Our was is our perfect ici seems weird syntactically. We said this to someone, stopping mid-route to write on a menu while opening conundrums. Only half talking to the other. Our subject a pupil hurried to climax. Our fins, once blue & velvet, are now gobbled up by a lack of particulars. VI We have nice dancing hearts in our feet. Yes love, we do. Yr sister, Io, spins & drops money on the car hood. In motion twisting metallic sunlight highway vision. She is bent in wavy hallucinated air. A shimmer of parking lot. A voice arriving at a stoppage in time becomes her point of no return. Or will have by the time we arrive & all out of context. VII This file is corrupt. This charade is over my dead body of knowledge. I contain a god-hacking super virus. Locked in my otoliths are comic echoes barreling down, 300 horse power on a pin that drops. VIII SUPER VIRUS KILLER32 has detected a worm. What shall I do? IX If I delete what I’ve written off tilting at windmills…the world simply ends. Crashing into darkness of the office recycling bin. This lunacy has features— shredded, compact. X This must be act one, scene one of my inner life exposed by my fictional life on the road. I have no name in the bootleg music MTV exposé but call myself Tillie not Tillie the time telling moose. Not Tillie the broken hearted gas pedaler. My alias is a stun gun label making device. I watch a lot of Seinfeld on my iPod. I want to make a run for it. What about our dream strikes you as post-human? Who are we to meet here? After all, our engine expands & contracts as any wild animal that is a normal engine would. XI According to the reference file in my GPS electronic mapping system, this place was purchased wholesale. & rerun like a movie starring bananas & cream cheese. & Bing cherries, sticky in our brakes, are squealing on our friends, ratting out poets, flarfists, & gnoets sans Io & her money drop aesthetics. Sans the tilapia I fell in love with at lunch. Sans the meat of the issue being—the next possible outcome hitching with a thumb.

another poem by Raymond Farr

 
 
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