Raymond Farr


The Houseboy Interactions

I rebuke the houseboy intermittently—“Lose the attitude. This is a time machine not yr sexual playground.” I catch him surfing the frozen Atlantic tip of anti-historical retro hallucinations of history. I warn him about the end of the end of history then go invest in paper angels. Some ominous bird is rearing up in my rear view mirror. The time is near. Xmas a cloud. & Sheila writes odes about crossing the tracks mounded in snow. About groping the houseboy. Her subject’s her object—the spitting image of some Billy Idol/Ward Cleaver dude. The exact likeness of his/her handsome less digital version of self painted on. Polished like armor in the nutshell of a maelstrom. The mushroom of chaos disguised as a dream. Or is it post-history (s)he resembles? My neighbor’s pet rock? *** Beyond the all-possible realms of a foot in a poem, I am 12 to infinity. I am one dose of the houseboy’s apprehensiveness. I spank the opossum at 10:52am. At 10:59 the apocalypse. I discipline the clocks. I rule the discarded tribes: 11:00 am. At 2:17 a roving band of elitist houseboys…It is 9:36. What is the meaning (right now, at this moment) of the ecstatic sainthood of post-history? As I animate the ghoul, his peripatetic glands, stuffed inside my ego, make me the stuff of free association. My banana split trademark is a fraction of else where. I am singing a sentence—“If time is a kiln I’ll heat my at.” *** The houseboy enters. He is gingerly holding a shark-mangled surfboard. His perky blonde gal pal is a rope trick finale he never quite learned how to perform. A subject (not object?) at a curbside diner, she stretches out on hapless dunes. On the beach side of Hwy A-1-A. Near Cocoa Beach. He is looking at—DISCONTINUED in great steaming Ron Jon shoes of shark relief. His feet hit the street. He is traveling. He is walking the moon walk here on earth. While out of his mind tumbles the ocean. Is this the end of facticity? The end of the end of history? *** In the houseboy’s version of Kurosawa’s 7 Samurai, the cheerleaders suffer autonomy. First as a book then as a fatuous but spectacular post-history. FYI in Brooklyn it’s Some Like It Hot—blackguards set chattel to chattel song. Dispossessing STONE FIGURE OF VIRGIN SNOW WHITE. No siphon sirloin bricks-in the birch city of mud & speculation. But Jackson Pollock zooooommmmms thru town, arriving dot by dot, splash of lilac by splash of lilac. He has drawn you a map. Now explode onto paper. Or seal yrself up. Chained to a bell jar & sink unperturbed. The river is powder. You never know how. You wander up then down Channel 29 to the droll hands & blunt eyes of the 21st Century. The end of something near & dear is imminent. The end of existence exists. The demise of the historical… The end of a sidewalk on dusky, visceral Wakulla Ave… vibrate at intervals. I mean the empty metaphor for a cul-de-sac. Fading in & out. Blue & auburn in paroxysms of vivid autumnal hallucinations. I mean the next best thing to breathing full time. I mean our repast is lyric. A banjo is playing. I mean a porcelain face. Half mask. Half cloud. So sweet. So clean. It breaks all our hearts. I mean the soul-less sweet illusion of eternity speaks. *** & when he denied us what he denied us, we could feel the goat burning. Exposed on its corporeal side all over the houseboy’s freshly washed slacks. I mean culture. Or the version of history I find in a cereal box. I find apathy despicable. I rewrite The Satanic Verses. I roll out my message board. I roll down the blinds. I mean I drop like an A-bomb into yr hands. & like a child that is an orchid I step out of the dark. & into yr expression—“Hold me,” you plead. I mean you beg me—“Make me yr guitar!” & thus it is we are thwarted by irony. We surrender to the houseboy. Reading his pages we get small & then smaller still. We crave our ALPO SNAK TREATS in the TOO GREEN GARDEN that signifies death. The death all around us. The death we bring with us. That signifies validity. *** In some exotic dragonfly enclosure, we poach game for our sustenance. Buzzing a tune of little flaming hoops for eyes we become buoyant in the boiling primordial soup of post-history. You remember the primordial, right? Nothing but trauma? The end of the end of history burning our feet? We banish the present tense (as if we could) in order to banish the primordial. Secure in our future. Strangled by the past. The end of the end of poetry same as it ever was. & so the houseboy writes behemoth songs. His treble on “ON.” & so it comes to pass. We articulate a void. Taking aim at ourselves. The houseboy a priest now. & the sky…So miserly a death!

Another Poem by Raymond Farr

 
 
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