Raymond Farr

What Is Marcel Doing Now?

Marcel opens the window 
& wants to call it a day 

This day will exist only on a page for him
He is bouncing a ball off of the ceiling

Driving his neighbors insane with the sound
Marcel then opens Novel Pictorial Noise—

A stiff puppet he reads to the world!
His voice is a kiss on the soft lobes 

Of its ears—a flamingo at dusk 
In the corner of the room

This is stuff you can’t make up, he says, 
Or it would seem unreal!

                    & once again 
The dark world appears blameless!

So many white enamel doors
Shoved back with small hands

But nobody enters 
& Marcel says as a child he had very bad thoughts 

But he told no one about them 
& he slept like a burning mattress 

Because of them 
& so we find him dead & staring at a wall

& another yellow morning has sprouted feet!
                        & the baby cries: Dada!
 
& wonders—do I exist?
Or am I only dreaming now?

Between the Lines of an Old Pilgrim Hymnal

These little lizard clones in baby cages crying
That’s what life was—post-Gaga hugs & pink kisses

All Mannerist depiction like a blurry cloud passing
& that time we all hung out & yr friends were like Now! David! Now!

& Now! was a season of giving & giving up & someone sd
The forthright blow job of a man was bringing in the sheaves

& I sd I must leave you here paraphrased like something else
& you were a good rock thrown into the missing 8 million

& because every sentence we spoke was a Remington typewriter
We drove emotion home by the sublime erotic action of its keys

& that somehow I was attracted to you because of this
& huddled out on Tronk Street we continued to listen to occult lyrics

A car passing was a furtive plastic paper sound & this head-
Banger girl was driving us to distraction—Radiation, she sd,

Was bad for the music business, it was killing Americans, it was
Something no human should fuck with! But she never stopped

Glowing—her body painted snugly into the 20th C.
Mosh pit of an electric green dress The mode was that

Of a contemporary line It was fucking consume or fucking
Perish as far as The Ramones were concerned!

A Boarder in a Water-Damaged Room on Calvin Street Is Witness

1.
A tiger is whipping its prey around in the snow on the TV & the sisters gather to watch in silence. It’s where the crazy cow girl on my belt buckle becomes the girl on fire every Saturday & we fall asleep in a room sanitized by the nuns. It’s where we scream for the lanterns to be turned back on.

2.
Eating dope Vichyssoise Glacée under a vanilla scoop of rain drop cakes I dream we bar-b-cue with the sisters in July. The convent is on a hill overlooking the train tracks where freight is a ghost that still moves when we do. Nothing up our sleeves—it is another summer solstice & the nuns move about like overdressed shadows in the garden.

3.
I feel like Holofernes breaking into flames just walking past the convent door. I am roasting in sullen August, a boarder in a water-damaged room on Calvin Street. Someone’s been coercing a blind man on my street, shooting up to the sky in narrow shoes. The sisters only yell out a window for quiet. I call this the body being strangled by a prayer.

4.
The blind man’s dog is lost in the mindless elevator of dreams—in the twin Gore Vidals of its eyes. & when the blind man turns up dead on a Tuesday it’s like it was prophesied—the dog comes around, hungry, looking for the blind man. Then he’s under the convent fence. The nuns scurry around laughing, shooing away the dog who’s gotten loose in an upstairs room. Clean habits, I imagine, hang like suits of dust in the nuns’ closets, in the almost perfect air.

5.
& scribbling lyrics down in her free moments, a young nun douses candles in the chapel, replaces the old wax with new—a saint the city only now endures. The road outside rumbles underneath the tires of a passing truck & the young nun is oblivious & sits in the quiet chapel humming, tapping both of her apostate feet.

6.
The sofa in the convent foyer is small as a cove. I notice someone has crushed an unlovable spider before sitting down on it & rubbed all its juices into the worn fabric, a thousand tender arachnid spasms ricochet like pleas into space. I am waiting for word from Mother Superior. My business is my own. In this empty shell, in these web-like entreaties, it occurs to me, we live our lives. But the sun today has claws & somehow we oppose the world—welcome chickadees!

Raymond Farr is author of Ecstatic/.of facts (Otoliths 2011), & Writing What For? across the Mourning Sky (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012), sic transit—“g” (Blue & Yellow Dog 2012, 2016), Poetry in the Age of Zero Grav (Blue & Yellow Dog 2015) & 2 e-chapbooks, Eating the Word NOISE! (White Knuckle Chaps 2015), & A Journey of Haphazard Miles (ALT POETICS 2016). Raymond is editor of Blue & Yellow Dog, now archived at http://blueyellowdog.weebly.com & publisher/editor of a new poetry blog The Helios Mss at theheliosmss.blogspot.com.
 
 
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