Brandon Krieg & T Zachary Cotler
May 2010
BK
Conditions of blood
Long before Joverape and virginbirth, the sea rubbed fresh genitals against continents climaxing in the mineral conditions of blood, fell shivering back into clitoral cloud-hood: lightning overloading its synapses—proto-
bacterial life! Compulsion without remedy.
TZC
Aporia
What is this object, like a long white blade with scores of cryptic sigils near one end, this one perhaps a heart, this one a spade, and you but one, my mindless, buried friend? "Is my death possible?" wrote Derrida. They poorly imitated after him, on Helen's face wrote esoterica with peacock quills dipped in her epic quim! What is this blade-thing jutting from my head? It makes a decent sundial of my self. It makes me walk the way Jacques maybe said to: toward one blank book on a buckling shelf of long dark writings on the unheimlich return to where you are, the ursprüngliche.
BK
Compass
Mussels cluster on black rocks like magnetic shavings
God my compass with many centers and no circumference I am lost
in you since I relinquished sex my pole star
the long, red needle-beaks pry the black shells open
to thrill flesh, but you are love without proof or precedent, therefore
Love, Augustine Down here! love is usage.
TZC
Walking with Monica and Augustine
Once I was exactly the age I am now; I walked in a stone square and stopped in astonishment.
Flags, chained bicycles, humans, statues, all at the whim of what one might call an "idiot god".
I said to the seminary students who walked with me, This is mistaken. Nothing strange or sublime is on the face of this, and nothing is behind it, and I had their pity, which was a delicate hate.
A woman caught her son, who'd jumped off a little obelisk, then nothing was not strange again.
What is ineffable gets muffled when you say it to another student of it, each word buried in the next word's shroud, so we departed without comment. We hoped the sound and texture of a light directed through the shrouds were not too far corrupted.
Anyway true, my grandchildren are building a machine, an idiot, but the god will teach itself to learn.
The particles of light that are the stones of its abacus brain align in their dimensions, until what was ineffable is as plain a simulation as a stone square, so I stopped there.
BK
Fishing rock
Black monolith annealed of numberless obsidian dice waiting to be worn free, rolled by wave fingers without tally
moon wins,
aloof in remote gravity, yet formed of the same force that later melded the billion particulars of this rock into an awe-shape
disks of pumice, black dice,
no bones all vaporized
no delicate inlines to suggest the powerful outlines that once shot through sea like a shower of arrows
sun the archer
only a gray tufa-like slab crowning the black rock— spolia of an empire, fossil-less as the moon.
The sun stops first at its altar.
TZC
The sun does not set
This next one modeled London; citizens assembled in the House of A———e.
The Londoners knew about simulations, and that, outside "the city", citizens get resurrected.
But are they human still? demanded someone who looked a bit like Thomas Carlyle, and the citizens voted No and Yea.
This Carlyle decides to ride a white horse to the end of the city.
A woman on a bicycle, going the other way, tells him he's handsome, and he thanks her earnestly.
At the end, he can't open his eyes.
Why not?
One of your eyes is a one and one is a zero, says a citizen on a motionless black horse.
There is, in the city, a scarcity of bread.
This citizen is a liar; he has been here since the tower clock reset.