Secret History

“...spacewalk through neurons
to gawk at algebra.”
Procopius was a Byzantine writer who lived during the reign of the Emperor Justinian and
his consort, the Empress Theodora. Procopius wasn’t a fan—The Secret History was his
unauthorized exposé on the abuses of the Justinian court. With such titles as, “How Justinian
Killed a Trillion People,” and “How Theodora, Most Depraved of All Courtesans, Won His
Love,” and best of all, “Proving That Justinian and Theodora Were Actually Fiends in Human
Form,” Procopius painted phantasmagorical newsbites of excess. In that last tale he suggests that
the Emperor is a vampire and his head can become separated from his body and fly around,
terrorizing advisors.
If we rob the liquor store we could be in Tijuana by dawn. If we hit
the Senator’s mansion we could pawn his Picasso for a fortune and,
with his widow’s credit cards, buy a cottage on the ocean.
Hugging the hegemony with a kung-fu grip, casting fuckword after
fuckword in subdivisions crammed with Catholics and kitty cats, she
suddenly died of her resumé.
She was neatly wrapped in a pawn store tarp.
They dropped me in a candy cane containment grid. I was drinking
wine from styrofoam cups in a small, black room where you can kiss
God’s two enormous eyes—concave spaces hollowed out of cardboard,
a place to shake the rain by crashing in cars.
That was yesterday and yesterday, ash fell on Pompeii.
The sun bleeds like a flashlight in the mouth.
Wotan
June 28, 1914
Wotan flings his spear
to Earth.
Not to call down a meteor and label it a sign, I came home from a long
day in which I pissed my pants, but told everyone I was sick, to hear
my sixty-year-old neighbor in the apartment next door masturbate
to orgasm. I mean bully for her, but somehow that wasn’t the omen
I was looking for.
I was expecting something more “biblical,” something out of one of
the smaller books wherein I complete all the side quests, unlock all the
puzzles, keep Jesus from being tortured by pressing “X,” and get the
good ending—the one with the UFO.
“...find a hidden ampoule in a human-sized rabbit’s carcass and then take
the subway tracks to the hidden temple to find the head demon.”
All I got is this lousy typewriter to brain him! If I could say only one
true thing in this world—if St. Peter, himself, managed to write me
a note for the Company Store, pigs flew in places other than on Pink
Floyd albums, and I cut the bolts that kept Wally World closed, I would
draw upon the rich, indomitable strength my potato-stuffed ancestors
possessed and tell you, “Baby, I wanna take a bite outta that butt.”
Back when I kept my plutonium notebooks, I was loneliness stoned,
drinking to disown my bones every morning during the hour when
the Polar bears woke up from their comics and unhinged their sore
jaws for shovels full of diamonds.
I can hold a million books and songs in this gray meatball of a brain.
It started out as a patch of fungus growing on a damp clump of clothes
and then became a hotel with a million elevators between galaxies
where angels make essays soft as sinews snapping.
I’ve been up all night reciting poems in fluorescent dorms, spreading
ink on Victorian type to tiptoe three streets behind the police.
The overpass—dawn—pockets bulging with pantry-store sinus
caplets and cigarettes with the President’s football in my hand. I hear
cicadas trapped behind a stove beating against metal pipe, brick, and
the cop who ate his gun to whispers in the wall.
My throat burns, the paper’s a day late, For Rent signs go up go
down, and my stomach spasms like a bird dancing in a computer. It
took a thousand years to crawl from one end of town to the other and
send back—
STOP
IN SE A STOP
TAKE E ARS OFF
THROW THEM
Like an Eagle Scout with a single badge to go, he helps the Queen
Mother across the plains, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, just to
find she’s an arachnid in disguise and he’s the main course—“Baked
American” with walnuts.
This conspiracy would’ve been discovered, eventually, because of
Reagan’s break with the old gods. Textbooks ignore Nixon’s fall and
his Romantic libretto—skip the first act straight to the intermission.
Who wants to stage the years that arouse a ravenous horde?
The Spiders puked up in divine displeasure, desecrated State
Sarcophagi with deliberate overtones for America, conducted their
atonal symphonies of salt in all the ancient, primordial modes—
twitchin’ in a good ol’ well fucked and sucked mad.
It’s 10:14 AM on a Tuesday and the stores are already sick. 20,000
soiled overcoats have no means to assemble a king’s ransom. Piled
upon one another, like raven’s wings, they dreamt of the opera house
where, dangling from a chandelier, Father Christmas constellates
with his tommy gun.
“I have him close to my heart when I go shopping.”
Isaac Newton,
part-time warlock,
dressed as a man
from Porlock. Pascal
who was rarely paschal,
got the flu
alone in his room.
Georg Cantor had an affinity
for getting lost in infinity.
Bertie Russell’s logical muscles
made one and one
make two.
If I had a ladder, some tiny lumber, and a space-age holster for my
hammer I would build a tiny, topsy-turvy house on top of the flag for
all the Bizarro people sending their LOLcats to Congress.
An ecstasy of fumblin’
because pregnancy’s American
as football.
Heavy Portuguese Men-O-War in drab lab coats hover outside the
window taking notes on the side effects of our dreamlessness. Next
to me are your hightops, red lace bra, and a marked deck of cards. I
thought you were a puzzle I had to solve and if I did the elevator would
work and I’m on to the next level up ladders, sneaking past fifty zombie
Siberian Huskies to get a hairpin to pick a lock on the other side of the
town a million miles from the internet where you can hear celestial
choirs of charcoal whales spin their weird pentatonic yarns.
The President’s daughter says she’s on the dark side,
close to the frozen borderline. “You’re drunk.
Enjoy it.” The playboy smiles and settles back
into an amphibian stare. “You’re not sick.
This is how you’re supposed to feel.”
Her green eyes listen to the music. “I’m going
to go to the washroom- put some water on my face.”
The President’s daughter crashes
upon a postcard of the mountain’s shadow
under the coattails of a murder of crows,
and their light bleeding intestine paragraphs,
their duct tape flashbacks.
“Molly, she come out? Are there people back there?”
The Detail rushes in checks every stall himself.
Molly doesn’t respond; he notices an exit.
He keeps asking Molly if she came out back.
Molly still doesn’t respond. He runs through the alley
and there’s Molly’s body in a pool of blood—
the map of the world.
“Bookbag’s been taken. I repeat:
She’s been taken.”
I ran into a man in Chinatown, looking as lonely as an unemployed
astronaut, hocking a wallet of baseball cards door-to-door. Shadows,
stapled to sticks and fastened to locomotives, passed briefly in and
out of comics.
The Gingerbread Men had ransacked his closet for bags of flour and
grandfather clocks, tossed couture from Istanbul upon a platform till
it groaned from under so many halter tops.
And they only left him two things—a photocopied picture of him
and his lover embracing a frozen ATM with a box of bulbs underneath
their arms and a guitar to murder an Opera wafting over purple
neighborhoods.
The Lord said, “When you die, I’ll set you up with a Prius in the
sky and a glove box stuffed with good leads for jobs in the New
Jerusalem. Excellent pay writing scrolls for the infidels or stanzas for
the Barbarians at the Skatepark of whom the banks are invested in
making Easter eggs of suffering.”
But, instead, he stole the moon’s clockwork, stuffed it in a tube sock,
and then sold it to children flashlight shivering in the vampire forest.
Reading “Society of the Spectacle” by Guy Debord and I’m bored,
flopped on a bus stop mouth of Notre Dame. David Hellafied Gangsta
Lean accelerandos his mint-green Plymouth into the Arc d’Triomphe
with a such clatter that St. Joan herself, a raspberry danish covered in
the Spiders from Mars, sprang from her pallet to peep the matter.
“Orlando Furioso, TUNE-IN-TOKYO to the tempestuous nipples of
Nancy Pelosi in order catch the latest gossip ‘bout our crafty Ulysses
lashed to the mast, he who plugged his ears with dandelions to drown
out the siren’s blast.”
I’m known to be a heap of beaks and hearts and other inedible things
wrapped in a baroque napkin ring, a Komodo dragon in a Member’s
Only jacket packing a polygon piece taking pot shots at Essenes in
the Canyon of the Crescent Moon. I am the earthborn carrier of an
exquisite virus to rake a census. “When you kicked, we sent you to the
Internet. No man has ever returned ‘alive’ from there.”
I’m not here to make the dudes go “cool,” I’m here to make the ladies
say “yeah!” Hell! I’ve been trying to hitch a ride on a lunar whale and
get “sophisticated” with pixels in the shape of a rat’s tail and challenge
the smoke wizard with a soup spoon! I’ve hid out long enough. I penned
elegant elegies. I bore pseudo-Corinthian pillars with their fake grape
leaves and laurel scumbags. I violated snitch capillaries on petty
parole offenses to glean the songs you’d croon when you bum smokes,
drunk and read books with delirious typography on Caesar Augustus.
Who, by the by, siphoned Odin’s piehole for rune juices that double
dribble future tenses and then scorched it with the kit n’ kaboodle of
the Sybilline prophecies!
Wesley Snipe me? Shi-at, that’s less than likely.
Haven’t you ever noticed that on most crime procedurals these days they
have a gimmick in solving their cases? For example, Numb3rs has math,
Lie to Me has facial lie-recognition, Profiler puts herself in the mind of the
killer, Dexter uses a sociopath’s intuition, Bones uses skeletons, CSI says that
forensics trumps legwork, and Law & Order says detective work is what gets
the job done, etc.
And on each of these shows, it’s either their way or the highway—every
other method of crime fighting is ineffectual within the particular world of
the show—the lawyers and detectives on CSI are either corrupt or slow, the
FBI agents on Numb3rs always come up against a wall until some theorem
nabs the bad guy, Dexter can be a vigilante because the police department is
hopelessly bureaucratic.
What would happen if these protagonists combined their unique talents and
formed an unstoppable primetime interpol?
In the meanwhile, we could be that unstoppable interpol!
To stop, collaborate, and listen
doctorkobra @ gmail.com
or visit his lab at
doctorkobra.com
I have a beard, but you cannot see it here.