Working Notes:
The films Rope, Compulsion and Swoon all hover in the vicinity of this poem. All three films are versions of the Leopold and Loeb story. H. L. Mencken was their lawyer -- his transcripts of the trial also hover. What is the nature of the unthinkable? of crime? Sacrifice, still the most erotic act and still never enough. To say anything is to say too much. To do anything too. To write anything too. Murder and everything standing in for something else.
THE 12th of NEVER Fibula Fabula Fable
"My parents never gave me anything," he said.
"That's not true," replied the fairy God Mother and
handed him a jeweled ashtray with ashes in it.
whose heads and hands are covered in dark socks
left at an intersection
in a stroller
(in a nest -- one falls
through the firescape)
directions:
return secretly
walk them every day
as if one person is the whole audience sentence
then sudden music stoppage
stampede silence
bellowing cattle
clattering hooves
fists landing grunting breathing
in stealth or suspense
an absolute musical lapse
the page of screen turns
walk the letters across the screen -- pull them
or you can leave all the cards where they have fallen -- littering the new year -- leave them there and let them melt rot
He took the lens out of his mouth
take the glass off your tongue
and put it on the finger of his him
betroth
downshore a horselike head was finally surfacing from the marsh. I saw the stripes that show what hope is like
and so my actions inaudible to me
1 May Dream: having agreed to a carefully planned and plotted murder- means: she will have a child.
-- From The Dreambook of the Teflon Twins Tableau
Put a sheet of film in the Underwood
close ups type:
FINAL WORD OF WARNING
I'M NOT A JEW
I'll kidnap my brother and collect ransom from my father
--My kind of incest: Our progeny --child body
Type:
I AM LITTLE
MY HEART IS SAD
Recite: Tableau
I dreamt of pharaohs and slaves
the word masturbation
taken into a ship
the purchased
word a slave
Three Choices
First of all I would set him free
and move the tatoo on his thigh to his chest
"want a ride home?" Fibula Fabula Fable
Let the letterbox hold the windshield
Let the hole hold the body
Let the kiss over the burial suffice
until later
A Passover story
neck razor and evidence
enthralled audience
either an amateur or a sadist
some were struck so hard
they were almost driven through the paper
others were struck almost tentatively
revolving
dinner table Laughter Opera
burned the clothing read by the light of the shoes
on a bridge
to obliterate pain by adding to it
let's go
to the scene of the find
Get a stenographer
Be my slave
angel face master mind
Alienist face of a crushed hat
partly from the pillow partly from his own body
a smell to die for
blood from the bird's breast or
brush with the head of Christ?
2 May Dream despondent
correspondent
duplex
slate
All escapes in the world
fell through
the firescape
-- From The Dreambook of the Teflon Twins The Questioning Room
One step behind the curtain please
MAGNIFIED AND SANCTIFIED
photo op
Why wind him in a sheet?
Why turn him into an hourglass?
travelling without permission
eyes willed to the eyebank
and succesfully transferred
orgy of publicity my enemy
dying to tell to
C.O.D. on the Kontiki out to sea
where the horizon divulges
its propensity for deep piracy
and coughs up another
disarranged beyond recognition
TYPE: PORTRAYAL in a bottle
the 12th before the 1st
three wishes locked in trench mouth BIO: Susan Gevirtz lives in San Francisco. Her books include Narrative's
Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson, Peter Lang,
1996; PROSTHESIS : : CAESAREA, Potes and Poets, 1994; Taken Place,
Reality Street, 1993; Linen minus, Avenue B, 1992; Domino: point
of entry, Leave Books, 1992. Black Box Cutaway is just out from
Kelsey Street.