I eat the lips of lessened fools
peel the skin back, fleshy folds
tug the scratchy flaky surface
pink in sunlight: lippy flowers
but flaky peeling: decay devours
rip the shredded pink skin surface
move flesh and fabric flowing folds
the skin is a hoax; all men are fools.

fabric is a
covering
for all your lies
I rip your lips
I scratch your flesh
I ripping lippy flowers deflower budding flesh
liplightsunfleshfoolfold
lightlustfleshfarce
fool's gold.












Samuel paced the length of the shoreline, lost in thought, lost in current, in psychoanimation. Facial features paced back and forth across their home turf as he ruminated about, as usual, the past, feeling far more than thinking, feeling far more than anything at all. He noticed a group of geese plodding along. The geese looked lost, confused. They startled as the towtruck that was behind the largest of the three dunes on the right came into view and slowly waded its way into the water, disappearing into the surf. As the towtruck went under, Samuel noticed something about himself:

Something wasn't real.

He was, yes, on a beach. A beach which is burning up. He has discovered the sky. Immense and cloudless sky. He has curtailed his feelings. The geese look puzzled.

Why are the geese here?

Looking around himself for perhaps the first time, Samuel noticed a large beer mug lying in the sand six feet to his left. He plodded over to it, reached down, and picked it up. It was a large, earthenware affair, with, inscribed on its clay surface, violins and violas, cellos and basses. Samuel made a mental connection

but he disconnected
as he noticed, within the mug's interior,
the figures of two three-inch tall
PEOPLE.

A man, old, or rather, the image of a man--flickering and transparent as
if some holographic
help me obi wan kenobi you're my
image, and a woman, perhaps not an image, but certainly, definitely, not
Real?

"Who....?" Samuel began, or thought he began--his words were inaudible as
the wind picked up its before-now inaudible libretto. And it could get
those for it is.
These are the days my friends
"Kathy Acker" "John Cage"
Samuel looked scrutinizingly at the figures. He knew what John Cage
looked like,
like this like everything but most of all like this. Yes. Kathy Acker,
not familiar--an idealiste, territory unknown. A thinker, a writer?
Perhaps. Yes.

"What....?"

Acker stated "We are facsimiles reproduced from originals, ripped from the
fabric of time and placed in this frame, which is itself..."
"No, I mean, why? Why are you in a beer mug? On this deserted shore?"
"We are here because you are here, in your frame---but you are really not
here. You are somewhere else."
"No," reassured Samuel, "I am here."
Cage crackled as if broadcast from some ancient AM radio deployed inside
a steel bucket. "You are a recording rather than a happening."
"A what?"
"A recording. The past is a. You are therefore a. Recording."
"Yes, but..."
"You are playing yourself back over and over again. There is no time
exterior to any one of us. Come outside your time frame."
Acker chimed in "If you listen to me, if when you hear me, the first time
in the spring time, hear me sing, and you have money a lot of money for
you in your pocket when you hear me in the spring, you will be rich all
year any year, but if you hear me and you have gone out with no money
jingling in your pocket when you hear me singing then you will be poor
all year, poor."
"But what is money," Samuel said, "but a useless social game, essential
for survival in our current system of social regulation--although many
take it for not an aid in playing the game of life but the framework for
the game itself."
"Yes, but YOU are playing that game and YOU are having trouble
discerning," added Cage.
"How do you know?" answered I, for I might be Samuel and any Samuel might
be me but
for now
Samuel is on a beach.
talking.;
"How do you know me. Aren't you dead? How are you here?"
"I am no longer in this time frame--I am not here."
"Well, what about you, Ms. Acker, are you here?"
"Yes. Oh Yes."
"Here and now?"
"Yes."
"Well, how much do you know about my history and my current condition?"
"I know you are
you are words.
These words are frail, smart, inept, goodwilled, annoying,
these words make up
the entirety
of what is you. These words and the barriers they impose. These
ruled barriers along which the words run, march, halt, walk, stumble, and,
at doubtful points, stumble up again in comparative safety, and then fall
into place as a shimmering and incomplete yet fully descriptive and
lifelike You."

"I am not words; I am a brutally transfixed material object locked in
social spheres that are brutally unmaterial. I live for detransfixation."

"I have it," stated Cage.

"Yes," added Acker, "but..."

At this point a huge roar filled the air, or at least something triggered
the sound mechanism in Samuel's brain to imagine a huge roar, and both
Kathy Acker and John Cage blinked out of existence, leaving Samuel
standing on the beach holding the earthen mug, which now held two mounds
of Red Algae (Porphyra) which shimmered and twitched but did not speak,
and cowering from the great and mighty roar. In ten seconds the roar
subsided. Across the sky, which had changed from the blue clouded norm to
a dark blue, cloudless blank, there appeared, in huge green letters

CA%60074 ERROR IN DISK ACCESS /TQ/ACKER/DETRANS/PROB File Not Found

The letters remained transfixed for a minute or two and then subsided as
the sky faded back into sky and Samuel faded back into himself.

The tow truck appeared in the waves, wading its way back onto the shore.
It stopped right in front of Samuel.
He blinked. He walked over to the truck.
He placed the beer mug on the hood of the truck, thought about this for a
second, and walked away.

The geese looked puzzled as they hopped out of his way.

Geese?






"Trench in your skull"



Why you have that lump in your throat:

Did you ever think about that dream you had about the matrix surrounding
your skull you know the one
4.5cm by 4.75cm rectanguloid curving
yet rigid and your head
dreaming with the night vibrating (you can tell the temperature by the
vibration of the night because everything moves sideways through time)
and my eyes vibrating and your life a vibration a little tad too thick
to see through? If you ever thought about these things then you will know
why you have that lump in your throat, your poor sandpaper throat

your gizzard
your throat when you raise your hand when you call attention to yourself
when you say THIS IS WHAT I THINK INDEPENDENT OF THESE OUTER MATRICES
and you hear the awful rigid silence follow on your heels and you can't
swallow because if you try to swallow then you will have bitten off more
than you can--
oh, wait
you can't swallow because you hear the humming the patterns
(you know which ones)
the patterns are all there but there are so many patterns and most
of the time they don't even look like patterns but you know that's
(you know that's)
exactly what the fuck they are. You lick your lips, you grunt, you
feel salt-water oozing out of your pores
_I_I_ think of the chemical structure,
[_I_I_] just think of the size of the matrix!
and you concentrate a little and you realize that the matrix
surrounding your skull is just another pattern and that ALL THE
PATTERNS ARE GOOD! and that ALL THE PATTERNS ARE ALIVE! and
that maybe this is all more than just a game so you take a
glance skyward and the patterns have, as usual, dulled
your extendedperception into blunted perception, so you lick
your lips again and [swallow] think {perceive} -Live-.
(--chew)


**********************************************************************


With your shark skin clothes and your reptile jacket! Don't come in here and fart about as if you'd saved us any trouble, Mr. I-fought-the-north- sea-islanders. Yeah, even though they were an alien race, you could have used a bit of forethought before you dumped that load of cheddar cheese on them. They sparkled in the sun like a bunch of dead girls eyes."

I stared at my grandfather as he said this to the tall Englishman in the uniform. The officer pretended not to notice my grandfather's existence in this mortal realm and when the North Franklin bus came he got on and was gone from our sight.

"When these ruffian dictators get over the fact that they have control over so much cheese, then they will stop throwing it about like a dirty sock, Donald m'boy." His gruff face was a mote in the remainder of what would have been called a sky. "We go up to those damn north sea islands, find a race of crabs the government says is from outer space, and sock em with a load of cheese that would have smothered even your great-aunt Bertha, and that is no mean task, m'laddy."

I smiled up to his wizened face and the background grey of the sky melted seepingly to deep within the earth that it domed. It all fused into a solid, living pulse of grey, and seeped up into our bodies, until we were soaked in the cold, liquid sky, and our bodies trembled, and our spirits sighed.

**************************************************
When dance about the prickly pear cactus
think harshly on your brother the thief
you dance about the prickly pear cactus
demarking the ground with your blood and your feet

tried to hold it back
triend to old it back
ftrind ot old i back
Prickly pear spin

sin

When dance about the prickly pear cactus
know sadly that I've spent all my joy
you dance about the prickly pear cactus
and with luck and with sin you savor the
things that a whole hearted god
would kindly destroy.






***************************************************************
"When the tooth is lying the head is clear"


We have sweet teeth my dear
sweet teeth do we not make me flinch
make me flinch
make me
two souls in a gnarled syncopation
in which
one soul, twisted about the other in a manner that forces
shall we say
a well designed thought recycling system
make me flinch
make me flinch
make me
undernourished; I would look so much better
I would look like
life were
not so
shall we say enjoyable; mundane; fattening
crystalline forms such as
a flinch: a flinch is, for a moment, quite
crystalline; these forms
are art.
Life is art with time added.
make me life is art with time added.
make me life is art with time added.
and a crystalline matrix of form surrounding.
Beauty.