Daniel Y. Harris




The Last Man

 

Chisel the beveled edge to curve the taut

angles with your hand, through a speculum

that shines numinous, past the fuzzy tasks

 

of routine. From the heights, the numen

coded in copper scrolls, redacts the tasty

shibboleth of lust. Persists a sore ganglion

 

below the rub-flutter of thighs, waits to

spit glitter, arches neck-face projectile in

the crease with nitric oxide. Groans and

 

grinds. The hung light and forepangs, this

athlete’s chemical curse to stay aroused,

tosses pillows at these gods of perineum.

 

Eat chocolate and walnuts and kelp, she

says, asparagus is shaped like a man.

A new man, new psalter, praise erectus

 

marble-stiff beyond the pale of climax.

Tumescence is transmemberment in a

swollen gate without keeper, keeps the

 

pistons in motion. No dread of ends or

reliquaries. For these new avatars of

male enhancement preach from pulpits

 

of a blue pill, hear antiphon and ditty,

the wails of synthetic rapture, gift as

vein-crown or sweet eden wax. This

 

darkling thrush, this surge protector,

beacon of edge to outlast the last and

go all night among crumpled sheets.

 

 

 

The Art of Corruption

for Jess

 

Dear Jess, a crack in the armature layered over a thousand

heads. There are no/all dimensions here finely cut to sky the

alchemy of a religion of scissors. Your vision was forever

 

shaped by the cubists. Ernst and Cornell bothered you most.

They were the canon from which you cast your spell. You ate

Duncan’s words. History severs its mechanical reproductions

 

reconstituted for the coffee table where your future is intact.

I will never see the world again as it was convinced of its

narrative strains and dogmas. The numb are resolute and grow

 

more resolute. We’ve even lost a dimension. I believe we’re

down to two but I frown with high spirits. Others more carcino-

genic in their appraisal than I say one and they don’t mean

 

“the one—” one dimension, one manner of speech, one day of

memory, one type of person, one language, with one principal

mode of expression, one reaction, one emotion. I won’t burden

 

your dead sleep with the media. You know how they have

turned the entire population of the United States into one person.

“An American,” Jess. I still see two dimensions. One dimension

 

daily reinforced by a mass market of media and the hegemon.

The other, where boredom bears its rude consort, we reside,

we specters of image and glut, we revolutionaries of distance.

 

What about the third, forth and fifth dimensions? The latter

slips into finger blades and returns as cult classic. Three and

four are recomposed in chemical cityscapes of homoeroticism,

 

are trashed, dear Jess. I saw one the other day, one of the three

or four next to a yellow burger wrapper. I thought of you. I

thought of hundreds of cut seamless images inside the yellow

 

wrapper. Here was Botticelli, Vermeer, Michelangelo, and of

course you Jess, the maestro conducting a symphony with a

scissors for a baton and fries. I have ten pairs of scissors Jess.

 

I had only one when I saw my first Jess. A Fiskars. I have kept

that pair though it is dull and rusted, the orange bows worn to

the metal ring next to a clevis pin. Most affectionately yours.

 

 

 

 

Piano

 

One more hitchpin to launch its aliquot

string there is no una corda other than

trills and speed to stolid negatives

 

the piano player lost in spits of grit a

dog barks odor of the stale family knot

of appetite like a seven year itch called

 

halfbreed or some turbid failure not

on track agnostic runs an ear for a crying

woman to pieces of the dorian mode

 

in tones of swing black keys for critics

sucking aplomb each time more

blue in stints of pedals and sharps.