An Excerpt from THE WORKING TITLE

Did anyone ever kick the bleeding shit out of you? If not, then make way to a smaller congratulation to pour the very threadbare umbrella over a melanoma-prone pinkness. Here is the clock for your cloak, attention diverted neither to time nor the ball to pen. There's always something else the tip of things is occupied with. Replacing the carving on the inside of the mouth in regards to inhaled vapors of the figure in the landscape. Frightfully expansive in either case but continued to address the secure and intimate note of the last hour. What a way to announce it! So brilliant and neat it might have hopped out of its own telling causing it to disappear or merge into something else. It vanishes in a moment, a dubious vanity leaked up round the edges of the mouth and the sewers. It is more up one's alley. Some external force has impinged used by too many objects to be eligible. I have a buffalo in a corner that says whatever noise woke the matter up. People annoy themselves in the tum-tum, elderly ladies must not expect more than this. Unlike the hairy animals, small oblong dwellings on the horizon, the nucleus is a wire inserted as a homage to electricity. That sort he finds useful, and handed on as a hostage to produce overstatements and even moves when a crow perches on it. He did not fancy other people eating ham! Falling back on the line and centuries of carnal embrace, an elephant always collects round its feet -- antennae and naked babies.

*

The questions are plain on their bellies, extra zeroes to stare down in a hat. Where ears pile up in the cups of his hands, responsible use of the aquamarine Porta John. One looks amphibious, a body hiked to an octane, with legs crossed and muscles of one of my favorite books. Mile after mile, with tabletops going by, equations halfway into their solvents. The West becomes apparent only after they disperse in a discarded packing crate, whose fingers tap the sides of dying of inspection, his name viewed from red chalk taste of it. Air rusts the feathers of the question, slamming two overflowing mugs and a plate of their hollow penises on the table. He has objects inside and outside the solid or dotted lines, pigeons shitting undisturbed on the beam. Yes, put two and two together, their fluid extensions trimmed with a zap of the jaw around the clock . This is the jumping off point, cross it out, the way you erase the edges at night to see what you want to see. It's not a native thing we get out of wearing much of anything, the sound of stockings when one crosses their legs on the set designed for a documentary on ukuleles. Crescendo is an imperative if able to run the sentence down without spelling everyone out.

*

They were so big they could be waved at them, and I waved, motioning to swim thru the mountains. Colonies of white ants lived in the holes, but it was mine, unusual not calling your mother Mother. Ice cubes in a dish cloth with a hammer and a trailing tail pipe gathers a wind into itself and flops out into its nothingness. We were breasts on the jewel of a tight dress. One could make a pretty good guess which of the two jockstraps ruled our safety. I only know the sensation which used to condense these lists before it slides over the corset and underpinnings. Where does one learn this? Perhaps from a ladies' magazine, a crusade with electricity? We stood on the bridge and looked down at reflection in the bale after bale of rustling paper shapes. Do I prefer the pink spot, the yellow room, the blue generator, the whale blue, the pussy red? For the first time in my life I see the inside world as a dangerous place, unless it's very saucy, stuck in whatever phase of hair-combings, soiled rational numbers run up to make better furniture in undwelling.

*

This is the matter of matters most, desperate look to which I was becoming assigned because dynamite explodes downwards, forming a crater. Gatherings make one feel insignificant because it is convenient for the cemetery buttoning him up. It shall be a statue for a thrown cushion to put the flames out & means a great deal of embroidery. It interested me how territory petered out into more than itself, stayed long enough to stay. Where it belongs, too busy whether the monthlies were regular or not. Her dream in order to pave the way for another suitable vacancy where the kettles were whistling in unison. One cldn't help if pens were shaking in rhythm, if the gold rim on the clock hadn't been quite right spooning two times onto two times in half. There is no response for the waiting where one has dropped dead in the middle of their name not being called. Then reaching for a pair of scissors cutting away the pieces for yourself and your budgerigar. Who he was dancing with recognized him, or when interest came into the unimportant face. Stop repeating the point of standing there talking about yourself in the very least. The simple introduction was the toast into you, teeth evenly displayed with the camera telling you not to move a muscle. No consideration for anyone, some story about someone being allergic to cornflour. Always leave the packet open so the cornflakes become limp instead of having to spend it on limestone and cookies. He said a cheerful smile absent from his face, the random bones found on a recurring morning. The writer who plays the opposite role has gone further down into glandular eternity, the tectonic, lengthy description of the monologue that preceded him and to follow.

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The piece is an excerpt from a long piece in digress, "The Working Title." It is couched in working as a deck hand on a dragboat vessel "C.C. & Gloria," Moss Landing, CA—the lack of sleep, physical exertion, and most importantly, hours spent with a gaff and a shovel alone on the deck: sorting 20K lbs of fish at a time alone, in silence, save for the shrieking of gulls (& dodging their droppings) and the barking of sea lions. Language of the shore life is in constant collapse and reassembly, the world as one knows it is reduced to the size of the boat, one's language becomes useless (especially if your captain is nearly deaf & can barely read & write.) One is his own audience & purpose for language—everything on the boat strives for smooth automation: now we are setting the net, now we pick up, you drive, zip up the net, black cod goes in the far bin left. One is reminded of Apollinaire in his mother's kitchen, trying to break the walls with his language. Similarly, "The Working Title" strives to reach the shore and reassume the "writing" going on at home, at the desk, but is interrupted & mandated by the order of the deck. Automation of work is pierced with fragments of one's life on the shore, but they are meaningless there, save for the longing for their validity, & are recorded in the order received (during wheelwatch, driving "home").