Smyth-sewn paperback · 48pp · $15 · ISBN 978-0-9773401-6-3

Taking formal and methodological inspiration from the speedcore, thrash-jazz “miniatures” of John Zorn’s Naked City, the poems of Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles are dense, impacted crystals of reference and insinuation: Hegel to Hüsker Dü; Milton to Moorcock; a high-style restaurant on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile to the Meadowlands; Ruskin to webcam S&M. These concentrated bursts of cynicism, rancor, and frustrated lyricism are not minima mora- lia for an electronic age, but literate squawks thrown at the screen of contemporaneity’s faceless spectacle.

Caractacus shook off his chains temple
trembling in wooden blocks — lintel
pillars architrave and pediment — a sauce
of pureed white beans garlic
pepper salt staining blue cobalt plate.
A stiff January wind whips the page from the
reader’s hand, blurs over the
microphones. I do not speak this language
well. I cannot read this second term.

Spencer trends Dylan Andy Big Boy
tangles of Nereia’s hair not sandy
and in my mouth. A cowlick consummation
tottering over the steps and into
the bricks, brought them all
to what they assumed were their feet.
Vagueness, said Dr. R———, is the upright man’s answer
to the arrows and slings of outraged
specificity. Pull me down another Meister-
brau. Pull out before you do it.

I do not speak this language term. Soft fasten
pulp prosperity war. Mr. Cleric, Mr. Layman, name
a “Chaplin” for the Aryan nation. Beat them
with baseball bats and feed their
texts or bodies through a shredder. I acted
only under orders, your honor, I did
chains temple bricks and feet of clay.
Too many deictics neuters and feminine rhymes
for this to be an American sonnet. Free to starve
to kill to speak someone else’s mind.

My name is datum, my nature is
a gift. Oriel of oriole orisons sea
to shining scent, purged of scenic estuaries
methodical fjords and transient
sporting utility vehicles. My name is torture,
the best penetrant your money
can buy. A flag in every classroom, boiled
head in every pot: your sparrows
are numbered, ticked them off on nine
curled fingers and a twinkle toe.

Pull out before you do it, make sure the camera
has a clear shot. Money in the bank. For
casualties read casual tears, for remorse read
remoras, for regrettable errors read triumphant new
era. Galley proof slaves. Resentment
spawned a bright and shining obsession, poising thought
against the blurred third-hand idea: truth is to
beauty as duck is to rabbit. Quack quack, said the
poet, which echoed through the fish-houses.

The full monty, as if talk
of sexuality would not seem objectionable
to someone, somewhere. Tie that one down before
it blows away. Guttural sound in the throat
of the saxophone, scratched my leg
on chemically treated mulch.
Dragonfly, damselfly, ladybug, mosquito,
a fog of bugs smeared across the wind-
shield. The word made flesh less interesting
than its neon-bordered converse.

“Winsome” one of those looks to muster while
sucking a finger and spreading it wide
for the camera. Motion option
whoreson poise. Beef and kidneys,
liver lights and complicated
closely packed flesh seins forward
over time, as if time would make it all
clear, the rough places straight and the high
places flat and easy.

I did not know what the word “anachronism”
meant until you explained it to me.
Eat your cellphone. A-1 vegetarian.
A charming plastic pink house
with a charming plastic blue roof, bleaching
in the sun, formalizes the informal garden, draws
palms bushes ornamentals and sickly
grapefruit into an enlightened whole. Sedentary
or sedimentary feet up and drawers down.

Somewhere they’re giving up the search
for chemical depots or stockpiled pikes and
halberds. Somewhere the clouds have squatted
down over our heads like a copulent ploughman
taking a midday dump. Like, really,
no kidding, man? The gear and wheels
are binding in an alarming mechanical
obligatto. Humming in my ears. And so
are we who are astonished to be loved.
Put it in park to remove the key.

This one runs like a scalded
dawg! but the heat will bake your brains
right in your head. Don’t sit there, Margaret,
if you want to pee go back to your
own damned room. Cash or checks
only No Credit cards No Debit. And bake
the green out of those beans
on the steam table. If you bread
and fry it, he’ll eat the sole
of a fucking shoe. And ask for seconds.

They grumble in the line at the deli counter:
one half-pound of smoked turkey — smoked,
you whoreson knave! No chance
of a revolution happening here,
and when it does we’ll stay out
of its way. Smeared gravel and asphalt.
Yesterday pink (the dead possum) today
a stomach-turning pinky-
grey. Dodge the lightning bolts falling
like pitchforks from a sun-powdered
sky. Not my president baseball cap.

A lizard straddles the pool fence, leaps
up to a post like a gymnast to the
horse, reading between the lines of a
newspaper three days out of date,
waving another car into line with
a gesture of two tobacco-spotted
fingers. If I knew anything about music, I might
understand Webern’s reliance on voice
and texts, poems and singers. You can sing
anything to the tune of “Jingle Bells”
and it sounds like the National Anthem.

Once upon a time there
was nothing here but swamp
lizards and mosquitos but now
there’s a solid chunk of concrete
asphalt and fifty-seven
varieties of ersatz. Choose your
ersatz carefully. One national anthem
swaps with another, and who knows
what that bald boy’s singing there
in Arabic — I don’t trust him.

Kassandra walks the battlements, chiton-
hems blowing around her ankles. Turn, twist,
dip and seize, make an answering harmony
to the throbbing of that electrified
intermittently seized-up pump. Tanglewoods.
Black sails on the horizon. Red
sails. Assisted living and nursing home
care two separately defined spheres, where the
cat limps along the fence,
shunning the neighbor’s animals.

Listening to yet another man read something
vaguely from a sheaf of printout, we knew
this wasn’t for us. Far better the brusque and gay
life of the entrepreneur, selling and buying
and getting laid.

It thinks in me. I cannot resist it. As if all
our darting attentions were waterbugs on
a stream of commodities, channel-switching
infomercials for rubber band body-building
machines and alarmingly cute ceramic
animals. It thinks in me. Like yesterday’s
sirloin on its peristaltic odyssey.

That machine grinds loud again. And it
was cold last night — I wanted a set
of fingerless Fagin-gloves to sit and scribble
in. A vacuum leak will keep the car
from starting dependably. Occult technology, as good
as magic.

Bathing in sun and air, wind over
limbs, wind-chimes competing
with the earbuds’ cacophany,
it’s not at all hard to feel exchange-
value licking at the pores
of the body (of course we do not enjoy
what we do not understand) —

the common life, continuous curve
of images cast onto our
sensoria, from dawn’s electronic
chirp to the flaking scalp’s
settling into a dented pillow. In the bath
of air and sparkling
water a voice sounds blown
over unseen ripples, dark waves
sirens calling out emergency or crowd
control trundle down pavements
the sun massages, strokes
and crumbles.

                    The war is the crawl
          at the foot of the television
display, body counts ticked off
in pixels and automatic Nielsen
          Ratings. Precious fluids, congealing
          and refined, white as the gloves
on a lager heiress’s pilot hands.
Belts and webbing bulge the prosthetic
          crotch.

                    Ahoy for the cities of ferries
          and kayaks, waterways of Venice,
Stockholm, New Orleans, Amsterdam.
Aseptic Swedish beauty of straight lines
          and white spaces, blips
          of color punctuating the blank;
I hobble through the rain
on cobbled streets, lanes and closes
          rising up at outlandish angles
          from the puddled leaden
bay. The Vasa, dried and trimmed
and swallowed in gloom, haunts
          its vast interior. It waits
          to eat us all.

of revolution and despotism, faltering

hands at the dashboard of an immensely

large, immensely clumsy wheeled

machine. Watching the old men

cross the parking lot to the supermarket

in an ecstatic slow-motion, as if

the electric doors will slide open

on the riches of Ali Baba’s cave.

Winding down towards the sleep

of stones in a perpetually more

quiescent rhythm, missing beats

and dropped feet. The sky

conjures motion from the black

fringes of trees, viral birdsong

downloaded on our heads

willy-nilly. Inference above

language, intuition of the divine –

perfect bullshit, at least to nodding cynics

who know that language hems in

our brains like a barbed-wire

fence. The world, Mr. Bronk – I say

gaily – is solid as you want it.

            §

We make our own reality. We speak

a goodly frame, and the squamous facts

conform themselves thereto. At least that’s

the official line. The end of history,

triumphal apotheosis of the behemoth

Capital, has been momentarily postponed.

            §

Once upon a time Reason, or a deity,

extended itself and grew into the shape

of history. Once there was a “tendency”

in human affairs. As we buy

our shoes, lace them up, walk

our errands across the steaming asphalt.

Kiss our lovers or children, ignore

or huddle down against

the unspecified hour. Our present

swallows all pasts into its self-contented,

pixellated maw. The future,

a child screaming for your

admiration, is uncontained.

            §

The Emerald City, the Rock Candy

Mountain, were levelled long ago

by the bulldozers and wrecking balls

of incessant imagination. You speak

of happiness in mutual labor,

a bright future of shared

sunrises and common weal –

I’m imagining you in a thong

and garter belt. The Paris Hilton,

I believe, was once only a hotel.

            §

Lexus lanes arouse our virtuous

class indignation, but when haven’t

we paid more coin to get there

faster? Shanks’s pony a phrase

in need of annotation, like Ruskin’s

illth , Hobbes’s state of nature,

Pound’s usura , Milton’s free will.

Those exquisite polychrome tags

lighting up the railroad bridges –

Mr. Bennett, Mr. Bloom –

are scribbles in the margin

of Capital’s black-letter folio text.

            §

A certain sort of poet

would wind it all up

with a brisk nostos, renewing

Nestea plunge into the immediate –

the sun, unblurred by smog;

breeze unsmudged by particulate

from the abattoir or freeway;

a wee bit of cozy love, unconditioned

by the constant rain of copulation-

ready limbs on the plasma screen,

of printer-ready, skin-severing

admonitions and laws.

            §

What we owe power, built

up in the telling, letter by

littoral, hands in the till

and finger-smudges smeared

on the edges of paychecks.

Dynamic, Greekly energetic,

power seizes us beyond intertia

and places us where it pleases;

diaphanous ridges smother

our eyes, waves edge over

our mouths to still

the crying.

            §

The fine worked gold is hid

in a smudge of oily smoke.

Chances are few, but dance

and dance again, fuelled

by a kind of passionate

disinterest. Dance hard enough,

we’ll disinter some ghosts

of old and hidden gain,

intricate dream-work’s

final mouthless sculpture,

gaunt and cockless herm.

Blot out the sweet
Potatoes’ peppercorns; at least
We’re sitting at the grown-ups’
Table after all these years.
On the television the president’s
            features seem pressed to

The center of his weasel-like
Face, little lips working
Like an asshole making buttons.
She can read at three, but
Are her ball-handling skills
            up to par? With so much

At stake or up for sale
How did you manage to choose
the ugliest sheep in the whole
damned flock? Striated like
Jacob’s genetic engineering,
            the patriarch as science-

Fiction con-man. He loved
Her for her beauty, but the
Sister had weak eyes – the better
Not to be seen. Take me back
To Chicagoland, I beg of you,
            for it’s there I feel

At home. The atmosphere’s
A burden at best – though a thinner
Air would leave us panting
In our trousers. Lining up
For the big discount or
            the new release. I’ve not

Read his book, but I saw
The trailer, mysterious lines
Of semi-legible script
(Font "Cézanne") furrowing the walls
Of a Pym-like cavern. Wrote
            an opera called "The Treasure

Of Injun Joe." Rub my stickers
Off, nudnick! La vida es
Sueño, es verdad, but is it yours
Or the Red King’s? Sullen
Gear-teeth ignite the pommel
            and thrust, trust in deity

Or currency, the bystanders
Stood by and the spectators
Looked on, but don’t expect
Internal Revenue just to listen
At your audit. Sunk tho
            he be, watry floor or glass

Ceiling. Shocking white and black
Striations through the marble,
Courthouse like a quaking
Unsupported blancmange.
The painting – all dribbles
            and silkscreen – rubs history

Against the grain, gives a
Negative vision – black
For white, white black, etc. –
Of the utopia none of us
Will ever know; and it moves
            in the body, clicking

Of the eyes’ valves
As they skibble over
The cracked and varnished
Surface. Under my palm
I felt the soft erectile
            hairs of your haunch, tremor

Of blood venturing and
Returning. The entropy
We chew and swallow defines
Itself in heat, in noise,
In chemistry, until it sinks
            to a level of common

Exhaustion, homogeneity.
With so much up for sale
And the currency’s paper
Pinking like rosy-fingered
Dawn. Striations of light
            and Angel of God

Wields a pencil and brush
To scrub out the last two
centuries’ errors. Draw me
A river, I’ll draw an ocean
Over you. But truth –
            to principles, appearances –

Remains the establishment
Of his value. Affecting
The ancients, who told us
Lies and gross calumnies.
Scamper, huddle through the
            rain of contumely,

The bitter cup of realism. Curly-
Tailed lizards move south.
Sky-vine like kudzu, who takes
No prisoners. His hands striated
With paint and masking tape,
            he would gentle the child

As something precious. No-one
Gets out of here alive (quoting
Hank Williams), and if she wants
To be an Indian Princess, who’s
To gainsay her? Like losing,
            sinking is an art

To which we’re deeply apprenticed.
A dormitory bathroom, a semi-private
Hospital room, the cold comfort
And ambiguous hospitality
Of someone else’s borrowed
            office, unofficially lent.

Measure twice, hammer once. Don’t
Stumble over whatever’s stacked
Around the pilings. Hunt out
What’s lost – better yet, keep
Track of your heart’s tchotchkes
            in the first bloody place.

            together what unhappy history has

dis-membered gathering the members

            of outsized outlandish Osiris






take them by regulation measured

            dosage and call out in the morning

the light reflected off their leaves

            and water-spangled branches the






highlights photoshopped onto that model’s

            canines and bicuspids moist white

nights of sleeplessness rambling down

            and up blind flights of stairs






twine the ways apart my lord

            cleave backages and ransom

implements to filthy humus

            I for an eye truth for the






thunder and the lightning- 

           bug sleepless the evil dead maunder

through an outlet mall of children’s

          fancies outsourcing nail set






past a laboring proletariat switching

          channels swiftly as their thumbs

can twitch I had hope when

           violence was ceas’d handing






paper sovereignty to pasteboard

            crowns and lath scepters pat

buchanan my jo have all

            the seas ganged dry love of






lurchers sniffing sheeps’ peeled

            hindquarters ye lightnings ye

thunders in clouds are ye come

            off the quaint pronouns mate






write something you could actually say

            in some emotion’s stress or storm

our latest gesture neither an opened hand

            nor pointing finger but an odd






thumb-thrusting half-fist oh no he’s

            not quite fisting her it’s only three

fingers maybe the thumb so hard

            to see on that grainy super-8 stock






pay it no mind unless it’s somehow

            marked folly magenta friendly

to unburthen one’s self-same interior

            frames to hesitate out on a progress






whose time-stamped facets might imprint

            a passage pale indigent or parsimonious

a new atom mine where naked children

            haul coal-carts of glimmer and what’s






the proper term for oral sex with the

            dead who can’t really give

anything your handshake like a defunct

            fish cher monsieur bush good






thing the storm shutters’re up early

            no she didn’t pick up what don’t

you screen your calls too incommunicado

            the chocolate flesh tones built up






by a dozen or more painstaking trans-

            parent layers of wash an icy

speaking warmth dream or nightmare

            of the moving statue goylem






soil ‘em goylem roil ‘em an aleph

            bracketed with the doubled horns

of the phoenician ox double ax

            of ariadne’s maze a jackhouse






that jury built monument to the ten

            words break two tablets call me

deep in mourning a barbeque of aureate

            veal lechon asado chimichurri






vindaloo nouveau beaujolais rising

            up like the sun which is we are

told new each day they leaven the end-

            less parade of bleached teeth






and boob jobs with photos of a girl

            got her face burned off in a wild-

fire true life human interest florida

            scum on the white house train






eat or be what you eat testosterone

            panic button photosynthesize petrol

for a hybrid hald-human half-turnip

            driver line up your fucking kids






and I’ll run ‘em down right now a bad

            hair life a tenderness in the angle

of her hand as she raised the cup

            to the old man’s lips charity shines






in our leader’s close-set eyes so

            careful not to soil them with

printed materials the charred face

            grins lipless over the lip of the






armored personnel carrier’s turret compressing

            time and space in swift apery of far-flung

instantaneous markets electronic chads well-hung

            blond and toothy I’ll bet wink and






bulge but why don’t any of our letters

            get answered in characters we

recognize lovers’ hands lapped in bonds

            of gold outcomes foreseen and outcomes






manipulated lie down take two

            alternatives implausibly standing in for white

and black odysseus’s scar displayed and spread

            onscreen as just another weeping carnal gash.