Preface

Fabula is the result of a bender I undertook one fine week in Abilene round the end of July 2008. I am thankin you, Solomon, for housin my sorry ass. My publisher calls one night when the whiskys runnin particularly high and Id just watched a program bout eternal life on the History Channel Incidentally, I had picked up, on the way to TX, in Oklahoma City, a small, pocketsize notebook; Id been scribblin in that a while when my publisher rangReally bore down durin the forementioned program Id forwarded to him Solomons number and he Why wouldnt I talk to him He wanted to bring me up to speed re the Morning Glory Bed & Breakfast y Aphale. After the conversation, I sat outside where the persistent buzz of the bug zapper coupled with the traffic from the highway and my faraway stare sufficed to reroll much of the month prior through my brain. Naturally, I couldnt write about it. But neither could I write about who, it will have turned out, I will be. Who this whole experience will have made me. Believed the Stl Police Dept. wanted to talk to me ran from the horror. Fled. Made a deposit (of evidence: my publisher). Made Abilene. Holed up in a double wide w/satellite y porn Cases of Coca-Cola line the kitchen walls. Solomon has an old-schools red, metal Coca-Cola cooler in his living room where recliners y television reside. Has an auto ice-maker. He works at the bottling plant in Abilene. I hate soda mixin with the whisky. Solomon has a green closet hobby. The result of the notebook is Fabula. My first stab at poetry since well I reckon it was high school. Id written some shit to try and impress a girl Didnt work. But she liked them. Thats the most Anyway, hope you like these. MS

F A B U L A
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Knowledge The Tigress of Sujet The Law of Transplant Instinct

Among the social practices whose analysis enables one to locate the emergence of new forms of subjectivity, it seemed to me the most important ones are juridical practices. Michel Foucault, Truth and Judicial Forms, 1974. Mackinaw Spoon NERE Press, St. Louis MO
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 KNOWLEDGE Not an unnatural memory, like when a boy, I smelled blood tween her legs, But an echo-jingle come again, come back to heave instinct neath my hurdling Excavations of this shit More than a hundred years, an orchestra more desire than future More presence than possible A phasing freezeWhat violence, What instinct Knowledge can only be violation Law then, at the precipice where decrees of How Just have fallen into a mirror Where drowning is a natural conclusion Where the unknown displaces from a decanter the subject is itself disappearing The flesh bloats, the entire affair how dense, sinks to a slow it cannot achieve; riles its orbit to due clarity obscuring an imaginary kernel said to possess imaginary stuff

 THE TIGRESS OF SUJET Subtle matters of nobility, privileged knowledge, The public square is a score, the goal of orchestraThe many players bear no significance if you must know, the masses who are subject They have heard the rumors, many are looking for mourning to end. A few reunited with daughters Perhaps some know Dorka, Ficko Jo & K Everyone listens The will of Law In every subject a natural slate upon which future behavior inscribes, Where knowledge and Law switch hats, an impossible lampshade balances its lamp, circling night in its place Everyone watched fingernails come free, it was said a dash of children made half scale butterflies after the executions Those standing close lifted their mufflers or the backs of their hands when the two Thrown in It was believed Ficko was less guilty, so a bit of grace erected up next to the fire, scaffold close to the castle where

 blood was said to lake, where a head would be delivered This mercy, her fingernails spared, her sentence swiftA headless body consigned to flame, and a scalp scored by an artisan whose lover twisted in a trough gilded with hay And the fourth, Bigger than mercy, pity like a kerchief, Katarina, the last of the brood, into a cell for her remaining days, for she endured domination by the others, for she was youngest Lady Bathory, a mere fifteen when she, 1575, arranged into the aristocratic fold, received Sujet Castle, a wedding gift Her husband studying in Vienna, then defending empire, then slain, 1604, in battle When did rumors begin Certainly there was sympathy for distraught nobility, nothing suspect about surrendering daughters to the Gynaeceum How long fore peasants boiling the local line turned the tow of Law(Eight years)

 Whelped & raw flesh, particularly buttocks and breasts, awakens the stuff in bodies of virgins And the face split, caking What it installs in the genes of others shackled and searching Iron made orange in vaginal dark, screaming drowns sounds of teeth dropping into a corner When hands fail to clutch burning metal, when they just wont hold Bitten pieces of cheek chewed, gnarled and drooling into mouths, the coven was said to have surrounded a girl when she dying Like parasites affixing to infection
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The tigress layered remains in the bottom of her bath, an accomplice ladled over her body It was said dead asses sported candles It was said the stuff rotted in her stomach
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 Bricks, they adjudged a few rooms tooled in brick, encasing her with mortar, window bars, a slot for sustenance Half-moons up her arms, into portions of leg they couldnt imagine (A junkies withdraw) They couldnt try her There was potential for Scandal, despite having arranged Forestalling a trial, To forego dissent in minds of the masses Bathory died in her home years after ingesting her own blood How long refusing to eat her plate, How many plates when months fell silent, When kitchen insisted, Step forth, find her starved, see moonlight tween bars on mute hair, Shadows organize to an unreal depth, A way pleasing in Hungary

 THE LAW OF TRANSPLANT Crazy shit, like this guy who lived most of his life blind, but was given the gift of sight when a donor broke down, but this donor had a penchant for imagery the other couldnt take It blinded him Also read bout two mice, a young one and an old one, they shared a circulatory system The young blood revitalized old, didnt reverse aging but lab notes allow the elder lively after the experiment Some patients scour biographies of donors, theyve heard stories, they have seen the moviesOthers havent the luxury, an instinct intervenes, screams Do it, Just do it
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Some have made ossuaries round their souls to notch up, to gain knowledge They have eaten the hearts of their enemies, they have drunk the stuff of holies spirits call away

 There are marks on bone distinctly tooth, places where earth pools like an engorged lung Theres a surface like a table where fingers are given the young, where nails drop in grass

 INSTINCT The task is to begin thinking But how to know when begun I recall fake nails dropping into carpet, a stench tailing a cotton ball, and she is asking me to gather them up I imagine they were pushing through the surface, and I plucking them for her, And so freshly drying, she smoked and I pretended to steady a fire hose
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How different memory than thinking Seems the boys unraveling of the enigma, scabbing white nest wrapped in toilet paper, placed in trash can My publisher & I, we cant get to the bottom of it Hes rung, his tranquilitys scary. In your cells, he says perhaps there are memories one reaches through rigorous thinking

 I tell him a documentary (I did hear him say cells) earlier wherein cellular memory was but one solicitous morsel on the way to eternal life, I am saying the subject of eternity fucks me up It isnt enough to subject to law, conform to memes your heart lukewarm, But to plot it out, the eternal subject The television has a subject, the market, history As the language of any futures laid out
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My publisher says its good I split, interrupts me Good for me he says. (One tremor glaciates) A position, he says A revelation, I say a view, a factory conveyor through which dying monsters come and come, packaged like empty space tween bars on a clock I admit sojourn may be an example of how I am yet thinking You demonstrated the basic need I confess I did But said is it natural

What nature reveals a girls blood, more than six hundred of her, delays the process of aging (It works in mice (There is evidence of donor- traits transplanting long with limbs, organs, eyes (Theres a substance repairs cells and diminishing our lives long How do monsters know But thinking stumbles here where the task is to begin thinking

 Where the subject can no longer take up subjectivity, can no longer in fact be singular, where the logic of polis reveals the multiple reveals Cant think the terror Can allow to seize me, and my thought This is what its like, Aporia listens to cereal whisper and Im hearing on the phone Theyre dead. I think its closing

 That shit gets sown, harvested like law after horror, battle, victors and their quills, terminal vests and buttons Knowledge rises like news but instinct, its there glossy in sweat, sticky at a button Eternal life no lemons, no sujet, What humans will do I think, survival of what Battle reveals stakes Count rounds logic Reason is dead. (Instinct for shoes gory and split, and flying particles spat and sneezed from those who wander the field after

If the natural state of being is violence, why then Sequester, Why dismiss instinct to sheer fact of terror without confessing the terrible thought And thought is what I like to avoid, the senses tell me what to do, nightly the brain prepares me and I dont skip but trudge up knowing and hope a glitch today Maybe I dont know Youre fighting a long one, my friend, saying he had to go, Hed spotted the clock And my time perforated tween him and the cordless radiating next to my skull

The bluish electric zap of the bug killer Still like that outside off the step, I know how tired, I know I am thinking, maybe let what rise when breeze my face, I know I like it

 Or is a primacy of memory somehow charging deep within us Signals an end to nature, an end to the natural subject by no virtue of knowledge What will, What law

 Orange band of horizon opposite yellow glow of town, whirring traffic groans while insects, exploded to bits, pop-sizzle the nature of violence Its our nature to change nature. Appropriate To make this here. (I want to go home. But theres no home. I want to be free of the violence which scores, the branding violations

 Implicitly, the subject belongs to its object, a subject of knowledge prostrate to law, a subject of language thumbed by rule, every expression governed and authenticated Even silence negates to treason Were the subject of any real thinking to emerge, it must first have shrugged off knowledge, an instinct to move inasmuch as possible away from possession, away from narrativity

 The natural subject, far from ignorant, operates in absence of narrative, it is not subject to anything but itself And thats the jingle, the subject unknowingly subjected to that which it is subjecting Concertedly, the arena of subject is rife with violation, and it is only by violation that any object (in the future) is ascertainableIt is at the cost of spending what cannot be transferred The narrative of this subject is knowledge of the animal The story of this animal has a place, and insofar as the animal thinks If we agree, nature has a story, why confront loss in narrative One does not debate wet in the shower I wanted to know, I wanted to know something about me Unless the instinct is to be other, to be something else

 But thinking, insofar as it is realized, is a violent act, a seizure, an appropriation The phoenix hari-kari suturist owns the history its sealing, deftly, with its beak but does it thinkIt must, someone said, to stitch up its belly I ask if thinking has equally led it to suicide, and the stammering You can almost hear it neath the feet

 The future does not open, it winds to a close like a tentacle, like a delicate and lengthy fingernail, the insides of ears and shells, line and narrative, voice, branches of a gene-tree

 How to reconcile the obvious violation, how to posit knowledge itself goes phoenix only to hari-kari, only to flare up again from the gash like straining wisps of indestructible stuff
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Tell you how I see it I say Draw near All the tiny duplications spread in minute succession receding smoky like quick, sure membranes Sunlight shows me window, sheer drapes, floorboards This is a place I do not know. I see the small plume like a grimacing statue cut open its stomach Gnat-like, whiting ripple stuff light as dust rising from the wound and Ive yet Out with a mess comes another ripple, even smaller, another mess, another phoenix So I look back where the trails thick, where I should see the past but I see them all bigger and bigger, frozen in the act Of redoing it, doing it behind me, doing it constantly. The largest now, the one from which all others have sprung, bloated and oozing fire, immobile, obese, tittering and pecking all shady

 with its beak, wire long the opening I can see it would like to catch the trail The original, which burgeons In his seamfrom this position I see theyre all stitching. I have the rush of a spout fore the fall, I swear some of the laughs issue through the seams Some range among the rest None are totally cut off.

Bleaker Zee Trailer Park Abilene, TX July 2008