Wednesday, March 9, 2022

 Published in the digital and print magazine, 34th PARAllel MAG issue 89, August, 2021

Body Paint, No Tattoos 

I listen to a band of kids in a room with no windows. I am perpetuated with the adolescent eternity in their skin (painted in second-thought colors). They sound like Napalm Death, with a drum machine. As always, holding the place in some equation revealing it’s all a toy. Substitution is the medicine.

Toy brains, toy kids, toy music. Generic eyes. Toy lens to see the Great Destruction this music once prophesied. Artificially intelligent toys, a powder of the old regime, toy prophecy, sharing restricts the air, and the room that’s also lost its doors. Doll doors.  Trinket escape.  Boxes shipped. Slapdash designs, easy to wash off, to burnish the pigment. Basal cell removal of what’s counterintuitive. Temporal nativities of form lost in commerce and digital enhancements. Accessibility waters down, flattens, all the hints.

Before you send your applications to Cornell you light the matches of re-gifted revelations.

With my trousers rolled, I scratch in your sound with a stylus of distant horns and angry doors. There is no world to leave you, the “fire next time” already burned what our bloated hearts never earned. We colonized with the reach of our appetites before you were born. We entered the playhouse and didn’t give a shit that there was no exit.  Great, huh?  We leave you our heritage, you inherit no exits. The planet will be fine.  You won’t.

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