The Flatbed

Corina Copp

Did it present one Pony in vermilion
Vernal spackle and consist
Mostly of quotes, Did she shuffle her feet
And bring figures into the poem because
She wanted to look like them,
Conference with birds of crimson
North, dying Human gulls, see Cheat—
Gulf, see Abyss. See enshrined.

She went on and on
About other people’s money didn’t she
Had a bottle of whipped, isn’t
That enough, birth is but a sleep
And a forgetting, who’s likely
To remember cries anyhow, cancerous
thus Did it, his desperate desire to be
positive and Her knowledge of the
absolute futility of It.
This is an assumption that none of us
Will ever receive, did it hear
Also in pain, oh won, mighty Sonne
Inventor of the castle clock
Us and us alone, ma’am
And did it slenderize…
Was it a manual for a pre-stage of
femininity—
Princess stage, you know who I’m
Talking about <<Mary Stuart
represents The Royal stage; Princesses
are the pre-stage, Something
That’s not yet settled>>
Mother had absurd adulation,
Completely idolized her;
Also a manic compulsion to humiliate
Her and her gilded wish to extinguish—
+ Foreigner, a slut, some lanolin Vater
Eaten my bad habit truffles, Ne’er-do-
Well, unchecked

Infant—who knows, becoming a poet
means everything to one, to the other
It’s just an obstacle, Gymnosophists
<<I think that with him
Language is more of a vehicle he uses
To sharpen His own perception so that
it can Hit the target with ultimate
perfection, Saying precisely
What he wants to say, while I am saying
It can’t be Done; it’s a constant
Deconstruction; Language cannot be
Authentic…if, as a woman, you don’t have
The right to speak, you’ve got to pick up
The Rubble….

I am a Trümmerfrau of language.>>
 

…………

<<I want to produce something
That can only be spoken, through verse,
Persistent verse…
Only to listen to. It shouldn’t be printed.>>

…………

Red-and-White families, Treasurer
Sucks in the family but still Ex-
Cites a fantasy but still conventional
Sound Effects don’t generate desired
Resonance, Mannerhouse,
Having clean sheets, having
Swept and vacuumed, writing like I’m
Dead, of course, and without blemish I
feel the success of my friends,
Using a condom, there isn’t
Even any hair to fall out, rooms
Consist of clean unsordid lines,
Blue Swedish textiles are the furthest
thing from grotesque, ‘tis why we covet,
An audience of all ages, I wouldn’t
Necessarily call this a flashlight,
Never rush a crush, and so on and
Actressing And So On Into Capitalistic
Happiness, but
I mean it, I have no
Comments, from goose to blow,
Truth to admin, a splinter
From a man’s finger I would love to prick
And press, A Vicious Escalator even is
Heavenly if it’s ever been in a mirror…


About a woman
Who doesn’t realize she’s dead…
<<I am Dead. I was literally Murdered,
And that’s also what connects me
To Bachmann.>> That radio
Play was red and I’ve
Been in love ever since, but I am
Not a strong woman! A hunger
Strike no way! <<Bachmann, in
The end, was also murdered
By her mother. Sylvia Plath had a similar
Fate.>> That poor woman. Oh and

…………

<<The night permeates everything, I am
Bringing it to you right now>>

Him, he’s positive and not
Instantly cast off. <<Death, you know,
eats Up the Time of others and
therefore he is Always hungry. One’s
own time is never Enough, after all.>>

<<Well then, who is the winner
In the fight of commodity versus ground,
Faith versus reason?
THE ANIMAL.>>

…………

Then there is the man at the piano
And so on into happiness.
If his view of coolant fields
Would persist for one’s country, well
I am Not a strong woman, nor am I
timid. After having cried up my wine,
Another’s life is easily acquired as long
As it’s made of soft metal, to cut
A passage through. See Tidy, see
Compel, see Fresh and Balmy
All such services, white as a silver lily


That’s called Napalm and
Pudding, painted on the wall,
Born in and lived for
Many years as a portrait of
A girl looking as if she were alive,
<<Every year she came back,
for eight yrs, And beneath the
granite slab, death lingered on and
on.>> And repurpose it to
feel a part of it, another angle, through
the bay window from the garden:
That poor injured soul, on the eighth year,
She did not come back. And she never
Came back again.>>

Walking arrogant from Target, sight-
Seeing and conversation, I
Slumped at her way of describing
Something e.g., I saw to my left a
Flutter of certain damaged liasons,
WINGS
Rather, of benefit brown,
and it was a bird slowly dying
Against the anguished brick and
Ecstatic ground that seemed suddenly
To have met there all along.
Not to relate it for the purposes of
Elevating my personal experience
To anything symbolic for incidental
Or even destitute to emotion was
Heart mine, art mine and that’s—
That’s—have mercy, am I living for it?
Or barely? And should I stomp the bird
To death? It was dying gradually

With its blue eyes on me, 3-1-
1, I called you, only to tell
on people who feel badly
there is a yeast in the street,
plplplease come help us

Where’s a shoe-box
when a small animal shows itself
to be a private being, hm?

<<The dropping of the daylight,
<<The bough of cherries,
<<Broke in the orchard for her

…………

<<Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene’er I passed her; but who passed
without Much the same smile? This
grew; I gave commands; Then all smiles
stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will’t please you rise?>>

…………

I’ll guess at your resolve, it is about
Behavior. Might you unplug every
spasm each
day No matter to machinic
Speak, but hell, no matter the non-
Knowledge I live in baked Hyperion
Fear of. That hairdryer organized
Nothing toward my drinking perfume
in telling it was your deus ex
careful watch. We police ourselves,
called revision.

Are you silently singing
while I talk, said the doctor
to her Husband, Then
later to her patient
about lying to Her husband,

<<Sure I can speak
Like a politician sexually
deceiving a row of
leaves sort of hemmed to
bushes and thundering
at our heels sort of
shadow roses
shadow, cremated against
a desire to inflate
an Awful-thing-to
do-with-a-Star-like-you moment,
took time out
….sweeps for the Brits
visiting him in work
scene; during sex scene
We all fell down I
swear he fell lazily, I
fell similarly it was on
a foreign earth between
roses and shadows,
my shadow sparse
of leaf and guarantour
of a humiliated bouquet
incompatible
yet formally appointed>>

Then she gave him
An update.

<<Sure I can I got
a high waist in water
belittling a national
deep focus <<To have a
strong local station you’ve
got to have access to
the things that are going
on in the rest of the country
and in the rest of the world
so the audience tunes over
and is willing to stay with
you.>> Is this big enough
to be made up of itself
yet, I thought.

<<That man knows all about the
curiously mingled sense of identification
and alienation felt when you can see
yourself die>>

Only in an, enormous,
Grosgrain interior inevit-
Ably The Knack, the movie,
Cramped the play
With its banal set of film
Gimmicks constituting
Liberation for which I
Should be grateful,
Cue: Do you ever think
Of me? Why do you not write?

Why do you not start?
Is he…prompt?

…………

Shakespeare freed me from Brecht
Come, thick fabric, into a conception
Un-Rolex your Felician
letter, <<In a
Word, he wrote, it was an
establishment
Of purifying the theater so it is unreal in
A manner proper to them; my friendship
With you is permitted dissent

…………

Trying to acquire what dogged figure
Got killed, in her late 20s she
Accessed a memory and in mock-
Adoration wrote so entertainingly
Of _call me_ I think it was.
It followed hard upon.
Don’t call me. I don’t need per-
Mission to live, like some
People do. Maybe I do but
Don’t call me. I am not a
Strong a brilliant
green is all I can say,
A brilliant green.

I am not saying … Hi-fi radio
Bandaged to her waist, all corsets
Hooked by Hermes and Lee Miller.
Fore mounting her horse to flash
Past the high-rises and in all the
Wet streets, not a one to be found

Not even Where’s
Mommy Now? All children in-
Side the house of constant voting,
Tiny ivory ovaries + pecks
True and correct to their
Ambitions so far, perféct, see
Spoilt. Justice is a woman
Detective. See invade.


<<Clearly Not “I,” nor “Your,”
nor yet “Love.”>> Showy, see
Darling, with Julie Christie
sweat. A division in thinking
We Love is not a
Ridiculous upswing in the end,

<<I am opposed to bringing everything
onto a social level.>>

<<More at home in the American art
scene and the German theater scene
than would be in the American theater
scene.…[American artists] are building
a bit on the foundation of the Vienna
Actionism, so to speak…except that
the Viennese were so dead
serious…while the Americans shit
on everything>>

…………

But to make ‘em laugh, take your-
Self for night, isn’t
That a wonder, now, to milk
The ram, to translate own
Inutility into light as air, to always
Use something to designate
Time passing, to wait for
The word manger, to get dressed
Like I’m 70, to start with <<a problem>>
Someone <<could have>>

<<I like to talk about obsessions>>
<<Good taste = personal taste>>
<<I’m surrounded by heroes!>>

Forgiveness: An Interview

Scratch the darkening heads of
the girls as they moan and
Watch Judi think.
She’s in a fix in A Kind
of Alaska
, by Harold Pinter,
having slept for thirty
Years, Judi I don’t
remember either the crime
I must remember in order
to forgive the person who
committed it or my love
from behind on the couch
last night crouch investments
now, possess how you retreat
…detailed…and, left and
Redial: give nothing, subtle
Loses. Moan exam and I
…domestic space does Not
equal war memorial in the
kitchen a year ago is someone
I seriously fix to bluebells
or the image I seriously walk in, an
accompaniment and an indication
of going beyond my suffering
through a blue dot that spews.
Held him because he who commits
me is the person I commit to a blue precise
rolling ball. Someone must
surprise rolling ball. Someone must
have condemned you to sleep
through what would have been
a nightmare had you stayed
awake for it. Instead you
had a fantasy about a plastic force
that could fashion stones into organic
compounds. You can’t find the
Public TV now nor do I presume
Anything is all right to do.
In your fantasy was a forgiveness
so light it tasted like the
incandescent cum of a pilot strung
out in the trees to die, as I mentioned
earlier in this piece. Marguerite
Duras has been grieving over
this air force pilot as a crisis of plastic
representation since she dreamed it,
and in unmentioning after
new day dawns, painter is procedurally
lost, having produced, yet again,
a neverhad. But the rabbit hole’s Love
placeholder. What do we do to copy,
then? We try to <<look good,>>
knowing still
bodies are the first things seen / when other
bodies are suddenly equally interesting.

Production as possible due to jealously.
These words are terrific, used like ectopic
pauses gold-leafed. <<I realized
wordplay will provide one way to recognize
my pain,>> <<PAIN being
one of the most important things
in my life,>> by a creature
comfort carries me back to a valley
I volley, dirtying lucre voluminous or
hurry back to your hill curses;
people are still alive over here
and a few straw nations are going
to apologize again, I can feel it.

<<I want to be hugged
to death by you>> by Hawkshaw
Hawkins is not looking for a fucking
source. I can’t organize
expressive canceling. I can’t introduce feminine
desire in poetry now that
I’ve gagged the melodramatic
imagination for affection, + it was
<<La Délie>> in the 16th cent.
The most insincere was I
ever in my
letters to you was hum
in lactate, looking for a third to witness
my former ability, letter was;
then just words humiliating
their absented meaning. We do this
Gall for the witnesses? To take affinity
away from the creep who throws down.

…………

Judi found the Public TV. She’s watching
a show about restaurant managers who
are using surveillance techniques to spy
on their employees to see why amoral
frolics have led to a blanket of black
syphilis. Judi’s decided to become a
physician, poet
and scholar. I’m of course talking
about how Girolamo Fracastoro wrote
epic poems about epidemic diseases.
Judi and Fracastoro rise from the hospital
bed, brushes hairs out of her eyes, her
eyes full of influential paints. Judi cancels
a prior debt when there’s no longer a
possibility for repetition compulsion. All
she has is former ability. This is not to say
I can organize expressive canceling
or that literature and art are fundamental
or that man is disquieted in vain.
<<One comes to divine a principle of
growth ‘demerged’ in the world. ‘Demerged,’
an old word meaning immersed, would on
its face appear to denote separation.

…………


For then I go blind, ski-horse thrill stills
Cat named EGYPT missing, last seen

Do you want some Rouge before we
go into the party? How is my hairshirt.
Cat named FILMLIT lapping BRAGG’s
in total trust we have her. Cut lepidolite,
fervent strike of the call ring. An old man
’s voice began to sing through a thought
having rendered him invisible. Once invisible,
one eye left but diaphaneity:
transparent ceramic, he sorts out Judi
in the situation of the shells. She woke up
after sleeping for 30 years and happened
upon ‘Is That All There Is?’ but the passions
of mankind were obstinately defriending
Mosaic Deluge. Judi folded beautifully paper
towels and tied them with Bellmer cordage
to two white-glass rods that then served as
kitchen shoes. She placed her feet slopes,
saw the fish and birds swim beneath her feet,
but did not feel The Man of Jasmine above
them, or unattached to argumentative
powers, or doomed to a theory of
supplication to anyone a 30-min. walk away
wearing same white-glass shoes in listeners,
whose glass Wake. Sleep.
she longed to baptize, could not write antipause,
pigstable her dark tendrils down
around pornogram
tender bronze tweed tetchy shoulders
in the gas dried she was suddenly in; why
covet abuse of the senses when you can
dream of it, she dreamt—decapitate End of
Tropicalia even while the pilot remains
strung through trees and for seven, eight
years, Duras returns to his grave only to
sniff her own outlet. He worked for
the state. Killed in lithium skybox Playbill
What will he love for years to come?
It’s safe to seer all return.


…………


Tip over Lacemaker to Coddle
grandma beached, smeared orangeish

lupis on lips and in heat a syringed dog
humping her on five tabs of tablature. If

you don’t stop rubbing your palms
together as if starting a fire every 30 secs.

you know nothing about but in action Wiping
crumbs from sandwich bread so you may

return to your keyboard I will slap you
like in Sissy Boy Slap Party. This action

will benefit every astrograph and you may
then be blessed to provide the impetus

to heal others. Getting in touch with these
deeper issues is important as irritating

as it might be to model. Natal Chiron
tokes me like a Triangle; I think, <<What

a strong trine,>> <<What a bottomless
pit.>> Life exposes your ears

talked chiffon, you give and give
your solipsistic wit to the sun

an endless need to prove, until
we learn that proving ourselves never

works! Sun is a flesh-bone posited
business model <<Here is the doll>>

………


Let me count the ways. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Up till anesthesia’s disabused

 

Judi, you can’t marry your sister’s widower,
what are you talking about. <<Build
a cell inside your mind, from which
you can never flee.>> If I find poverty
in your blueblood, I will


………

 


I am talking now about my own writing. I
do not want the collective embrace of
Writing.
Yours truly,
Fresh information.



…………