|
JOHANNES GÖRANSSON ADORATION OF WINNING A chorus of flames. I search for evidence of my adrenaline in the rubble but the gods have set free cockroaches thousands of cockroaches throughout my paradise of words. They are devouring a sublime tattoo on my chest that says skin. It's a verb. It says skin with ink from a viper's fangs. It says skin but it looks like whore from here. It looks like Los Angeles is burning down again. From here it feels like Los Angeles is a glittering cocoon again as I ease into its noise. In Los Angeles words only mean when they are carved into anatomies. I use silk to cover up my wounds. I don't have a ouija board so I use champagne to speak to money. Money tells me mom is dead. Tells me I'm in debt to her memory. That I need to find a soul so my words won't be worthless nonsense. I know what soul means. Something close to an exchange rate. Wosh wosh wosh: my body is where the rate is wrecked by adrenaline. Words become infected. Death's economy is inflationary. My mother gave me a watch to keep track of every step but I lost the password so now I wear it as a bracelet. An ornamental crime that tells me how I'm like the cockroaches. I can take a thousand tiny steps but I will never reach the heart of matter. Listening to Los Angeles, which speaks in broken mirrors I begin to believe in a language that matters. With the shards from the mirror matter speaks to my spine about birds. My birds. The birds of paradise. Empty promises says my daughter as she drafts a suicide letter and fills the envelopes with the dry husks of bumble bees. She wants to move to Los Angeles in a helicopter wearing silver jewelry and her mother's old wedding dress. She laughs into her burner when I tell her I bought the phone with money from my mother's condo. I bought, she argues, a book of war poetry so that I would learn how to win the war against poetry, but the only poems she writes are the scars on her thighs and arms. War poems against the body. I'm scratching war poems into the blue-gleaming butterflies that flutter everywhere in Los Angeles. Los Angeles writes its poems on my arms and in the pig meat I'm frying for my son. A riot is taking place outside our window where there used to be a religious ceremony, a technology of innocence. The poem is an erotic technology of sounds. They are worthless. I want to kiss my wife's lips in the afternoon's sun-ruined reliquary but I'm running out of money. I can tell from the pigeons that wake me in the morning. It's like they say about moths and music - I can't see the flames and the sound of paper burning doesn't feel political until you start reading the words. The words are almost always about the body. I can't make them out without a glass of champagne. I caught a fever from my mother's cancer. I caught a worthless feeling from the necklace that looked Egyptian and it was akin to the excitement one might get from going bankrupt. It feels like I'm singing the words to a hit song about Marie Antoinette. Or else I'm just reading the newspaper about silk moths. Or else blacking out. Dreaming about a thousand candles lit inside the worthless word, Satanic. The poem must be Satanic or in some other fantastic way worthless. Has to free the inmates from the mills in which they own nothing except their own deaths. Can you hear how full of hate I am? And how much love I feel for my daughter as she imitates helicopters in war zones. Love is the only debt. Death is the only joke I don't understand. A pun. I'm drawn to foreign sounds I can't read. So I write a poem inside a slaughter house. An allegory about paradise. About riots. I use it to soak up the blood from a pig. I make a red snow angel on the floor. A slush angel in Los Angeles while wearing silk. I take out the trash. The trash takes me out. I'm outside of language. Even the surveillance camera doesn't understand what I'm saying with words on a page that is dissolving in the slush. I'm going to win. |