tom taylor - message

‘in the play of language, death disappears’ (canetti) fodder for the muses, troops massing across the pepsi cola bridge to the gods, the dead filtering into my slept apart and elbowed the snoring mate warmly, shoes piled in store rooms, bodies stacked like cordwould at the antechamber to the ovens, mute crowds from all times and places their faces blurred out by the decline of memory or responsiveness as the viewer or inventor itself, him or her or them or us, as the vision itself finds sponsorship by ammunitions manufacturers transported across the ages by victor boot’s airline pilots, fodder for the machine of death’s transfiguration from natural process into sponsored event, but who’s buying?

In the spray of lingo’s death’s disappearance mutes the solipsist’s escape is even found with labels in the empty pockets sewn together with tendon and spline and earsocket, the indian’s genitals worn by the soldiers who killed them, made into tobacco pouches, exhibited in Denver by the raiders, our own little bosnia in the episodes of the uncivil war’s quantrell raiders setting up gattling guns to pacify the natives into disappearance and why do you wait at all for mr death mister blue-eyed boy of cummings’ recall and flutter at the edge of our cynical enterprise the masquerade of progress while as Lafitte said the planet is bathed in blood…

Passing by the open doorway of the building where the whales were cut up, the man in black rubber boots slid across the liquid red floor pushing at the end of his long pole a cube of red flesh two by two by two feet I ran as fast as I could, the stiff ‘thing’ pulled from the car down the tracks I could barely make out death was death nonetheless the numbness in my feet smoke rising around my body from the small-rolled joints of death and dismemberment keeping me awake their feet shuffling through my dreams not sleeping but counting corpses being thrown over the fence one after the next in line was not someone else, as they say, everything in the dream is you (or me) (or us)….

The maps to nowhere sold from machines for a quarter of your fingertip, babies at birth sponsored by the hospital reclaimed upon non-payment for medical purposes, anything that can be imagined will come to pass through the generations which may elect not to follow anything anywhere in this dream passing through the illusions as through an eye glassly the demon dripping sloth and froth from nasal and passageways fumed with the decline of the slope of instability at the end of time’s bare munificence not remembered.

In the photo from the slaughterhouse, the fat guy in a bloody apron drank warm blood from a tin cup and smiled knowingly at the lens-eye, you are next, he finishes his break and gets back to the task at hand all this in the silence of the empty minded and broken hearted remaining on the planet while it spins into the sum and portal of what will not be spoken nor remembered my father’s ashes sliding like kitty litter into the gray black waters under the golden gate bridge the sailor returned into his medium which was assigned rather than chosen a life a life my geek fisherman’s cap sailing from the end of the boat after the sandy nothingness had quickly slid into the water and we all felt the shock and finality and emptiness and compromise and futility of the end of the moment we’d been called together for, my mother preceding him into the same waters with none to see or think or feel but the boat captain and the neptunian clerk of the shadows…