Read to Kill
Based on contraband, based on stealing fire, based on the thrill of nothingness
I could consider paying taxes if reading is all you want and maybe a little tidying up. But as it is each night a new piece of shit falls from the hole in the sky. The vast arms that encircle us with their discontinuities remain unable to reach me aside from the occasional caress.
Fragments of fragments, one must recreate oneself in the image of conscious activity. When I leave this town, I’m stealing your bike-rack and putting my broken one through your windshield. It’s like I told the cops, when I’m reading don’t fucking talk to me.
Another Front
I’m certain the mob runs this place
in order to sleep with regular people.
Tell them I’m at their service.
Tell them what you just told me.
There’s real consequences to listening to this stuff
to letting your parents back into your life
by the unlikeliest opportunity they’ve been waiting for
amid opportunity’s infinite proliferation
a new bed-frame descends, a door
like the color of poppies
the collar of puppies
our things have begun to think differently about
themselves, which I picked up on right away
when my seed spilled out of me at the foot of
gorgeous bridge that spans my life.
A besieged lord with a horse’s head
in automobile that can decipher Linear B,
I’m leaving you some of my best ideas
the better to deface my greatest minds.
The seems are not what you think. Your somatic experience?
Everyone gets a chance to linger near me
in the form of a giant fissure,
and it’s truly life changing to be in the warmth
of that body which prefers not to exist,
that does not know doubt. Truly, one is like a bug on a hinge.
My Dear Nature Lovers
The trees waggle at the entrance to the dark. Don’t say anything that might be fondled down the line –– the slope of which rises to a terminal peak, somewhat developed along the mule-track by various outbuildings. This diarrhea, I mean diorama, is purely verbal, and I believe nature will copy it, if it hasn’t already in its Spanish and Portuguese past, with all the various small flowering shrubs one finds there, busily metamorphosing into whatever period-dress has been arraigned.
In the bilge, where the flowers are kept by the electrical box, the one that doesn’t close, I am in pain, unable to lift my pen to write neatly. Unable to style ligament and lift of leg, the drawings of animals have no presence with which to incite the playing of cards this morning it feels like, as trains come out of the mines, haunted by irreversible dust.
Though I have fallen by the wayside, friends, whom I may nevermore meet again, jog up and down upon the road. Perchance, in the hollow, there still erupt the vast reflective flowers that inspire you to go look for them.
Car Expert
My car collection would be less valuable without it, he claimed, banging a pink falcon in the zoo; but what sad ghosts were left to wipe up the creme effulgence that constitutes our momentary understanding in the vestibules of the housing market
in anticipation of infinite journey by car. My whole life
seat contact was clouded by jackets or other people
and yet I saw the thruway entrance;
maybe my head was shaved before my mentor could save me
from becoming the law,
where the extra kitchenette would have languished in the qualities of the air.
Curse the Virgin Islands!
My two glass eyes like candy inside a cloak
will not descend into another organism.
Like the bands of quartz on the freeway
that slam into trucks with their reflection
what comes of my plans I never hear
as they’re drawn away to completion, squawking
where ashes turn into fleas and suck the blood of man.
You pause?
We are but peanut shells discarded by cannibals.
❂
TAMAS PANITZ is the author of several poetry books, including The Country Passing By (Model City 2022), Toad’s Sanctuary (Ornithopter Press: 2021), and The House of the Devil (Lunar Chandelier Collective: 2020). Other books include Conversazione, interviews with Peter Lamborn Wilson (Autonomedia: 2022), and The Selected Poems of Charles Tomás; trans. w/Carlos Lara (Schism: 2022). He was tyrant over the online journal Blazing Stadium. Tamas Panitz is also a painter, whose paintings and stray poems can be found on instagram, @tamaspanitz.