6.

F.W. Murnau pulled himself up, rubbing the plague in
sleepy granules from his eyes. As he did this,
boulders rolled by, as if suspended in a current;
somewhere at some point in his peripheral vision they
dipped beyond the mess of his perception . The
pavement was carpeted with blunt teeth of glass. He
smiled; he knew he was smiling emptily.

Jean Cocteau, he thought; was it inappropriate to
think of Jean after last night? He'd stood in a field,
after reading too many emails about poetry and parks;
on one side, some sort of company dispatched its
trucks for the night; on one side, the irrevocable
back lot of a shopping center unrolled beneath a pink
sky that murmured about distance , murmured and
followed The Death of Love, already distraught-thin
and stumbling vacantly, across the sick punches his
shoes shot into the newly-rained-on grass. On one
side, sleep fell like windows of a house across the
nihil fragrance of tobacco interlaced with his shirt.
And he didn't–or, more appropriately, couldn't–care:
the blitzed starvation in that broken smile The Death
of Love wore had already leached him of everything
he'd known as human.

So F.W. Murnau tried to think of the inhuman. Almost
by reflex he thought first of the computer; the
inarticulate stutter of pages and pictures building
up, loading. The safety of binary, of hexadecimal, of
instruction code and logic and mathematics and
everything a man had to translate to touch. Every act
presupposed another; in the computer, mediation upon
mediation built up a skin that, because of its
density, was highly polished. And yet, lying face up
in that field, a dawn in gauze staining the overcast,
it seemed to F. W. Murnau to be a half-hearted effort.
To understand the computer, to occupy the space of the
computer, was nothing more to him than a man trapped
in a trick house of mirrors; the unfamiliarity of the
house turned out to be only himself, distorted by his
own hand.

Masturbation! It sickened him to stare into a mirror
all day. Jean was like that; Jean never seemed to
leave himself, no matter how many long walks in the
park they took together. The Death of Love, on the
other hand, was the exact opposite: F.W. Murnau
wondered sometimes if The Death of Love was ever
herself; she stared out the windows of the apartment
all morning long, blinking slowly, untouchable, with
all the exclusiveness of a pariah. If Jean Cocteau,
every time F.W. Murnau touched him, froze, heat
spitting around him, splitting the pores of the air,
The Death of Love, when similarly stimulated, would
only sigh.

He shrugged. He didn't see the point in much of
anything anymore. Most of the trucks had left for the
night. A tired-looking young man opened the back door
of the Save-a-lot; he tossed a greasy white trash bag
into the dumpster.

Th dawn birds had stopped singing.



=====


NEW!!!–Dirty Milk–reactive poem for microphone http://www.lewislacook.com/DirtyMilk/

http://www.lewislacook.com/

tubulence artist studio: http://turbulence.org/studios/lacook/index.html








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