#357 L'Écuyère

                                    There's a nursery rhyme I part
                         remember. Something about
                              riding a cock-horse to Banbury
                Cross, to see a fine lady upon
                                        a white horse. Perhaps that's
                                  what's happening here. The 
                        young girl, now dismounted 
                                     from her mother's knee, has
                              turned her back on the white 
                                     horse & the lady in — though 
                     clothed — Godiva pose. Is per-
                                  haps contemplating the cubism
                             of the tombstone that her body
                               has become, the tumbled straight-
                                       edged landscape, the upright
                         dwellings, the church beyond. 
                                 Is that Banbury Cross? she may 
                                          be wondering. Which way is the
                                    lady facing as she rides along?

#356 (Untitled Collage, c. 1926)

Eyeballs drone across the
sky at regular intervals.
Occasionally they fall. Still
see nothing. Or, if they do,
it does not register. The

bird on wings of song has
escaped its cage, lies flat
upon a table. A 1920s
flapper thinks the cage is
an apartment block, looks

for an empty one to live in.
The sky is a sandy shade
of ambergris. It may not be a
bird. Whales swim by. They
sing. In an unknown register.

#355 The Song of the Sirens

I am waiting for the Prince
of Ithica to pass by. My

weapons for the skirmish are
lined up behind me. A glass

of water to wet the throat
should stronger singing

be required. The candle is a
lighthouse in reverse, as an

attraction not a warning. A
leaf to augment the wreath.

The stone wall to keep me up-
right when he embraces me.

#354 The Silvered Chasm

           The e-library                 charges
       me $42 for                    a 24 hour
          pass to access          any
          single steam           punk
       novel. They                  do not
      usually take                       me
          long to read;                       but
        this one has                       a serious
     tension to it,                           that boils
   its way to eat                       my walls 
       away. It melts                        crowbars, has 
           peeled the eyes           from the jester 
    bilboquets & left             them pasted 
         to a nearby                        plinth. The now
       revealed bells                  ring out in 
           horror. I can                     not look 
         away. The                      steampunk novel 
     remains unfinished            reading. $42 
             PayPalled for                  another day.

#353 The Art of Living

The rave was all that
was promised. Music in
various colors, smoke
of various sorts, a
subsequent disconnect

between limbs & mind —
while at the same time
both feel amazingly
intertwined. Living in
La La Land isn't
art, it is artifice.

#352 [Untitled]

We have seen parts
of this before. The

sleeper in his capsule
hotel, dreams keeping

him suspended above
a familiar meteorite

from which the
landscape stays its

distance, in thrall to
the gravitational pull.

#351 Total: 0

                        Having been told that 
              the next digital revolution
                            would come about by
                    finding a cornerstone to 

                            act as a key to decode 
                        your name, then trans-
                                posing those numbers
                     onto your face so as to 

                    explore your relationship 
                             with your spirit animal,
                         Magritte tried it out &
                           came up with nothing.

#350 The Connivance (2)

Today was the
day I’d put aside
for Patagonian tooth-
fish, but overfishing
by illegal longliners
has rendered them
commercially extinct

so all I can
do now
is cast
some
short
lines
into

the ocean & re-
mind them they
probably would have
lasted longer if
they'd continued
to be known as
Chilean Sea Bass.

#349 Wreckage of the Shadow

Renaissance is alive &
thriving this year. No-
thing else to touch it for
style or energy. Disassembled
birds—hallucinatory, peri-

lous as a minefield—set
faces to grimace, then set
out to create epic doom
metal albums from flat
unpolished non-metal

surfaces that carry no
images of the world
around yet still reflect
the importance of set-
ting up a mise-en-scène.

#348 The Discovery of Fire (3)

a bass horn catches alight
a bass hor   atches a  gh
a bas  h r    tc es a  g
  bas  h       c es
   as  h         es

#347 La Part du Feu

In no particular
order, the clues are
a carrot, an egg, &
a glass of some un-
known liquid, vin
or vinegar, it's not
clear. In no particular
order, raindrops keep
falling from the ceil-

ing, a candle halos
but provides no light —
though an external
light source casts a
compressed shadow
of the housekeeper on
to the carpet. In no part-
icular order, Hercule
Poirot, as played by

David Suchet —who
isn't — is dead, the
housekeeper main-
tains not a vigil but
a pretense of life
within the room, hard
to tell if the egg is
hard-boiled, easy to
see the detective isn't.