Stick Your Tongue
Between the Sea and Land

i.

   Did we ever hear the sea smother the sea lions their coats of supple hair the rich ladies look so nice drowning in and the parasites riding deep in the submerged scalp pulling blood from the suckling of kelp where a face is lifted like a president's grave far from the sight of the people covered over and over by the gentle shifting of weight no matter what weight the weight of sea the weight of   and did we ever get caught with our arm inside another person's head running our fingerprints across the inner bristles the soft inner echo across the fury of stable razorblades imbedded in the junk of the opening and closing—the sausage apertures—the coarse digressions of the mind which starting with sea will end with itself in a deep fearful slash charging down the seam of a rather serene terrestrial sound such as hunk! isn't it to be sure different than sip! which is a sound that liquid or rasssssssssssssTtt! the sound of air; kelp makes such a sound when it screams at night and rising you rush out of the security of the sanity of your bag to meet them.........................................

ii.

   o here hold my foot a bit how far now is it do you suppose it is that we have swum..?..nigh onto nigh mile he answered somewhat sardonically albeit wet:  savagely he turned and spat and his split and horribly cracked lips murmured sad sweet reminiscent psalms the like of which Calvin himself would not have approved of to the slowly sinking foot.  Once let go of she was able to swim through his encrusted nose like a whale blowing through a drop of angostura bitters.  And since seeing that she could then would not until seeing far far ahead he in the light stroked her arm calling called her she prayed for his calling his arm her or at least would have in the mean time found it somewhat more acceptable than this what you would call hard swimming rising with each wave to falling with each wave she called wave there is an arm raised high above water like an arm raised high above the water and it is possible that i cannot continue to
   bifurcate disassemble disorder crack splinter shift
   separate orders the reason
do not swim with kelp it is as if life swam with life the man told her when she and only she was pulled from the slipping night

iii.

   Right there at the edge of the beach another couple were talking well did you catch that she said swimming nigh onto nigh mile straight into the sun and apparently unclothed although aw shut up and pass me another beer and throw a log on the bonfire and unwrap one of those baloney and thuringer sandwiches and move over a little so i can see and stop fidgeting and moving around and running off at the mouth so much i love you so much he murmured in return stroking her arm without the ingrained passion which has for all its faults become so popular on our beaches these days.  She fell down and looking back across the slow grey water said why when you raised your hand did he say the obvious that is he said   god
i am tired lying on the beach watching the quietness the bifurcating lovers hard along the sand keep scratching at parasites running into their eyes from the skull's passage.......

iv.

(THEN WE WENT LOOKING OUTWARD)

   o the day has suddenly become quite brown as though a grasshopper had spat tobacco juice into my eyes and all at once a dog having become sensitive to such things fell prone on the icy path before us!  thus the covertly seeking culture stalks us:  runes signs subtle pressures organic intricate interwoven in secret clauses rescind the common and the common conversely threatens to become—to become!
   The sleety weight of government—clabbered stale sour flat heavy (the poetry of beer farts in a closed elevator) the definitive nonessential clutching mediocrity a prayer wheel of bullets sunday of fire scar on the great scar of rhetoric and the rationalization of plain shit.
   Stereomaterialism/Musak/Flagvirtue/Creepinganomie
dreams of steel and crinoline dreams of gossamer chrome dreams of white brass yellow brass white metal lead zinc pale gleaming gold dreams of fiberglass soldiers and plastic Indians dreams of the supple flesh of virgin timber and the riddle of barbed wire; we dream of fruity ripe rotten plains above which the American Bald Eagle glides collecting used conundrums weather balloons businessmen and doctors from Chicago drunk in a Piper Cub and lost where the Psalter peppers the air with thick decorous curses pungently carried on an inversion of rarefied stink across the silent decayed committee charged by the president with the crucial task of investigating the complete collected possibilities of forming at some later date a mirror image of this committee of which the Psalter speaks to be charged in turn with cynicism.

v.

(BUT WE SCREAMED AT THE TIDE)

   "The statistical emergence of human values threatens to beat a bloody kink in the marginality and death-like complacency of inviolate laws—such things as books we have been able to force our presence onto like a rock in foam until a third presence is known.  The cultivation of a pure and fertile light is precluded by an ordering and infinite infinite breakage of electric veils such as capriciousness is necessarily ordered by the desire.  Once in context you have settled the matter.  Already some have cut their tongues into flagstones and cast them on a mercury pool where the stone fell through the slick sides of mercury-like echoes at night in civic buildings."

Copyright © David Dwinell 2003