Karl Schroeder
Home Decorum
we ceded the front door and went in through the garage. we carpeted the garage and removed our shoes in the driveway. we codified the front door and snuck into the home theater, stacked atop each other in an oversized trenchcoat. we notified our accounts of our change of address and climbed out the virtual fireplace. we got up twice last night to use the bathroom. we scraped the tree frogs off the driveway and awoke on the roof, drenched in gatorade. we moved the contents of the old refrigerator in the garage to the new refrigerator in the garage. we carpeted the driveway and parked our cars on the lawn. we remembered what our grandmothers told us. we burned down the garage and went in through the garage. we painted the front door blue and buried it in the back, next to the dog door.
Scrapped Script
in a fireworks show, the grand finale
in a color-corrected landscape
the timeless tale of a man who watches a bullet
whizz past his face in slow motion
the beam of light from the strip club
baffled astronomers for months
you look older with that haircut
I am older with this haircut
the general mills CEO put on the boo berry mask
the boardroom erupted in laughter
the CEO realized how bored his dog must be
home alone, day after day
anything is productive
if you know that it's moving you
further away from or closer to death
in fireworks shows, ever larger
and grander finales
—an enormous meteorite is heading straight
for new york—but nobody believes the astronomer
...not even his own wife...
UPC: 786936761481
in the future, everything is symmetrical
there are many more dead people and
dead people demand proportion: their
lives to their graves, their graves to
stones the gravestone salesman has
in the back (I think, let me check—)
thoughtful shopping arranges coupons
by date of expiration. poetry supplants the same
meditative restlessness as the aisles in walmart,
which are arranged by a product's capacity to love
a human in the way a human can love a human
under the right circumstances (x)
when there's an odd number of dead people
there will always be one sitting alone,
waiting to hear where the party's
at. at the live-stream of Robin Williams's wake
we said we should have known, we should have
bought that signed mrs. doubtfire poster
we saw at that garage sale that one time
posterity's unifying theme is vanity
which is best observed in living poets
with their crackling minutiae, illuminating
hindsight, sunflowers under the bridge,
moisturized mass killers, panes of glass,
their spaces surrounding, their distances between
bodies that never existed. by now we know the future
will look a lot like now. we planned for the present
by laying out the streets like walmart aisles. we
filled every crater on Mars with dermatological
jargon. for every museum we constructed
for people who killed, or were, we made
sure to press a flower in a dusty tome
at walmart, the rotting grapes
sit in front of the fresh grapes, Robin's
face adorns the impulse section,
flubber moves to the end caps
Bliss Point (x)
I
, which include barometric pressure,
the amount of salt left on our skin
after the hurricane but before the sex,
the consultant came over to reinforce
the extremities (It literally went straight
from [summer] to [winter,]) and offer us:
hard candy with: every meeting, our mothers'
permission. *blue raspberry as an idea circumscribing
the object. *banana as an object precluding itself
the big-name cultural theorist tends his
superlatives like a rooftop garden, chews
similes that he's supposed to suck on
II
, which explain why people enjoy shipwrecks so much,
that the longer something marinades, that the more
lives are lost, that the point is premeditated—
if I were good at crashing ships, I would
form a ship-crashing consultation service
with some of my ship-crashing friends
[ ] to sink the thing, [ ] to just get it
stuck somewhere. (this is as far as we can take
you. any further satisfaction must be pillaged
from nearby villages, and reported
to customer support.) exposure to blue
light is marked by intense mental alertness
III
, which manifests in record concessions sales,
insomnia, and an inability to find our veins
in the movie theater bathroom. they say
the mind processes a body as naked [ ] before
it sees a body (the body an object in transit
to receive itself)—while our grandfathers (bless
their hearts) were opining on declines,
James Cameron's avatar grossed [ ] at the box
office, more than the GDP of [ ], [ ], and [ ]
combined. through sleight of hand I'll transfer the pleasure:
watch as I turn [these] tricks into wine (teppanyaki restaurants,
ecstasy at a music fest, stouffer's meatloaf in the bath after work)
IV
, which further ferments into manic nostalgia,
an odd number of truths, which make a truth
as an adobe brick drying in the sun (the truth
becoming less relative the farther we drive south)
lifesaver candy x circumscribed within throat [ ]
constricts your breath just enough to keep
your throat alive. the veins leave our skin,
intertwine like blue twizzlers. watch as remote
amazonian tribe makes first contact with abc news
*choking on a lifesaver as an act of revolt
*James Cameron as a bucket of brackish water
distilling on the roof of a thatched hut
Castaway Cay
given:
1. “art” is artifice, objectification
2. “art” is the only real creation
hold no allegiance and then even fewer
things will decay
as the backhoes chew on
the lone outcrop on the big-box street
(coral is blasted, sand
is dredged, ships are moored
in the dead, white bay)
it’s so easy to say
that this is not art—to break it down
to constituent parts—
first it is waste, then it is laid
then it decays until it is food
if it is food, it should be beige
it should be gray
it should be black
it should be gray
(it should be blue
it should be slightly lighter blue)
so long lives this
like plastic, a grudge—I hold
no delusions about what I’m doing
I’m only here to get laid