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