Johannes Göransson

Dear Ra,

Welcome to a slow-down. Welcome to Sanity and Peace. Welcome to a life called Plunder and a hope called Cashed. A Haiku About Your Body and Other Picnics I Shouldn't Have Picked Through. A Haiku About Bang-Bang-Ugh and Something Too Heavy To Swim. K. says it's my posture that gets me in trouble wherever I go. Any second the door will slam open. It's 4:56 p.m. in Spanish Harlem. Lets bleed our century. Tourists are painted black as baby seals. Somebody is on the verge of a nervous breakthrough. You didn't understand what I meant when I said, "You say nothing in your letters." Do you consider the latest CD you bought a devastating insight into your love of parking lots? How did you tame my strychnine? How do I sew the seams back together? Do I use fists or stilts? How did the roof get so funky? Did you buy that CD I told you about? Do you still smoke parliaments? Make every day Meat Day! Make your mouth taste like a bicycle! An expert told me you have an eye called the Eye of Hours, that your fantasies are bright as TV. My retina comes from Nebraska. My soul comes from a card game with a retarded god who didn't understand the rules. I make up the creepiest rules. I invented last year out of cigarettes and a frightened vision of space. I invented my snares just before I figured out that I was the only prey in the woods. I invented a pack while I was running, and a fall while it was dark. I haven't invented perspective yet. This poem makes my past look like a highway leaking out of my head. It makes me look like a floor. I'm rewriting this poem. It used to be sweeter. Now I want to give you barbwire and rashes. I want to dress you in a sweaty sweater and matching pants. I want to insist. I want to trade in my torso for new obstacles. Maybe I'm writing to the wrong address. Maybe Egypt is extinct. Maybe I'm laughing as I write this. I have a Maoist sense of humor. The last few nights I've been hearing a child cry "don't please don't please don't," but it's not quite a child. It sounds partly like a cat in heat. A friend of mine read this poem and said: "Johannes, you're a sick twisted fuck." When did you get so interested in lamination? Fat pigeons are fluttering through this poem, crapping and shuffling their folds. This poem is ticking, ticking. The rich own the rackets; the poor play with wrists. What's wrong with this picture? I don't make corsets out of charred gloves. I'm sitting in a Starbucks at 3rd Ave and 94th Street. I don't want to nail my arms to yours. I write with my asthma. I want my feathers ruffled. I want my pigs squealed. I have a hysterical aesthetic. Those snips you hear - that's just me inventing again. I'm trying to make an out, but it's turning into an in. Bees without wings - that's my next project. And after that - orifices. Don't let my skin fool you. This is a game of chicken. You've got the wishbone, I've got the beak.

Dear Ra,

In this chapter you will be played by the pretty little curly-headed singer from the Bangles; my dick will be played by a moron; Jesse Garon will be played - poorly - by the bored ghost of Bertold Brecht; and I'll be played by an old homosexual with white wispy hair and glasses and a definite problem with booze and nostalgia. Don't ask me how I'll be able to make it marketable. All I really need is you dancing naked like an Egyptian. What do you think about setting it in a pool hall? A public pool with hair in the water? This is an exhibitionist flick, a nervous tick, a tattered bit of barroom humor, bloated by a heavy payroll racket I can't kick out of my skull.

The Screenplay of Our Porno

Our Lady of Snow and Our Slow Lady: These are the two girls I keep in my garage, these are the trinkets I tinker with when my day droops yellow. Dear Lady of Snow, are you the girlfriend of a teenage mutiny? A message in a bottle from a desperate bleeder? A song written in jail about whiskey? Was it supposed to be about childhood? Either way, the only important question is: Will you hide my raw with your white, will you sooth my scarlet, will you wool my tool?

Dear Lady Slowly, did you maybe dream of babies who wheeze strangely? Is this the card you were thinking of? The Queen of Pork. Did you squeeze it when I wetted you? Do you play with lye? Do you slowly slacken when I've slipped it out? Why do you like to be licked slowly, my tongue not even touching your clit, while you sister likes to be almost nibbled and chewed? I'm not missing your teeth. Why do you talk so dearly to the geezer with the glasses? His wig is fried like chicken. His charm is a tampered piece of evidence from the lost case of the man who thought he was the first but was not even second and proceeded to peel things that don't peel.

Dear little J. A. in a garden with a riot hose,

I'm sorry about the locket; I'm sorry about your face. Some promises just can't be kept cold enough in here. I'm sorry about trading in your childhood for figurines, but remember that you've let your orphans run all over this architectural congestion, turning it crinkly, turning it flushed. I can't even hear my feet as I walk anymore. I can't smell my shit in the bathroom, I can't fuck the gashed lady in the couch, I can't jack off without history peering in. They've turned me into a cough at the piano recital. They're ripping up furniture. They're trying to turn my panic into a jigsaw puzzle.

Dear John,

Today there are two killers dancing on each other’s graves. Today a kiss and a crank-call are twitching in my pajamas. One was a blunt object, one wishes she could turn the tables into dust. Today my groove is in their graves and their graves are stark raving craving meat. My mind is subject to interrogations concerning your disappearance. I tell the cops what I told the girls and my own hands: You came here disguised as a faint hope, and you left as the leader of the free world. My lawyer can't speak. I took care of his mouth and drained his library. I stumped his birds while he was busy bailing me out of my masterpiece. As a fellow surgeon, I'm sure you understand.

Come to think of it, Dr. Ashbery, we've never been introduced to each other. I've studied your case histories of wet cases. You are the premier expert. Your dissection of the child-victim of a hit-and-run won't end. But you have no idea who I am. I run these operations on a tight budget. I found my calling in a chase that ended "quivering on the sidewalk," as they said on the 10 o'clock news. I pilfered your lush and lapped up the leftovers from your last-ditch attempt. I crashed your hairdo party and lived to tell the tale of a wheel chair. Now I'm the one with eyes. Now I'm pulling bodies out of a wreck and a lake you thought was empty. Was that your kid whose farce didn't fare well? Are you related Anastasia of Florida? It now strikes me that you've been lounging in my house without paying, without once asking me why I invited you in the first place, or why I smuggled artifacts out of your suitcase.

Let me tell you. My name is Meme the Modern. I've invented a new brand of surgery - I don't try to keep things together that should fall apart; I pluck them, I shuck them, I ship them to opposites sides of the house. I'm trying to cut the connection between ladies who crouch in my garage, knitting their lives together using nails as needles and a blue thread that looks like a vein. I try to isolate one killer from the other, while they're trying to synchronize their breaths. See them shiver, see them imitate a car in winter, a bird in rubble, a racket with ropes; see them race, see them rifle through crippled riffs, seem them stand so still they look like they're worshiping.

You know the God I'm talking about. The god of rock n' roll nostalgia, the god of struck, the swarming god, the grasping god, the god of a certain fluttering I feel by the window, the glistening god of pavements. You've taken such good care of the little thing, though you never found the car that hit it. That's what I'm here for. I have a camera. A voice is shouting in my tape player. I have a scene to shoot and a childhood to desiccate. I'm leaving the lye in your bed.

Dear Ra,

My cinematographer wants to know why I claim that there's a devil in this letter. He wants to name our movie The Salvaged. His favorite movie is Tarkovsky's The Sacrifice. Maybe I'm not Satan, but at the very least I'm skinny and in need of a haircut. I’m baptized in ants. The commission has studied my squirrels and my utterly mixed metaphors. The chairman suspects my letters are ransom notes. My premises have been vacated. My gym teacher was never exposed in the tabloids. My officers are searching for an abduction. My favorite sociologists are rummaging through my drawers, searching for some brilliant disorder they can call their own.

My favorite dogs are belching.

Must be the doughnuts I fed them. Must be Monday morning. A professional typist is testifying in my corner. Journalists ask him about William Blake. Jerks ask him about cold chicken, and why I've sown up my nights with such a thick thread. Republicans asked him why I wrote my messages to you on the fridge. Did I use red paint to make it look like blood? Did I try to pollute the penises of the youth of America? The Democrats still think you're a china doll from Illinois.

My role model was arrested for disappearing. He was let out on a technicality.

Once I drew dimes in this smeltery, now I'm inflamed. I got sick riding around on the NYC subway. My lungs caught up with my panic. A wilding whacked through my store. The boxing gloves were the first to go, the gasp was the last to get stomped on. It was that gasp I desperately wanted to save. That gasp was my Sandinista childhood, my Death Squad playmate.

Jesse Garon thinks it was the Last Great Symbolist Project. I knew my nightmares were too subtle for this neighborhood.

Uh-oh.

Something is starting to creep into this letter with the sweaty theories and ropes. Something is starting to whistle in the gristle.

Something is starting to tap-dance with my fingers. Something tells me we have an illicit but charming child running an insane asylum in Cairo. You're lucky I'm typing this on my computer. If forced to decipher my handwriting, you might think this was a scientific tract on the migrant patterns of birds. I'm an expert on beaks, not escape routes. My perverted professor says you're a symbol of the American puritan heritage. My cinematographer says you're pretty enough to be a meat-hook symphony. Sometimes slaughter sounds curiously like a slang term for yearning. Don't get upset if I say I loved you for your ass. Do you really think I'm writing this? It's you-know-who. The unfunny farce. The ground meat of God. A protest dragging torn tiaras and other leftovers through the mall.

Johannes did write this: "Last night I went to a rock show and smoked too many cigarettes and thought of you. It's true. I even picked up some girl - or she picked up me - but I had to leave because she was boring and not as pretty as you."

The first time I talked to you was at the party after my reading at that lame art gallery. You didn't say very much. The last time I saw you I thought to myself: There is a little flake in her peach fuzz.

Dear Ra,

In hell everyone wear mullets. The protestant in me might say this place is bawdy. The catholic in me might mail postcards of cows tearing apart a small mammal with their teeth to his ex-lovers. The stink in me might call this place empty. The poverty in me might try to steal a fur coat but end up giving head to the wrong me in a slaughtered room.

Did I ever tell you about the girl who loved jars? Do you often pretend to be a cover-up? Have the Romantic Poets contacted you? They've mistaken a county road for your voice. They're hiding in old refrigerators. If it's good enough for the diurnal curse, it's good enough for my binges.

Hard was the highway that brought me down. Tenderly was how you sucked my dick, and tenderly was how you swallowed. I'm sorry if I can't stop talking about zoology. Once a cage, always a chatter. Forgive me for revealing things about your private life and genitals, for making your life seem tacky as a ghost in a parking lot, for making you into a trivia question in the 'souvenirs' category.

K. told me day-old coffee is poisonous. I have no choice. A headache is already starting to bite. Do you really think this letter is about you anymore? Do you even think this letter is addressed to you? If you're reading this letter, it's an accident. One involving a bicycle and a hard surface. My name is Stuck. Have you fed my fists? Are you the one who smothered my ride?

It was the sheets that failed me;

the sheets and those clammy

little sticks you pretended were matches.

I won't rob a grocery store, but I'm hanging with hysteria and I'm not wearing any band-aids. What did you do with the shirt I bought when I visited death row? I may need it back. I'm as nervous as a guilty person. All I need is a charge and it will stick. All I need is a girl and I'll stick it in. Don't say I'm a monster, I'm a small-time crook at best, and stricken at worst. With what only kleptomaniacs know.

These days seem like shreds,

but you should have seen me last winter

my days hijacked, my nights like glaucoma.

The news people are saying that the quietest liquid in the world is dangerous. I have been wandering around on the bottom of a swimming pool not knowing that the water was sick. A mother is crying outside the company's gates. Maybe the liquid turned her beautiful son into a heavy-metal gash. Maybe the blind girl drank too much silence. Maybe she fingered herself too much. Birds are trying to squeeze notes through the pasty mass of sky. Flowers smell like lead. I don't care if the liquid screws me up. I don't care if I become a lesbian or a frisbee. The company is trying to hide its tap-dancing behind a florid facade. The dancers are trying to hide the hideous wrinkles around their eyes.

Dear Ra,

Last night I went to a party downtown because I heard the bar was open. I expected to come home in a trash bag but it was 5 bucks for a beer and that doesn't even begin to describe my irritation with all the stockbrokers staggering around on the dance floor. I made up several metaphors for them, but they were all wrong.

The closest I came to capturing their dementia was "staggering like oil-soaked birds in an ad for extinction," but I've used extinction ads too many times to describe your cold cold fingers on my chest and you are nothing like those stock brokers, or “oil-soaked” for that matter. Birds (Did I mean seagulls?), now that’s a whole different matter. That is for the ornithologist to figure out with their fragile bone structures and implements.

I don’t know the first thing about prodders or cracked ribcages. I'm an expert on curfews, sarcophagi, TV static, sheets that need to be washed, barks, brackish wrists, nicks, water-damaged walls, birthday gifts and chunks.

I’m not an expert on the Silent Era but I have been to the Odessa Steps and I have talked to you in a public bathroom and I have been robbed at gunpoint.

Still, I wouldn’t call myself an expert.

Maybe I would call myself an amateur or an amateur flagellant. Or a foreigner in a gossip column. Or a gossip about foreign objects thrown through windows of a Cairo hotel in the middle of the night.

This letter is obviously about classifications, but don’t despair. The next chapter will be more practical. It will tell you how to make an incision in a pig's throat. It will be addressed to history. It will implicate women's swarming bodies and describe race riots in terms of Brechtian aesthetics.

(Good thing! This poem needs some colors to make it marketable in places other than abortion clinics! )

Warning: This is when the story gets truly sincere. If you're reading this to your children, tell them to go to sleep now.

Warning: You will learn how to rifle, how to rake, how to forsake, how to ram (if ram is this animal I'm throttling), how to jam just enough nasty antics into a parade to make it seem like the worship of a shunned item, a moist, delicate item, for example the sore from a small dog's bite.