JOHANNES GORANSSON
RETINA, IGNITE
There are many reasons why my
reconstructions fail. For one, horse screams are impossible outside elevators.
We need grates. We need some space to bleed. There are many titter-tatters
inside God. There are many feet kicking. There are many reasons to want out. My
hares are offensive. Listen to them digging in the sand. Listen to my
squandered chest. Listen.
The birds of paradise have expired.
They must have been throbbing. They must
have been bright. Touch. There are many reasons we feed them to the pigs. They
don’t make any noise in the pigs’ mouths. They flap but they cannot make any
more sounds. The only sound in this museum: a centipede burrowing into your
eardrum.
Listen. The funeral has begun.
The Sound:
kneeling, incised
barked torso
ornamental infanticides in
the ceiling
soak a foot in salt
water
If the marching
band is tearing down the cutout Christs, who is
painting a bird on my chest? That
plucked anatomy doesn’t look like last night at all. That’s a joke I keep telling
myself about last night to confuse the gentle peruser
who wants to stab open my landscape painting to feel the stained hares inside.
She wants to knead them like dough in my hands. When I talk about last night
this openly, I am joking in a panicky way. When I say “last night,” I don’t
mean night as much as a woman, the white color of her thighs. Or the swan that
burst out of my wife’s dress. Or my wife’s voice in my ear.
Or my flocked torso. My barked
torso. My car alarm car alarm car alarm.
traversed
distance
After puncturing the grand opera,
we moved into more
advanced anatomies,
teaching immigrants how to
speak
with peanuts in their
mouths
while watching the tiger
devour another lamb.
Now all we have to do is teach them
how to find a tunnel
and douse it.
We will be stuck on the other side.
Last night’s architecture exhibits many
foreign influences. The ceiling is unusually low for a horse show. Walls are
not usually this thick unless the rooms are used for interrogations. The main
stylistic impulses of the decorative patterns seem to come from the orient or
some such illusion of tranquility. The persistent iconographic feature of the
open eyes seems to come from the fire. The realistic style is nostalgic. The
flecks on the torso appear to be real blood, if not human blood then the blood
of a horse. The birds are trying to escape. The glass is almost unbreakable
unless you use a hammer.
The poem engraved on the torso should not
be read.
Its obscene depiction gives us an idea
of what the
architecture looked liked before the fire.
No pigs in the elevators! No pigs in the
women! No disfigured birds or pigs or horse screams! And absolutely no drive-in
theatrics with my x-rays!
I’m reconstructing the horse farce with a
garden hose and an infant.
The only problem is that all these
beautiful beautiful birds
disfigured and fed to
grunting pigs cannot fit into the elevators.
I want to fit them all into the eye of a
needle.
I want to stitch up the landscape. I want to
drive the bungled
innocents down the well and
into town like loud lambs.
Come my chosen
birds
Come my brick
narrative
The theme of the futility of reconstruction
is inscribed in my medicine chest. I’m scratching through the shelves searching
for a drug to swallow, the right implements to make a cut.
When I tell you that I’m trying to
reconstruct last night’s architecture I mean that I’m trying to drown a horse
in a mudslide or a kindergarten. When I tell you that God is violent in the
elevator I mean: there is not enough space for all of those hammers in your
seashell collection. A torso can contain an entire October of birds. But eyes
can only take so many breakouts.
A torso can contain a travesty of stitches.
What do you keep inside your abandoned
factory?
I keep carving up my legs up there in your
abandoned factory.
I keep pearls soft in my mouth. I keep my
hares hid in my woman.
I clean a woman with turpentine. The hares
will be safe in there
but they will choke,
choke wonderfully like a car alarm.
I’ve been worried about my slippery puzzle
since I sat through a movie about traffic jams hiding my hares inside my shirt.
I thought they had sharp teeth but they don’t have any teeth at all. They don’t
even have a mouth.
Bleed my hares. Bleed me a bed for all the
starving children. Bail me out. Not because I’m innocent but because the show
must go on, and the show needs a pair of eyes that have been used for
photographs. This is not my voice. It’s a recording.
The hares are breeding in the cabinet.
This is my voice. This is my
the barbarians. This
anatomy was made to model
for Dührer’s allegorical representation of corruption.
Green. That was the color
of my eyes when I wrote a poem called “The Diary of a Pig Circus” about the
assassination of my silhouette. I will probably paint over the naked girl with
the guitar string because I like to keep my music clean and my girls alive. The
mice scurrying around in the projector sound like an itch. The kneeling figure
with his arms outstretched is the donor. His body is drawn with great
plasticity, a style that was later eliminated by the linear styles of the later
period.
We need some space
to bleed.
We need a tree in
which to breed.
(Why is the bird still intact?)
“In general the
picture is the apparition of an appearance.” (Duchamp)
This command was written on a mural
featuring children rising out of boxes. The style suggests a direct influence
from the international Gothic workshops. The snakes are undulating wonderfully
in the pajamas. The holes are in the bellies. I’m writing this poem on a
cutting room floor while editing a documentary about the Massacre of the
Innocents. Before I came in here someone was editing a film about distance. The
landscape is shot from far away, from behind a wall. The soldiers are curious.
The working title is “Ostranenie.” The voice-over is Shklovsky reading Zoo:
Letters Not About Love.
My hare is shivering here. Touch me. Here.
Here. “Am I really that disgusting” shouts one of the strippers into my ear.
“No, I’m cold” I shout back but I keep looking at the scar on her little belly.
The gorgeous money shot will be dismantled on the sidewalk. The scar will be
erased.
Do you want my broken fist? It’s actually
my brother’s broken fist but he won’t need any broken fists in the barn where
he’s going to sell pearls to swine. He’s going to engineer a change. I hope to
engineer my emptiness into another kind of animal, one less likely to get
struck on a dark highway. The final paradigm of the landscape as a reclining
woman would be pacifying if it weren’t for the smell of oven-gas and the holes
in my eyes.
I can’t see a single thing
I don’t want to wear
on my body like a car
skidding out of control.
I joined the Big Dance with a rotten scarf
wrapped around my baby sister and a theological look in my eyes. I originally
ended this with a shiver in the animal and an image of distance as salvation.
I’m discussing the recreation again. Realizing that it will
fail again. My torso was not made for birds. It was made for herds and