Mark Wallace



from Party in my Body

Welcome to a world beyond your wildest insinuations. Home and commercial air conditioning ended our abrupt and misplaced passion. Becoming morally serious, the great man sputtered, coughed, fell silent. Isolation. Self check-out. Boredom as a function of things one is forced to ignore. No grandeur of the shadowed hills, no caustic street-fed walking. Let the brutal blood-breathed bird bath be. The instigations of nonsense! If I abandon my body, will no one ever find me?
*
Tell me a story about knuckling under. I wish we'd take a field trip. How many people work in zoos? Internal affairs is closing in. Do you suffer from innuendo? The fear of insects, rats, and basements made quite a few businesses money last year. Why is that barber chasing that priest? Boats on the river of romantic longing! I hear you've got a new chicken. All these unused wings and claws.
*
It'll soon be time to fade and laugh. Learning to regret the sunrise, I'll write you from the fall of forever. People I'd love to have beside me! On the sidewalk, the world seems changed, Reverend Tanner's pawn shop. More than one gets torn to pieces. Would you look straight at it? Or wonder at the long cold plain? Adjustments are made to measure night against a single cry. How to tell it to anyone? When a day disappears like this, I feel like nothing is ever replaced.
*
Can we list you as a dead end? Decisions about what counts as news never count as news. Dipping into relevant jealousies, I'm getting the exclusive lie. A hidden city under the hidden city under the hidden city and so on. Is it time to tell the time bomb's story? What's your professional plan? Beware of shadows in this ghost town graveyard. Did we produce enough emotion? Life as a series of special effects! People should have more sex at work.
*
For an hour, I sit in the sun and do what I want and consider why the world seems cold. How to get to the point of finding what people have to do with things. Motivation and discrepancy. In front of a camera, a model walks back and forth. What's the edge of your jurisdiction? Who can see with all these pictures? Ignoring an official emergency, people saunter through the courtyard. Avoiding the basic terms! So many illusions couldn't be planned, but enough of them are to confuse distinctions. Excuse me for forgetting my time card.
*
When there's nothing better to do, I write poems. Spears, bows, and arrows have directly affected modern weapons. Pervasively having no impact, one learns what to ignore. Is it time to want less than ever before? Another tragedy masquerades as a minor annoying lack. Excuse me, when is lunchtime? Traffic and the need for love! For a search that would lead to breathing, people will plunder anything. The low burn of feverish disconnection points out who will never know you. Not that robot theory again.