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Do you speak oil? The sun death of economies
now fossilizing in their own inky rhetoric, spreading
moments of inertia full astern that guarantee landsfall.
Do you speak nations or flag? Cost-benefits that slide
ratios of 10-to-one or 1000-to-one invisibly absorbed
in unmarked graves - 'raped' counted by ones by nuns
or nuns raped counted by tens or American nuns spoken
in news-translated communiqués of depressing state-talk,
newsssssssspeak crackling against the starched habits of
shiny whitefaces married to god, Do you speak Church?
Or prattle in Family, codes, linguistics, cultures bound
by familiar rules , pater familia, tu est sanctus, tu est filius,
to a fault, a grammar from which expurgated syntax will be imagined
but not worn, daily papers imagined but not read, lining bottom
drawers, of secrets ,, folded paper-hat birthdays celebrating
the inevitable countdowns, waitouts, showdowns, …, pick-me-up
marriages made with pressure-cooked loins inside steel walls.
What language is that, Office? Can you make out the muted sounds
scurrying through the edifice of its grammar -- the giant vacuum
cleaners of downtown Anchorage with their small piles of dust
in the distant background, speaking the vhooooooommmmmmm
of daily meetings to landscaped ruins mounded against the wall-
din sky among chinese-puzzled bones linked through each other
to impossible dreams, can you interpret Rattle? Din sum: none.
At 3:30 am one or more unknown assailants brutally assaulted
the Microsoft Corporation…
Do I wish to proceed with this artifice, a politics that cannot
be
escaped, a break that will occur momentarily at the end
only to be anesthetized? Must I burden the patient? In the end
I must
ask, if only for the sake of balance, _Do you speak Poetry?_ must
I
capitalize the eyes, for you?_ Italicize the distance s p a c
e & 2m prn,
Is there an editor who will not seize upon the arbitrar-i-(ness)(um)(torium)
of a garden pathway pursued by a spell checker? Do you speak
arboretum? take a day off with Hortus and pretend its lovelier
somewhere without the need to speak at all. Close them again
on a field of dying doves. Doyo happentto speak Dove? Yo!
Redmond authorities described the incident as the most…
And in one moment the phone will ring. Are you there? Will
you take this call? Have you reached (the home)(the residence)
(the polis) of, and we are having an emergency and the
chord will
not reach. Do you speak phone? Do you give head? Do you
care if she did, if he got, if her dress - black with what kind
of sleeves?
Do you speak Stain? Libido? Liberation? Must I reach back with
a question mark where a mobius phrase was clearly intended? what
was phrased in polyglot for rondolaise dancers turning just so
on an
inner light unknown outside a small group of leaderless doves.
…a home invasion by unknown
asian gang members. The District attorney said…
Do you speak English? I said to the rummy Filipino sailor
on the Oakland docks. You read it, he said, I haven't got
my glasses. I started and then hoped I heard the only lines
of English he knew. Wanna fuck, Ripple wine, I haven't
got my glasses. Thass good! he said, But Coleridge only
had her shoot craps once. You got her doing three passes.
They're not going to leave the table.
They'll go for higher stakes.
Did I speak Ripple? I was ready to puke until his
words began to point excitedly and gesture, [his brackets
held closets with secrets from Chou En Lai] and the
sonofabitch drew line-breaks in the tar with a stick dipped
in guano while his other hand went straight for my crotch.
…here in the glass enclosure of speech, investigators
are still on the scene;
press two if you want to stay on the line.
All of a sudden I could remember the few words
of SAILOR spoken to a six year old on the hill across from Sutro's
running away so fast I stepped on a gull too stupid to get out
of the way
and broke its neck....
She was sitting there like a fresh shower and I'd left the words
on the dock with the maniac who spoke guano and the hot iron
of his slender brown fingers still burning through the melted
glass
of the wine bottle I'd slugged him with, knocking language into
the next bin.
She stood in a spray of cinnamon and orange tea with parens around
it.
The waitress came over as I gasped for something in broken-libido:
a gesture, a lunge, a slant rhyme. You wannamenu?, in one syllable
that would later have me asking, how the hell did she do that?
but
it was too late, the plate-glass was empty and there wasn't a
gull in sight.
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