1. |
five day hair
02:06
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pulled up to the premiere
with five day hair
freshly shea butter soaped
to coax my ethnic airs,
fired from the writer’s room
but invited by my agent
as an inclusive, diverse reclaimant
Trotwood Copperfield with the muthafuckin raiment
analog reboot:
shooing donkeys off my own grass patch
hee haws from an ass to
a biracial brass tacks
modified races playable on my profile
on Actor’s Access just to get cast
(but fuck that)
yo, sat off in the seats to the mid/side
thoughts out of phase
and producers look across the aisles
at my Roman nose contrite
yeah your guilt don’t pay for my cat’s wet food dude
if the concessions were something like movie food
I’d bean every head from here to fucking Kalamazoo
What is jalapeños?
in the lower peninsula the after party’s
a megalomaniacal Medina
hanging mouths, vacant through Neoliberal levers
top 40 blaring through the speakers
white-haired senility we entertain
as we are entreated
in this high society of the spectacle
over at the catering table
I’m pouring ranch on my vegetables,
legalize it, nix the fine print
every “E” and letter that’s silent
I’m just here at my representation’s obliging
miming mores memorized meeting
senators’ daughters doing Ketamine
while they poorly freestyle rhyme
and rolling blunts with the social contract
at the ire of I, the undersigned
(but it’s alright)
in lieu of royalties
I exit onto Mulholland Drive
and check my phone’s time
I have a pitch to prepare in the morning
a sitcom about human rights in Palestine
(it’s not funny though)
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2. |
beginning again
02:06
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beginning again
the quotidian windswept ken
the polite force of nature
in a gentleman's agreement
regarding property taxes for the lessees
west coast orator
who too drought tolerant to smoke trees
beginning again
the diagnostic bisected armistice
in church light halogen
wicker basket mask
to shitpost and don portable confessions
(in public)
beginning again
the misbegotten son of an auctioneer
gum flapping as the family trade allows
but would rather be quiet in here
laconic as permitted
in goth ceiling vault decays
Damned, Bauhaus, Sioux, Diné, Visigoth, Dravidian, Ghanaian, palm oil, Miller High Life, filé
single file each bid in Twi Creole pidgin
beginning again
personal history made macroscopic
activate a single memory
begin an artisan species level extinction
dowel driven, inlaying the mouth feel
nerve damage is fantastic
perfect sequence, pressed acetate
recorded, planted grown roots
amniotic aquaponic trauma
this wing, unit of measurement
sorrow made designer
beginning again
norteño ballads leaking through the windows
rusting a single pane thinker
from tangents on the timeline
snake eating the tail
commercial break processes, pauses, and lingers
the Socratic method on Clyde Stubblefield loop
questions resurface and then slip through the fingers
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3. |
still to this day
03:26
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see, what I’m gonna do in this garden?
what I’m gonna do in this space?
I tended it on my own now
the weeds grew in your place
see, what I’m gonna about my guarding?
I’ve got it up still to this day
waiting for the moment that it drops down
and water streams down my face
(face)
tell me where to go
if not right here
though I feel the warm shined skies
to see they’re clear
but do you know
I’m frozen?
pruning limb to stem
leaves of what were left rooted
see, what I’m gonna do in the garden?
what I’m gonna do in this space?
see, what I’m gonna about my guarding?
I’ve got it up still to this day
waiting for the moment that it drops down
and water streams down my face
texts dry by the succulents
what it is to be stuck in this
exhaling the air pockets
as the perlite and soil mix
where there were four now
two hands dig accompaniments
to inter life until it blossoms
and upon our split
I was left in my kitchen
dangling your pothos
with the greenness of my pathos
this menagerie of potted mementos
I am left holding
a nursery in which I rhyme
on my lonesome
see, what I’m gonna do in the garden?
what I’m gonna do in this space?
I tended it on my own now
the weeds grew in your place
see, what I’m gonna about my guarding?
I’ve got it up still to this day
waiting for the moment that it drops down
and water streams down my face
(face)
(see what I’m gonna do about my guarding?)
(see what I’m gonna do with this space?)
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4. |
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sculpting a bust from welded e-waste
varicose knee brace
stone-hewn uppercase
with chisel and given Welsh name
federalist government eponym
turned to polenta in Cornwall
all my antonyms are cornballs
posting bills along png files
organized Crimean sea walls
to advertise the personal drowning, insolvency,
freelance tutoring in clowning
the college fees were inflated
so an injunction was made against
adjacent adjuncts adjudicating
adulating anodyne affronts
solely for the loose digestion and chortles
timeshare South Beach property
was to sit on the couch and snorkel
Atlantic water working 4k black magic
3B Afro-Ashkenazi cornrows
(whoa)
the remixed videos melting on the timeline in slow-mo
K'uk'ulkan on tryptophan
feathered orientalism
spreads dactyls and blasts off to post-humanism
shirking ground control, saving the last dance
401K investiture, small business defense contractors
light refractors, concave analysis of shadows
following the day jobs of out-of-work actors
as Kubrick’s black obelisk
throwing the bones, shooting the shit
holding the remaining audience’s hand
to the tyranny of symphonic music
omniscience tells David Byrne
to stop ululating in the back
the talent’s only working with two tracks
no English dubs or overwritten memory card
of Indo-Aryan tongue clacks
palate cut by Danish reactionaries
in the Writer’s Guild screening room
pale glow of Nordic suspense
coloring attendees pates in a Chromecast
steel toe magnolias orated by Darby Crash
for kindergarteners’ reader’s theatre
extracurricular class enriched uranium space heater
Svalbard seed vault jungle fever
ice melt bear pelt
spontaneously combusting top shelf
asphyxiating monocropping Afrikaners in the veldt
installing Windows XP on a quantum computer in Soweto
conjecture turned to syllable count let go
caesura on nitrates
the polycule was monophonic
with a noise gate
gender dressed down
calling the spades our their name
to their face
Persian plastic surgeon forehead bones of exonyms
engendering entrenched ideologues’ epithetic backpedaling public option rebates
who’d rather train AI to abstract expressionist paint
mortar on the front lines in Ukraine
a trebuchet of the same,
coupled meaning sags machine learning in its frame
and loftily I do abstain
from inserting my superego in this
(and loftily I do abstain
from inserting my superego in this):
what’s igneous is bliss
1500 Kelvin Catalan kiss
Requerimiento read at an Upper West Side bris
foreskin mineral rights stretch corporal limits
subcutaneous dermic postscript
assonant resonance in old growth forest
adolescent technocrats grift
by column indent in yellowed jingoist newsprint
facial recognition, delivery eye-contactless
broken blue black mirror autocompleting abridged chapters in Gaelic
40 cloves of garlic broiled in rotisserie sediment
metamorphic quartz pozole turned from hominy protolith
absolutely scrumptious geological records
at 78rpm flipped
resequenced into one shot hits
inlaid turquoise reversed and pitched
conflict diamonds in the liner notes
copy written with an inch of carbon
bearing an arm’s auto-playing stylus
routing the channel to another tung-oiled deck
before a cease and desist
eye of the needle worn
scratching gerrymandering in heaven’s mists
shit—
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5. |
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spliff licked precipitous
betwixt Kardashian lips
the market dips
the card shark has a lisp
flips a six of clubs
skims the chips
the house has in-obstinate kicks
so it perennially wins
legato drips, affogato
over vanilla gelato, latté skim
regional accent flooding the room in a din
dimmed recessed light hit
boss man grins
concubine espadrilles upon on the ottoman
often, lofty projections as such
in holographic glow
soft fresh plaster walling
London calling to
authorize whales selling sons of
freedman yelling, gerunds
defunding people not of reason
Bartolomé de las Casas living for free
in colonized minds
in a presidential suite
in the Four Seasons
Dominican Republic renunciation of over/unders
Darryl Dawkins relámpago
drum filled 96% cacao bean
of Chocolate Thunder
all backboards asunder
tears the rim down
to the inlet of Howe Sound
waves extend to the alternate timeline
where the Mau Maus refused kowtow
British Columbia turned to cumin and bitumen
in a molcajete
methane exhaust before the Natural History Museum
displayed Paleolithic tempeh
and the roulette has its substrate
while it bets on Black domestic aid
on the Oscar stage
awarded in the back gate
the floor ablaze
patrons of Casino Petit Bourgeois,
the lion’s share of assonance
“on a sea of silky smooth Crème Anglaise”
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6. |
polyglot on chloroform
03:03
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dyslexic reading in Kanji
in a chrysalis
sumi-e braille dappled
on vellum pavement
the imagist hung from a spare line
enjambment in arraignment
sham trial
spam Misubi in case files
transpacific barters
androgynous garters
Mao’s Little Red Book
praxis for decapitating the Carters
idolatry of VPs of marketing
placation industrial complex
in compartments
exchange rate of lymphatic systems
platelets diluted with horse hair bristles
and tabla rhythms
Irish American converts
in the Faisal Mosque
re-lacquering orientalist art
in high gloss
scripture as intrusive thoughts
for atheists’ Tourettes
NeoGeo pocket
got the circuit wet
next book of revelations
is a fantasy sports bet
decolonizing color commentary
fan duel Cyrillic em dash
in Joshua tree
and the headliner corporate streams
the Gojoseon Dynasty
8 piece vocal group tears the
bee’s ACL and Achilles’
disabled list and full roster
of systemic inequality
whose respective logos
pull up the rug
and settle for threes
full court press
silk screened sloganeering
linguistic flattening and tapering the eccentricities
this is the erstwhile social textile
cross cultural hatch of endearments
commoditized as consumer-tech
siphoning the humanities
in other words, this is literary criticism
for the multimedia future infinity
this is the, um, uh, polyglot on chloroform
object permanence foreign born
shredding the Moynihan report
defunding the poverty porn
irascible nave made wade
in the present’s liquid form
giving descending rise
international chart size
imperial, world-weary sighs
wheezing twinkling the twine
the Pimsleur approach
upon the horizon line
anthropology acid washed
given a Canadian tuxedo
and advertising time
quitely fine-tuned corsairs enshrined
scorbutic enzymes
dissolved in cebolla, cilantro and lime
coup de grâce piña
smoked rhyme over shawarma achiote
carved part time in high top Filas
cleansing the oil from the palette
the speaker comes to
removes the sublingual treatment
removes the cloth and breathes freely
uncoils their philo
cues the lights and retranslates
a once trivialized peace treaty
the representative amid declension
and impious impropriety
on autopilot almost lit the plume
in the embassy
prepares for the windup
contact and discrepancy
as in what was said
versus what it was meant to mean
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7. |
me saco el pulgar
02:33
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(es que es que es que es que)
las palabras se salen
desde la brecha
abajo de mi lengua,
distorsiona como un espejo
y la altura arriba
alcanza un techo
de sedimento
pero si yo estuviera hablando fuera de materia
todavía yo encontraría lo palpable:
aplasto lo que he deducido antes, compulsivo como soy,
y el polvo resultante se revuelve por dentro
ya mero llego
en una esencia,
la mirada de humo y carbón
penetrando moléculas de razón
de hecho, he articulado más
en la manera de árboles caídos
sobre grandísimas hormigas
viendo el enjambre sin fila
se puede dejar venir una lluvia de saliva
que inunde cada colonia
y cubra nuestra imaginación mundial
porque me ha dado cuenta que
soy vecino de lo distinto,
mejor dicho,
el destello de lente que llena el marco
que a nosotros, nos convierte en niños
con gotitas que se acumulan
en deseos alcalinos
aquí:
cada medida se falla
cada medida se tambalea
y mis manos solo agarran groserías,
pruebas de tornasol
tragadas en la boca del Latin vulgar
me saco el pulgar
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Rhys Langston Los Angeles, California
From smoked salmon to freshwater microphones.
Rhys Langston recommends:
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go to albumIf you like Polyglot on Chloroform, you may also like:
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