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b y J o h n   W a t e r m a n n

Touching and examining the inside of a hollow leg in one of Ethiopia's chill rooms, still with the taste of human flesh on his lips, a diet of desperation,a meal to be consumed while standing upright, ammunition in bundles between his hardened gums. Transparent dots in the distance as facilitator for taking polaroids without reason, mechanically transferred onto  kitchen utensils, a decapitation on a bathroom scale, a super combustionsinside a toaster.Afterwards, a big campaign for mediocre reasons (lover shakes bangles of foreskin), masturbating at his own pace: Rimbaud is slowly coming into focus...Holepunched and squared in a small carton, some locks of collected hair from dead enemies. Displacement of the mind. Increments. However elaborate the choices provided, whether to remain a man,  who overpaints the dark pictures of his past with a new kind of singing, or whether to become somebody who suddenly can wail like a woman in mourning. Great poems he wrote, but in the end forgot all about them, a practice carried forward in later years, after everything had collapsed under him, culminating in the admission, that he believed in getting the tea leaves read on Thursdays,  nearer my dog to thee! A choir of war crippled children singing like dolphins under layers of saw dust, barely audible, a feast for the initiated. Back on the moon, where it is peaceful and anxiety melts in the bleeding throats of nightingales.The last advice given to Rimbaud, before being put in the freezer: "Straight after the thaw, try to make new friends, because the  old ones will all but have perished, wiped from the memory of the computer"