Celluloid Cigarette Burns

This poem was inspired by the first fifteen minutes of the 2014 film The Scribbler, which was quite boring and its pacing awful, but it posed enough of a feminist problem involving using multiple personality disorder to justify a young woman’s lust that I couldn’t leave it unpondered, even though I left the film itself unfinished

__________________________________

I watched the camera obscura play back the scene of a woman

claiming dissociative personality disorder as a reason

for finding the crimson flower in a man’s bed

only when she was possessed of this new age demon

of psychology could she fly to the summit in her mind

which let her breathe out the phrase “And god said it was good”

We let this serpent coil around her in terror,

the one that whispered, “even here, you are not your own,

even here, you can see the hues of regret

coming to stain your picnic blanket

violet red”

Like a child’s maze toy, she is the silver ball

that a baby will never allow to go home

If the Toddler wills the winding,

she will be the Moses of this Legion of Self

she divided so that no one would truly know

who built the hollow golden calf with which

she plotted her escape into the desert night

When pleasure needs justification,

especially those which involve breaking the mirror

to decide which fragment looks best under black light lust,

then we know our heroine is losing

we have to send in an air team of deus ex,

a package of girl scout cookies with fortune

scrolls reading some speech about Amore

sustained under a rainless sky

Kardashian Krystal

All the “previously on"s have taught me one thing

and that is how we have allowed our weeks to turn into

a uni-calendar obsessed with eating its tail

instead of sliding past the screen door to slither into the amazon

that no longer patiently waits to fade past parody loops

faster than our cable vomitoriums allow us to recover

And so, here you are, doped up on soap time hash and Ultimate

Fighting Molly, with Kardashian Krystal for good measure,

How will you recognize yourself in the mirror when all you see is

the back of the news anchor of channel nine telling you to look out

for a forecast of humdrum static destined to rain morphine drops of HBO

and Cinemax, all the while, Japan has a race to coronate their champion

with a crown built out of A and B buttons, a blue screen center and front,

with the coding for ambrosial pleasure entered on it’s face.

- July 16, 2014