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

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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

Slothcake

Sloth Cake is a chemical composition

resulting when the electrons of apathy and omniscience cross

You know the forecast is abysmal

why even bother to sled when the snow is destined

to be drunk by narrow vacuums of earth

so quickly the joy of white becomes the sorrow of melt

Sloth cake is all of this

and none of it really tallies up to anything

but a taste of sugar waiting to be whipped

into cream blown away by some ferocious wind

Slothcake spells “I” - which is a lonely half of an equal sign

it was left behind by the calculator’s frenzy

Sacred Heart

Those rimmed in halos of gold are often devourers of hearts

Why do you think Jesus’ heart is wreathed in the divine flame,

held in the hands of every saint who has touched the ecstasy of the madness,

of knowing that god is ultimately a love so pure that it is actually

indifferent

your coffee house minutiae is nothing,

what do monoliths of heaven care for your desperation to buy black market plan B,

they much prefer if you approach with all your jewels of perdition

the diadem you scraped together from tips singed with cigarette stains

& long nights where your back was arched like a tent over a papyrus

too often burnt as offerings to the hallowed face of NO

So they burn you alive, a consequence of you wanting to touch deity

you might not come to them with the American Dream guard dog by your side

but you will be loved, even as  the cerebellum creaks and cracks from the threat

of too much spark

too much of the rush of the drunken starlight

too much of the sensuality the trees imbue when

they carry the whispers of the sky’s love for earth

So to fall in love with sacred hearts

is tantamount to suicide

but when did the expired flame of the Teresa

appear less than sex concentrated

but my snuffing out comes on the wings of LustAweFear,

These gods of the humors

they transfigure crosses into bridges

and even though to know them is to know another

Little Death

I welcome the moment’s closure

the breath stop

when the orange comes flooding in

To know love is to know the belly of the great Incinerators

It feels like Joan of Arc

It tastes like charcoal

It ends like nebula in miniature

February 2015, Rachel Ford

Asterisk

My deepest hope is to ascend to the level of the asterisk

to be stampeded with ink when I die,

so much so, that no page may forgive me,

for the violence I commit on ivory, yellow white

a flourishing spoke wheel,

serving no greater purpose than to cartwheel

across the screen, right past the cursor

and into the highlighted void

I am, I will be unapologetic about my typewriter theatrics,

I will be a generator of actions,

an emote to dead words,

abandoned by the smileys they invoke

I will be a hanging breath, a thought emphasized,

a St. Catherine’s wheel for the unsaid

suffering in the potential, of the absence of the said

really does bring out the best of the machines

so the asterisk says it all,

encompasses my spirit in a simple bloom

it is all my chaos hidden in the keyboard’s vault of symbols

no one really knows how to use

this is how I see myself

cumbersome, but small, easy to ignore

but always recognized, when seen, as a pause

that delayed introspection before a click

that never takes off

a dead man’s landing strip.


Rachel Ford, January 2015