Spoiler! :
DISCO FLOWERS
“Dada cannot live in New York.
All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival.”
-Man Ray
1
Steve’s been saving up
for a bass guitar we go out late
to the cowboy bar and I know
I tread on sacred ground
when I ordered our whiskey neat
“we need to get the fuck out of here,”
says Steve, and mine is a New York
overrun with dead men, corpses cropped
to zombies and ghosts, all bartenders
are avid necromancers.
2
Steve’s been seeing UFOs
and now I see them too
we go up to the roof and smoke clove cigars
until New York turns
until the edges of New York meet like origami
and the city lights are eaten by acid like it was actually just one light
shining through the facets of a crystal
we are taken
on the arcs and waves of the trombone section
and dropped off like for soccer practice
in a city without light Steve says “maybe we were
over the rainbow the whole time.”
3
a stranger on unicycle tells us
welcome to wolf town
and Steve and I
see a UFO
pass over our heads
like the 1970’s
like a disco flower
4
Steve and I walk in roughly the direction
we saw the UFO going. Steve’s stumbling
like Edgar Allen Poe
he trips and picks up a pair of roller blades
from the gutter.
“these are my roller blades from when I was a kid,”
says Steve. I could try to hide it but I’m not surprised.
“They fit!” as snug as contraceptives
but they still won’t keep you dry.
5
Steve and I see an hourglass lady as we approach
Legume Avenue. “Bones before cones my brow,”
says Steve so I have to say “fuck you Steve.”
6
we introduce ourselves as wanderers and she smiles
her dress all black and clean like the inside of a coffin
Evan is her name and she’s a liquid tenet that is
the she lives in a building whose
blueprints are never the same twice.
“It’s like living inside your husband,” she says and swings her briefcase
but her fingers are all ringless Steve asks her if she knows
of any good parties and she says no and that
a lot of people who end up here think they are in hell.
but it isn’t hell it is pandemonium, it is the dadaist’s dream
it is a Rothko painting, a burning singularity of dream spaces
and urban canyon crags, it’s a cameraless photograph
an auragraph, a river full of the viscera and glossolalia
of dead giants and stars. “What is in the briefcase?” I ask
“skull fragments,” says she.
7
Steve roller skates and we go east,
we pass: peddlers selling bones, champagne poison
TV embroidery, jars full of sand, dandelions, muscle cars
confetti, mirrors, mobius strips, vegetable paste
mimes, cursed gemstones, and root beer.
“come to think of it,” Evan says. “The biggest party
in pandemonium takes place on the party UFO.”
Steve grabs my face and I could tell he considered
kissing it.
8
we’ve seen movies we know
how to get abducted by aliens
so we find some trees and hang out in the dark
I remind Steve that if they come for us we have to pretend
to try to escape. Everyone loves the thrill of a chase.
around us the city unfolds like an undressing lover,
empyrean and incarnadine, beams of light scathe the sky
and it takes me a few minutes to realize that they are spelling messages
on the clouds like please remember to drive safe and no uptown ? trains
after six pm.
“Shit is that the train we need to take,” says Steve.
9
Linda always had her whiskey neat. Steve thinks about it
many years later when sitting on a rooftop. He remembers telling her
that “I don’t like soccer.”
Steve’s dad abandoned him at soccer practice in 1999 and
it’s been tequila moats around snowmen
ever since.
10
Linda’s the star of every soap opera
Steve describes over the phone
from Iowa while I’m playing football
on xbox, he’s drawing a chalk outline
around the moon.
“Linda is my
July 20th
1969”
says Steve.
after that it’s all NASA shutting down
it’s all space rex and amphetamines,
gin floods in movie theaters.
11
no luck in the forest so Evan takes us to a restaurant she knows
called Beard Wizard where all the waiters are bears
and all they serve is pints of rum.
“Can I have a grilled cheese sandwich?” asks Steve.
Evan,
Evangeline
she says she can pay because her looks are legal tender
and I know it is possible for a heart to be simultaneously multiplied
and divided, there’s a portrait of Buzz Aldrin hanging prominently
above the bar and I can tell that it’s fucking with Steve a little bit.
A grizzly bear in an apron brings Steve a pint of rum.
I snatch it and smash it on the ground and everything after
is rum soaked shadows.
12
Evangeline can talk to bears. She knows all the dialects,
throaty noises and growls and I breach the event horizon
of desire. Steve roller skates around the dance floor alone
some prankster rigged the jukebox to play Leonard Cohen’s
Lover, Lover, Lover 29 times, I counted
because that’s what friends do
to Steve I am just
a plaster simulacra of the moon
I am in danger of becoming
a whiskey crystal on the slide
of a playground.
13
Evangeline tells me to get Steve because we’re leaving
the Rolls Ruckus is picking us up so we go back to the forest
where a UFO lands and opens its hatch and everything else
is lava lamps filled with vodka everything else
is a punchdrunk lovesick beatdown
everything else finds us on the valence edge
of a dancefloor so crowded I stop wondering
why uranium is radioactive a homeboy sometimes
has just gotta leave and when we exit is as tachyons
shot through a collider and into our apartment.
14.
Steve’s been throwing up
like its not 1999 anymore
but I’m listless like the singer
in a metal band and I’ve go this feeling like
no one danced at my wedding when actually
everyone danced at my wedding but me.
Gender:
Points: 13173
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