Im gonna try and make a sentence, that is english, that is true, and that somehow can record the thriving existences of two very different things, native to separate times and parts of the world. one is a carved plastic flowerbed the size of a quarter, that was made to look like ivory, but that is not important. I know its not new but when it was made, and who wore it are details that are foreign to my grades of value. Preference, those sliding shale plates running vertical like oiled and machined conveyer belts locked to my sternum. its dirty on its backside but the physical condition of it is unimortant, I bought it at a fleemarket in buenas aires, from a man wearing glasses that kept it in a steel case with glass shelves, in a little store a block from the iron roofed market in san telmo. I am sure these things are not important, but I will record them like a scientist looking for something, unsure what will be revealed at a later date. Like I said its dirty which means that the indentations are filled with a black oily stain, it has a flat back, and the front is a carved relief of big petaled daisys, there are grooves in its stems, and a hollow belly behind its face, big enough for a string to slide through it like a pendant, but Im pretty sure it had a pin glued to its back likw a brooch. it will at one time be 5000 lbs of welded steel plate pinned to porcelain plates collecting ruin at the ocean floor, dropped from a boat by me, to hide its insubordination, and its vagrant disregard for my need to continue moving, the machiavelan child, the ballgagged women,poor dixie with the wood and hairless monkey puppet at the riverview hotel 1995, "play it again slut" scribbled on a bar napkin shoved up her ass while she crawls along the floor of the tower room.
Ive diverged, this is the problem or the solution, this is not one of the two things. I wasnt expecting dixie, by the steel sunken bed, but it was there, and I have vowed to be honest.
quikly returning to my precipice. my original document. the second item is a piece of imformation that roger, the excavator driver told me through a steel box translater that he held to his trachiotomy hole between tokes of marlboro reds. because this is imformation, all the details of its author and time and place I feel are crucial. I was working for a landscaping company in vermont, I was 20, and drunk all the time, he would pick me up at my house on route 100, in the middle of the granville gulch. "back in the days they built these old barns, theyd line the board forms with newspaper, thats why when you look here" he had to trade fingers holding the voice box against his neck to point with his cigarette finger, at the crumbled concrete sill. I had my hand on a pine six by six, and my head would always be spinning from the jamesons, and the sadness, and stooping made my back burn low. "the ink would bleed....see there I love that shit". I never saw the foundations with old pictures bled into them, I wish I had, I regret it like I regret not working on a ranch in oaxaca. I dont regret much, I dont regret all that hurting Ive done, all those women Ive tortured physically, I dont regret that at all. something about plastic petals transcribed onto carbon plate, resting against a clay bottom. a plastic pin in the pocket of a pair of wool trousers, and maragaretes 17 year old labia punctured by a hundred feet of clothesline, belongs together like happy weebles in a city set, hotwheels in a plastic garage, and whale bones soaking in clorox.
those are the first two items