(Loosely for Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Mama & You)

"It has been said: 'The illiterate man of the future will not be the man who cannot read the alphabet, but the one who cannot take a photograph. But must we also take as illiterate the photographer who cannot read his own pictures? Will not the caption become the most important component of the shot?'"
—Walter Benjamin from Stanley Mitchell, screen 13, no. 1 (1972), a Short History of Photography

"Don't fall on your head & become a statistic boy-
Don't let your life slip away"

It's early & the dust is piled along the floor
electro-static junkyard
the sounds are devised as mountains

a crow rests in the cornfield
the world is barefoot
the saints are bleeding
& the new portraits are of eyes &
how they breathe in real time
meat & cornea align with numbers
if you hear them
their words appear as a text
but what they say is unimportant

They are lined up one
atop the other like school buses
They witness like money
you watch
they watch
can't see you
you watch
until the sun bites the floor & the side of the world-
it's almost gone

The dead & their pigments appear
on the glass everclear
shuffling lips on the mind
you watch     they watch
they know     you know

Sounds of the breath sizzle on the ledge
film jumps rope
another fills the pupil
then another
round & round
the staircase of the iris
(nothing's confined but the outline of the fetus in the hallway)

another
one more
blue
blue
black
brown green

seasons
pilots
oars
saws
pistons
circuits

(The light is constant

statue
lake
cutlass
pistol

violin
tooth
flute
customs

hair &
politics

rape
murder
love

finally the hands

There must be a chair for coloring the human body
You go outside
listen to the road-
sounds like heartbreak
a synaptic knob
like your mama
like that window falling
like somebody's coming to see you
like an old lover
like feathers
like night

You look back to that room
see the blue light shape it
       smell the air-
let someone else covet the image
the mountain don't hurt no more
that eye is a grave-robber

Water: the muscle of facial expression & mastication(

you change
'cause it's all skin