=============================================================== from *XIBALBA ARCANE* by Jack Hirschman ============================================================== *To the brave fighters of Chiapas* ============================================================== 2. It will be done, in its good time, the food will fit the mouth again, the foot the shoe, and the swollen hunger and the raving gangrene and the broken holey leather will be smooth. Now the chips are falling, and must, now the chips are breaking us into microworlds deciding what's what. And we wear wiped mouths but, inside, are going to pieces, controlled by snarled minds, hearts dead in carnal sophistication, two-day men and women, two-day their brief cases and velvet lapels, the Day: crime, the Night: crime, the real hoods of the world. Yes, by force of habit, debris and garbage piles don't escape the corners of my eyes. After the rain, the wet refuse is even less appetizing, but I'll let you in on a little secret, straight from the hip: the garbagest garbage in the gutter, at the curb or in an alley trashcan, is nothing compared with what's on the mind of those executive board members high up there. The name of the cities, all of them: Money. Already are. So it doesn't matter Jack Morris goes from Minnesota to Toronto, even though he just pitched the most classic game in modern history for Minnesota. There is no Minnesota or Toronto. He's gone from Money to Money. And it doesn't matter Jack's my name and Morris the name of my grandfather, and I came from New York City or I live in San Francisco. There is no New York City or San Francisco. They're the same as Minnesota or Toronto. They're Money. Jack Morris has gone from Money to Money. Even across the border. That's the new world order, whose fleece is widespread snow, whose Death has a wild hunger for poor marrowbones whose guzzle is hemo. The razorkeen cold knifes the rags we're wearing to ribbons. The way we've lugged those sacks over our shoulders. Still do. Who are like thousands upon thousands of ants who've discovered corn-kernel crumbles in hydrocarbons after centuries of bugsquashed buried life. The wasps are heaped at the rancid puddles. The madness of the decade is tied to the tree. The spots are removed from the jaguar, which appears more dirty without them. He was flat-out down in front of the Hungry 1, bleeding (or was it the Bleeding 1, hungry), bartender-bounced, and the chicklette in fishnet was looking upstreet for a cop. Be a good passerby, be a swab of cotton, take him round the corner to the toilet of The Saloon where he can clean off the blood. He's got one buck and B of A black plastic, can wobble upstreet to a versateller to get him back to money. After many years knowing a great deal and believing in nothing, he has become a bottle of vodka in a velvet coffin in a case carried by his own ghost lying next to the detachable parts of a chalked blue-tipped cuestick. 3. The glyphs, the glyphs, I see their secret now! The corpuscles of the invisible skin on the bones of the skeletons of the centuries. O what a dance, what a dream, what a spin, turning within turnings, what a revolution! A meadow can be on a palm, I've actually risen to the height of your sorrow and begun my life in words. That is a great happiness. I can sit still, they'll say I am moving everywhere. I can be so rapid, birds will disbelieve, I'll not allow a blink to split a second, that's how serene I am now. Because the grains of me remember where I belong. Where I was dreamed before I was written. Where I was burned, cremated, and where my _xcriban_ killed himself with an obsidian knife in despair of the holocaust of the codices. O I could tell a star a thing or two about time, I could. How we mined it and ate and slept and fucked with it everywhere, so that space itself _was_ it, yes, a chunk in our backpack, a bite of the sun in our bag. If it were only this night, if it were simply this food, if it were merely this breath . . . They have collapsed the star and let it hang out at the corners of the world's mouths like a pang of hunger, a chugalug of slang. In the name of Landa, the codices were burned, and the people. in the name of Himmler, the books were burned and the people. Now the silos are weeping, the face of the wall has crumbled, the trees sink, the stones sink, the moon's kiss has darkened the sun. In the flames born of our mourning the face of the youth shall bum through again. When his eyes are unbound and the heart torn out of his chest is put back into its cage, the pack onto his back at sunset, the tails of the serpents will be tied. His blazing footprints across the sky. 4. They call it an annular eclipse, but the moon's kissing the sun and it's like an inter-racial thang because the moon's coming off dark not milky, encircled by a corona of radiance. Meanwhile, down on Grant & Green Sts, Eugene, that is Dominique the transvestite, who's come to live on the streets because the disease is in her/himself, is getting murdered by a 2x4 in the hands of his/her lover, Terry, who's only been out of Quentin a couple of months and loves reading books, you know how it is. Lately the smells of dead rats, and scorpions seen eating each other in winter alleys. Bloodfuck's the decade's face. Bloodfuck and get it and die, is the decade's fate. Tweak and lace and tossup because this life it ain't nothin' right, it just hit me in the nose kick me in the mouth when I'm down a knife a club a chain a gat battle over a Fish at the moshing she smoking a Blunt packed with Bird and fireflies between those lips meanwhile sipping on a glass of lipstick, que padre! What're you in? The Pumas. What're you? The Iguanas. From the Comancheros came Satch, Dynamite, Tinamou, Blue Juan, Toon and Wild Goose. From the Zeniths came Humbugger Joe, Quetz, Zack, Honey Polleny, Ramon and Turkey Claw. From the Cobras came Ali Muha, Jodido, Deerhoof, Freddie Dee, Centipede and Gizmo. From back out to south came the Kings of the Gestapos, Lords of the Sabotage, Rulers of the Astronauts, knocking down 56 lanes. We say, for any man to make attempt to take us down, he got to first find a rock to kill Goliath, overturn the pillars of Samson, name the stone that David stood on, name the three little children that walked the burning fires of hell, stand in front of the Lord and say, "I have no fear." I say for all of us, sixty-two across the chest, don't fear nothing, God and death, got a tombstone opportunity, a graveyard mind, he must be one of us 'cause he don't mind dying. Got heart, got bravery. 13. We will no longer subsist on stones. We will lean on the light and bend with it all the way out. Hiding in silent misery will be a thing of the past. All this wrangling over the buying and selling of the heart and the buying and selling of the heart will cease. You shall talk to me and I with you. The way the world is made and given will be fresh and new. And in the season of the opening of the flowers when we yearn for the flowers and lie down among the flowers we will weep because the divisions of the world are one. =================================================================== From *Xibalba Arcane* published by Azul Editions. Copyright 1994 by Jack Hirschman. ===================================================================