Drunk
She insists whiskey’s for whores, numb cunts, translucent stick insects who always hang by the edges, crawling out of conflicted faces, looking for a taste. Because they have none of their own. If Lyric’s going to drink and fuck, then vodka. Chopin. She prefers salon to saloon. Bleeding to doting. Removal of her muslin blouse an instrumental ballade. Let the big gulping sluts chug on bottles. Lyric is drinking herself into a story. Technically demanding, emphasizing nuance and expressive depth.
Sleep
Lyric dreams a memory. Tsunami washes blonde Malibu doll houses against bleached foothills. All the clocks turn black. The days after float in receding water. Long-stemmed dolls bob around and she pulls off their heads, their paint blue eyes in a dangling smile, to siphon the succulent goo. Salt water beads on Lyric’s skin. And she is wading in. So tall she sees over the mountain, into the desert, and far at the muddy star-tinged edges where she knows a secret made of everything but words.
Breakup
She hates feeling whole, the What’s left now? of it. Lyric shatters. Dish, arrow, trust, contentment. Lyric is smashing herself into memory. Taking aim. And ecstatic about pieces she’ll need to pick up. Put together again, but not quite like. It’s missing pieces she treasures most. Like absent lovers. Like silence between Basie’s notes. The empty that binds blind chance to fate.
Perfection
Lyric riffles songbird feathers. Skeleton-shape grey dotted red with open beak. She feeds the pink window. From worms and stones in her collection, of collected memory, of sporadic chime and wind clacks, of box and bone, crescendo so high on flocks of cloud that muscle and men die of heart attack and atrophy. Women fall weeping before her. She insists dull song is dumb constellatory consciousness, frightened rabble, an opaque death mask plastered-on in the womb, so if Lyric is going to think and fuck, then it’s going to be a story, and one we can’t forget.
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Curtis Blazemore has been on the planet far too long, publishing various works in between having bad luck and making people rethink their faith in humanity. No matter. He sees sentences in the exhaled smoke and scribbles furiously. He hopes someday to be able to afford a Greyhound bus ticket to Graceland.