Alamo Theory. Josh Bell
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Ezekiel’s. Of course, you were off busy,
revising your plague journals.
Bringing clock to the beltline
of Orion. What could’ve you done
about the remaining days
no longer outnumbering us?
Voice of the dying groupie
like a deck of cards being shuffled.
One last electromagnetic pulse,
one last electromagnetic pulse,
and the neutral bodies of the dead
dropping from our larger, living bodies.
The truth? I thought the castration threat
a touch on the heavy side of the tonality.
But you got your point across.
And by then, we were a much
cleaner people, anyway.
Alamo Theory
Night falling once like a horse
through a bridge. Page God
refusing to be survived. Page God
hollering over one dirty haystack
at whoever’s hiding behind the next
dirty haystack, and no one’s getting
off this tractor alive, no one without
a pod of vanilla, stuck like a witch’s
finger in the throat. Often who goes
there isn’t the bees. Isn’t the cherry trees.
No one’s darker than me. No one’s
big enough for pogroms. No one’s
grammar gets a pass. Can’t you
hear the popping of the karen-gun?
Why the Hittites, why the Etruscans,
sore and lost between vast greatness?
See the mountains, their trauma halos
of power line? Okay now show me
your anagram. No I don’t even care.
We bury a prom dress in the sand
of every coast; sew a new prom dress
from the flag of every coast. Jesus
sat down, calmly, fashioned himself
a whip of leathern cord. Page God
had never recorded premeditation
at such levels. We never really learned
the correct usage of the voice box,
either, but when we took ourselves
by the neck, it was ancient, our language,
brave the living mammal pinned
to its duration, the problem with the orgy
always witness, witness, witness.
Your breath comes out in a pretty
cloud of blue, which is a different color
than most people use. What a brand-
new giveaway. Students of the game
have noticed that often, before I shoot,
I take the time to mention vegetation
fretting somewhere across a fact-lit
red hill. It’s getting late and I’m the only
American on the dance floor. Still.
Josh II: The Return of Josh
We thought it walked a lot like Josh, clean white shirt down the soybean rows and toward us at the tree line, Josh walking through a field so green and real it made us feel like getting married just to look at it. Except for how the cricket-sound had moved inside of us, the crickets stopped their buzzing as he walked, and we took our eyes off Josh for a second, cows on fire in the pasture neighboring the soybean field, saw them crashing, tallow and sulfur, into golden hay bales. Again we turned our eyes to Josh, and we really thought it walked a lot like Josh, closer now, coming through the rows, with two large birds (this was strange) braiding what looked to be a length of red ribbon into his hair. Of course he was still a pretty good ways off — close enough that we could hear him singing, and I thought it sang a lot like Josh — but it was still just a little ways off now and the ribbon was a thin red ribbon and I couldn’t say for sure it was a ribbon. So I asked Earl about the ribbon and Earl said Ribbon, and I asked Kim about the ribbon and Kim said Ribbon, and we agreed the ribbon made us feel like getting married just to look at it. And we agreed it walked a lot like Josh, except for now it was crawling, vines poking through the cloth of its pants legs like insect feelers, and we asked the ribbon birds to keep their eyes on Josh, and likewise we kept our eyes on Josh, or at least we thought that they were eyes: it was getting late, they worked like eyes, they followed Josh, and we felt the ribbon birds were on our side in all of this, that our parents would be calling to us soon, that the streetlights would be flickering on in the neighborhoods behind us, and Josh still closer, holding out his hands and opening his mouth as if he’d ask a favor, and I thought it would be smart if we could all agree upon an answer. So I asked Earl about the answer, and Earl said Answer, and I asked Kim about the answer, and Kim said — and this was just before we learned the truth about the ribbon — Kim said: I don’t think that’s Josh.
Vince Neil Meets Josh in a Chinese Restaurant in Malibu (after Ezra Pound)
Back when my voice box
was a cabinet-full of golden vibrators, and my hair
fell white across the middle of my back
like a child’s wedding dress,
I made love to at least a dozen girls
dressed up to look like me: the hotel bed a sky
filled with the flock
of our south-flying mic scarves,
the back of my head and the front
appearing simultaneously
in hotel mirrors, and the twin crusts of our makeup
sliding off into satin
like bits of California coast. I heard my own lyrics
coming out of the tent
of their beautiful wigs, my lyrics driven back
toward me, poled into me, demanding of me
the willing completion of vague circus acts
I’d scribbled down, once, on the back of a golf card
or a piece of toilet paper. Sometimes I myself
wonder what I was thinking then, but those words
went on to live forever, didn’t they, radioed out
into the giant midwestern backseat
and blasted into kneecaps and tailbones
by that endless tongue of Berber carpeting
blanketing the American suburbs, boys and girls
strung like paper lanterns from here to Syracuse
along my microphone cord. Who rocks you now
rocks you always, I told them all,
and all of them somehow wearing
a homemade version of the same leather pants
I’d