︎

MK Hairston





from Pocket of Tother/Pert S. Malingerer


This gum wrapper scrap of tinfoil was tucked into his pocket as he ran; scrawled in pink ink bulging tightly against wider swaths of purple ran the words one cotton fold, more foil pieces and a few splintery scrolls of sycamore away from the umbilicus--like a tear jostling along the splay of his thigh. Its secreted mouth threatened to reveal certain perjuries:

I am a pomegranate in the clutches of a monkey; it swings within eternity as hungrily it seeks to devour me. Unwilling to bear patience for the ground, its grasp has opened me; am I now not lost to its mouth, having joined the waters flowing all around it?

I am sustenance within your reach but you will not wait until you are prepared and abundantly you find your hunger cannot commune with satiation.

I am stones from one stone, always smiling at you for awhile then frowning at you for awhile before smiling. I am the broken and the mended, the departed and the soon to return.

A light mist had held onto his body, entreating him to thwart this effort, to disengage, halt his breach. Snapping his head suddenly, his lips striking the frictional air half open, slightly sibilating as if the faint light left to day dangled a Zephyrus ligature to purl him back into the blanched conspiracy from which he'd split, he bared teeth like staves against a smothering I bank of fog meeting him squarely at the rim of the vale and thickly sounding out his name, he began to hear it thoroughly again as he had in an entranced moment when first he had understood that he was behind and beyond his eyes, and this was leapt backwards and heard his own name reverberate through each layer consigned to his existence. It was immediately this name he signed to the note clutched in his hand, dampened by atmosphere without and within so it seemed for the moment almost a waggling kerchief, a flaccid tambourine or a flag momentarily somniferous while its bulwark gained a foothold steadily.

Over the morning a fist of birds, fisting the vista. Did you actually see it? Did you? By common source, the vulgar amendment. Had there been any blight that day or any other to ring inside silver canals. ? Mmm, ringworm eyes? ... Answer not met, mets another. .. Mmm, tarpaulin? Ah aha! It rained above firmament, glandular, always a spying smilebeak spotted from the woods by means of garnet locomotion. Apologies to the backbone. Tue: one, too. Pointing toward the sheer pole, by no means shabby, but meandering; raking pith across a valent mudstream, leaking sabotage. Whoooooooooooo ... eyes caked in dew. Proceedings in procession to the lotus shrine: maukin crop of falconers. Sultry lip-hinged mania of the mattock, ticking ... lingering on limen. Rouge ... ? Roulette. Refurbishing balustrade? Nah, just a wink off a flintlock. Composure. Composition.

Pert. S. Malingerer.


He ran until he reached an aquatic hem and slipped between the seamless darkness blanketing him like earth closing around a seed.

In his pocket, pink brushed hazily past purple, lifting off tin:


                                                                Equator is a trough

                                                     Through which ebbs sky doused

                                                       In the hue of your bloodletting.



                                                                        VATER


                                                               Neith the loin cloth.
                                                                  There are grapes
                                                        Beneath grapes there are teeth.

                                                                   beneath teeth
                                                                 there is a curtain

                                             beneath curtain there are no more full moons.

                                         all the furniture is fabricated as moments spindled.
                                                  i argue with my lungs  i spin on heels
                                                    wheeling for a ready treasure chest

                                                          sharpness is an instrument
                                                          incapable of consideration

                                                              snipping my eyelashes
                                                                    like millipedes

                                                       love loves as furniture furnishes.



                                                                         \\\



5:53 am/10:17 pm Occurrence

Started getting the sense and the accompanying idea that I'm sometimes like a cat one feels duty-bound to feed, though if you looked at the unconscious minds belying-perhaps feels not duty-bound but trapped within a system well acquainted with many but confusing like multifarious trails on outskirts country -even the organics of the woods draw us toward the arrival at some totem, precisely the same to itself, but perceived by each as delicious proof of that which they had (without perhaps knowing it) always desired and anticipated finding. I seem to lose my way, my point. At least I can attempt a gist. This thought a moment ago landed nearly silently here in the house, alone, thinking about that which blurs your eyes before sleep or was within the mind-frame that allows for the sudden angle inside to realize it must communicate to reason, who "thinks" on it while the sea is all mediums and jellyfish of all sizes and rankings.

I was on paws, delicately but still compelled on these paws to reach the totem again and it seems that I did, though by now the wording has altered. Sex, there's paths to it that narrow as you approach, paths that follow along in the individual style and signature of the individual but lead to the same essential conclusion, like a redundant bifurcation. But, see, there's more to this. I think what earlier I felt to say was "Sex is for dying." And it consumes the celestial bodies and the leaves, stranding me on the absurd island of a flat bottom boat, absurd because the boat is a bed resting on the rushing hushhh of ghosts whose whispers have echoed out from below, where the alien contraption of my labored geometry seems to monitor in disinterested trajectory the pressurized comforts of various alluvial existence, I am on a plane just as well as this boat voided its paddles, faithful that the long float leads to the certain ending for which we break our ethics and morals and obscure standards of procedure and decency, our backs and our patience and our conditionally-buttressed security, and our identities and our inseparable essences, the interlaced heart, first to drown followed by its treetop-dwelling twin, the mind.

Floating toward the ritual must from below look like a Moses in modem day, hidden from the heroic death in a passively steered chariot by a hydraulic hydra dervish grown accustomed to endless fonns of ecstatic travel. Through swallowing a seed grew understanding of the secret that each means of journey is a movement of divine fluidity. I thought of the underside of the skiff over again and again over as I do when contemplating the eyes that seem to play endless rounds of cards, hopelessly, sols pouring upon the forethoughts of my brow-slinking companions; as though breezes catch the kerchief of my sol gel face and reveal tresses all sails, like solar snakes undulating. I cannot help but reveal the secrets; I keep these eyes which leak as grass bows behind a straw hat, glasses and my hand, like a planetarium.

The bottom of the boat. I imagine it lying nestled in the sediment floor, looks like a warbling geometric cloud casting shadowy quasi-rectangles, a new and bewildering flatwonn or a coffin, trusting like Moses that there will come someday a halt to this fluvial mummification. Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam-but they couldn't do much in here but become life boats the first time they shifted their incredible prows. Sure, I'd ride a bison, ifit let me, or ifl was drowning. Their fur feels like a lightly oily handful of newborn kitten fur without the firm mushrooming of a feline endoskeleton. Not that I derived at this through derelict means embarked upon unflinchingly as with a once white lab coat, a clipboard and a mind so illuminated by its elevated duties that the data it elects is laid to rest atop a pula malice prepense among a reliquary encapsulating the rapacious mien of one once stricken with terrifying, amazing, electrifying grace stricken with the curse of clutter and the threat of constant ricochet.

I've pet an acceptable array of cats, and as for bison, I once witnessed some in Wyoming. They postured in what appeared to be shamanic trance, with certain birds landing and lighting in cadence; I supposed they engaged in symbiosis with the bison, who seemed disinterested in the world still busily consumed with flint knapping and drawing tokens from pockets and maps out in palms and a variety of bloods from each fissure the world made of itself in offering.


                                                              earth eats itself


                                                     much like surgery wounds

                                                         slit before the scalpel

                                                   though scalpel eats the praise


                                                        all seasons imminent


                                                   love eavesdropped the airship 


                                                         wind does not breathe
                                                         clouds curdle into birds


                                                         earth will soon unmoor 


                                                             leper earth shed


                                                        sweet gum morning star


                                                              man is not kind
                                                              man commands
                                                               god is not kind
                                                        god commands nothing