Greetings from the Mouth
——— I looked down upon my hand outstretched to the meat of your palm, which grasped the top of my offered parcel / mine relinquishing it from below. & I did not recognize the skin. I felt no presence in the twitch of the fingers. I did not know we were anything but a mockery of statuary.
. I hadn’t retreated from the scene & lingered to examine its parts. My messenger’s face bore none of the flaws that give shape to a man. His features were so clear as to be nothing but invisible. It was from this that I knew it was H.J. Bohlmann who had offered you communion. The extended hand was Raoul’s & the poem that it delivered the product of a team of botanists who created it as a sort of pesticide.
. Each of us have exhausted their mouth at some moment. Each of us have been repulsed to appear in some group photograph or shrank to see their name in some roll call for the dominion of the virtuoso. & so equally we have delighted in the potlatch that saw our grouped suicides. We have come together to kill one actor & gift his fingers & penmanship to a new costumed hero. We remember when Raoul’s arm belonged to Joachim & the decadence with which we ripped it from the socket before gluing it to its new benefactor. We remember the way Joachim wept intoxicated with joy as we cannibalized his ego and spat it freely.
. With the fertilizer of Joachim, Raoul, Bohlmann, the Rory Twins, Father Josip, & so on we have cultivated a great many lies. We have fucked ourselves so wildly that at last we have born fruit, our own unlikely children! Each breath of new life a laughing forgery. Their mouths now turning as a carousel to seed counterfeits in every direction / roots whose beheading only emboldens mama tree.
. Too successfully policed & so I have disappeared to we. Given a title & so we have taken them all. Us having tunneled with the shovel of I in guerrilla action. Across the bow!
. Made old by a calling we march them all. Ahead as infant’s fancy.
. Truly yours,
. Peter Heard
