Zebulon Huset

I Swear There Were Cameras at Some Point

We have not killed it, but we are gutting a deer.

And dad’s still alive—his desiccated body

had a bike pump shoved in I-don’t-want-to-know-what orifice

and reinflated to the size I remember before I told childhood to get fucked

and took time by the hand like a willing runaway with a carnie.

Wrist-deep in the viscera like it was a macabre Nickelodeon show.

We raced the clock and the neighbor family would never

find the golden acorn in the small intestine before us.

“Is there ever a tipping point?” I ask him as I run my pinched fingers

along a section of small intestine like it was an empty tube of toothpaste—

which is never really empty, like you’re never done measuring a string

if you can increase magnification. And you’ve got a pass to CERN

so we ditch the golden acorn—dousing the neighbors in slime

because the lesson we were all supposed to learn was when to fold ‘em.

Origami cranes, we have no problem with the Himalayas

and flying west we are again time travelers. Landing before

we started writing this poem. Is a book still a book if you melt its glue

and scatter its pages in the land he loved so much? What if

you’d memorized sections? Sure, they’ll lose mass

like a iceberg with a diesel engine being sailed to the desert,

but you’ll get to the finish line with more than a cube.

“Isn’t it funny, it’s called dressing the deer, but we’re turning it inside out.”

It was then that I realized he hadn’t spoken for years.

But there was an acorn to find, after all. The neighbors have moved.

The cameras have long run out of tape and the company that produced

the tapes folded like origami cranes decades ago. “Were we always here?”

I asked. I wasn’t in a hurry. I feel like we could disembowel this deer for centuries.

Don’t Ever Call Him Junior

The skyline an echocardiogram. My left ventricle a cookieless fortune browning at the fire’s edge edge edge edge.

If you focus on the edges of things you are consumed

and the jutting femurs of midnight give no quarter.

The yearning stops at some point.

The want for a want. The need to do.

Kalamazoo too. Not even in a supernova—a tidal or gyric event.

It will atrophy and be abandoned to entropy. All viruses work by confusion. We have a rich heritage. And are paupers all. Too poor for line breaks. for capitals whenever we want them

the edges don’t soften they are or aren’t

the dichotomy of quiet is another coastline paradox

for another day.

another sad day

sad day

say dad… before you lost edges

before you lost want

how long was that?

how long ago did I allow the savvy grave robber to swap my cherished idol for another bag of half-remembered sand? did the booby traps even go off or had they deteriorated to rotten vines and long-expired lamps—the octopus monster’s skeleton blanched and the dark lagoon sieved into the local aquifer last drought.

but there i go again…

talking through your silence.

Feeling Like Batshit

Hey you, gigantic concrete troll under the bridge,

walk with me. Please.

Your days of being guerilla street art are over.

I don't care what your name is. I'll call you Ishmael.

Ishmael, have you ever loved a woman.

Mauve is just pink trying to be purple

and they got a decade named after it.

The accident of a novice after the greater good

who noticed his test-tube stained.

I too enjoy a vodka/tonic as much as the next malaria-free person.

Fuchsia is pink on a dose of bitch.

Oh tyrian, Tyrian purple, how we long

to be Byzantium princes and born into you.

Regality isn't too vain a thing to pray for, is it?

I heard most gods live in the sky, so unreachable

to religious scholars working with original documents,

or writing them.

(Call this a gospel, Ishmael, we'll sell it online.

This stripper flyer thumbed with mud.

Every order comes with a sacramemento.)

Gold plates work in mysterious ways.

Sometimes they're stone and remind your followers

(even in the literal, goin'-for-a-long-walk-

across-the-desert sort of way) ONLY ME.

What else is a gold ring for? Theopompus

wrote that Tyrian purple fetched its weight in silver,

so my love is, like, four times that ugly stepchild

of red and blue. I've heard that sirensong before.

Hey Ishmael,

why does your jacket look so pale and faded?

You're blanched, but Tyrian purple gets brighter

with wear and sunlight. They say. You should try it.

Is it still easy to be a stowaway?

Sometimes I want to be in the Atlantic so bad

I'd roll the dice with scurvy. I'll bring sweet-n-sour.

Someone's bound to have triple sec. Seasickness

shouldn't really affect we tectonic plate surfers.

Something's tainted my brain with association

and I want it to stop. I want

A simple explanation, (for once)

that doesn't involve magic

(or foreknowledge no one

could possibly know).

Don't walk away, Ishmael, I told you,

listen to my woes like you were reading a poem,

or looking way-too-into a painting.

If life were so linear as narrative we'd all be cubists.

Ishmael, I need to keep you here. Here's a dollar teaser.

This is a huge pile of shit, I hope there're no latent nitrates.

I'd hate to succumb to the Guano Act.

The only reason no man is an island

is that every island eventually teems with waste

which can be used to explode people, and that

can't be wasted. 3-2-1

boom.

Predication's not so easy. Has this been about a girl

to you? It is. I ate all the red skittles,

she left just the heel-ends of bread in the bag.

It escalated from there.

The bat shit islands—

but premonitions. Palmyra and the Sea Wind

murders second to the grid of misplaced plastic raked onto

its pristine shores by that bastard Tide.

Can't that dick take a break from the incessant

in-out, in-out-in-out. OK, I guess I can't blame him for that.

But this is about my guano island. Now.

Not the landmass I'd been shipwrecked onto.

The beautiful deserted (though not desert) isle.

Ishmael, keep up. Five-down-low, got it.

This is serious.

I feel like I say that too often.

Could I manufacture my bullshit issues into gunpowder?

Could experts?

I don't claim to know everything anymore.

Is there such a thing as chemical overreactions?

Did you want a donut? There're holes everywhere.

Do you get what I'm saying Ishmael? We're in danger

of losing selfhood.

I'm saying how do I... how do I articulate ellipses.

But that's just more theorizing on zeroes and absence.

What I'm really saying is placate me and I'll give you $5.

Placate me and come into existence, just this once.

Become a real person instead of a pathetic force ghost

Do you realize that in text-message typing $5 is ten characters

fewer than five dollars? Character conservancy is key.

We must be frugal. How do you express

regret as a four lettered word?...

my silence needs italics.