Dahmer Suite
I. Dog Day Afternoon
...I
was always interested
in how things worked underneath
the
skin....
They
came when called
— from the start —
roadside strays,
tail tucked,
splay-legged & begging
for a hand
out-stretched, a stroke.
I
killed the first
two days before I
turned twelve
— if you’d caught
sight of us
boy & dog
sporting twin sloppy grins,
you’d have
half-lifted your hand
— waved us on our way.
When
I split it
groin to gullet
there was only a whimper,
even when I thrust
into flaccid
tissue.
The pyretic engine
of belly
spread wide— a
holocaustic gash,
an open invitation
— an invocation—
an Anubis to
jackal me
through the hours
of the nights
to come. That’s
when I came
to the conclusion
— that’s when I
augured
a future that lay
somewhere else.
Only
later I determined:
a light hammer
strike to the temple,
if handled right,
anesthetizes
& doesn’t ruin the head.
II. Ahead Of My Time
...Maybe I was born too late.
Maybe
I was an Aztec....
It
takes 100 muscles to smile.
It takes one week
& a
fifty-gallon drum of muriatic acid
to render soft
tissue tender enough
for the wire
brush.
I
once heard that clumps of raw meat
soaked over-night
in Coca-Cola
would dissolve by
morning.
That’s just not so
— at least, not
the striated muscle.
But
it’s a fact
Aztecs prized a
dish called “Man Corn”
— human meat
& maize
a cassolet baked
in the brain-pan.
It’s
a fact
ancient Bactrians
kept carrion dogs
to feed on the
flesh of dead relatives,
but only after the
heads were removed.
It’s
a fact
in the Templo
Mayor
seven structures
housed 100 skulls
—
gnawing evidence
verified by bones....
I
once heard the one faculty
that separates us
from
lesser creatures
is risibility
— our ability
to laugh.
What a joke
— a bone of contention.
A human skull
consists of 22
— collagen,
calcium, phosphorus
hinged in hallowed
symmetry:
Supraorbital,
Parietal, Zygomatic...
an ossuary of
cranial obsecration.
The Greater Wing
of Sphenoid
unfolds the
Mystery —
sows a sutra in
Coronal Sutures:
Buy
black blocks of granite
construct
a temple
temporomandibular
tempus
ludendi.
III. Dahmer Edax Rerum
...My consuming lust was to experience
their
bodies....
If only one had
stayed.
If only one had
stayed on its own.
If only one had
let me
do whatever I
wanted
I might have...
I might not
have seen that message
etched in acid, there
in the pyramid
shape of occipital lobe
— might not
have heard it speak
to me once in
Creole, or Caribe,
of unspeakable
appetites:
Zumbi (it
loves you)
Zombi (it loves you not)
Zombie (it will love you — forever
stay with) you
know,
an ice-pick really is too big
— an
upholstery needle works just fine.
You must wipe it
with Clorox,
(draw the upper
lid away
from the eyeball)
insert it carefully
into the tear
duct.
One solid tap
(use what’s handy)
is pretty much all
you need
to punch the point
through the orbital plate.
Stir till white
matter
churns soft as
butter.
Injecting
ammonia is overkill.
If only one had
lasted.
If only one had
lasted more than a day.
One everlasting to
do
whatever I wanted.
I am consumed by my
work
at the Ambrosia
Chocolate Company....
Dolores shows a
photo of her grandson
& the women
bleat: He’s so sweet,
I could just
eat him all up....
Ambrosia is the
food of the gods
— did you
know that?
Did you know
that it imparts
immortality?
Did you?
The Frugal Gourmet
says:
Take Eat
For
this is my body.
I’d been
swallowing that all my life,
digesting His
message of Love:
To
eat is to appropriate...
How appropriate
You
are what you eat.
If
you kill it, you must eat it.
One
man’s meat is another’s...
Food
for thought.
(The Texas Review)
Fall River, August 4th 1892
And
when she saw what she had done
she
gave her father forty-one.
It must have been the August heat,
its steaming iron sky pressing you
for months that year. Calculations
later concur: it is the year of
the dragon
— inspiring every searing
breath. Heat coils & howls,
singes your lungs,
& dense air perspires,
expands, like serge suits
bloated by scalding water,
& monthly flood of blood
cramps your frame, groans
hormonal, inflammatory elegies
to your body burning infertile
eggs & the sidewalk’s
infernal, hot enough to poach
soles right through the shoe.
And you cannot breathe.
You are suffocating
in yards of over-starched cotton
drawn over long drawers &
woolen
stockings, a silk chemise &
whalebone
corset — your carcass trussed
& dressed
made ready for the oven of your
father’s
baking house — snapped under the
thumb
& nail of the coffin king,
Procrustean
in his attempts to fit them
in their last narrow bed
— one size fits all —
rumors of limbs lopped or bent
to accommodate. You are the good
girl,
still daddy’s spinster princess.
It is 1892 & you are
thirty-two
& just back from Italy
where girls must be at least
twelve
to marry legally.
And you just spent
this trying morning trying
not to inhale fatal phosphorus
from newly booked safety matches.
And it is not safe.
It is 11:15 am on August the 4th,
1892;
there is a Depression going on.
Your family lies
dormant, glutted on mutton.
You are dreaming over a scorching
hearthstone
sweating over freshly split logs
& a demon-lover;
the grave & cryptic man
invented:
whose hands ignite your flesh each
night
whose heels strike sparks in humid
darkness,
inciting ruts in asphalt roadbeds.
Cleaving to this image,
you go upstairs
to
wake your parents.
(Conspire)
X Marks the Spot
Amelia
Earhart piloted Eleanor Roosevelt, in evening dress,
to
Baltimore just after she became First Lady.
She
was so enthusiastic about the flight
she
wanted Earhart to give her lessons.
The president said no.
Fact a Day Calendar, January 22, 1999
If Dana Scully got her wish
to be Eleanor Roosevelt for one
day,
let it be: March 7th, 1933.
She is a knockout
in Chanel’s black box-jacket suit.
She has a matching Glock in her
handbag.
She’s not yet a delegate to the
UN,
not yet chairman of the Commission
for Human Rights — has never been
a special agent.
She’s just niece of Theodore,
wife of Franklin —
the First Lady who wants to fly.
She tells Amelia she’s been alienated
from the President since 1921,
since the poliomyelitis. She
explains:
inflamed motor neurons,
& her dream, where a man
called Mulder tells her to believe
that the truth is out there
somewhere in the gas-pressured air
of a turbine engine’s whine;
that she would like to take
Noonan’s place
in 1937, co-pilot & disappear
mysteriously
between New Guinea & Howland
Island;
that Franklin will die in office
— a bull’s-eye for the Cancer Man —
after breaking the “no 3rd term”
tradition;
that in 1992 a search party will
find
remnants of Earhart's plane in
Kiribati.
She promises to call: Amelia,
it’s me...
She swears to dispute their
claims.
She will close that file, rejoin
her in the area
between Melbourne Fla., Bermuda,
& Puerto Rico,
where any number of planes have
vanished
& investigations to date have
not produced
any scientific evidence of unusual
phenomena
involved in any of those
disappearances.
(Dark Planet)
Post-Mortem Mother
after Denise Duhamel
My post-mortem mother glides
on gurneys, slides through each
fluorescent basement, skims
Our Lady’s cool corridors
counting acoustical tiles,
keeping time to the turn
of rubber’s drub on linoleum.
She scorns the M.E.’s hymns
to her beauty, spurns his frigid
slab of thumb as he strokes
each rigorous limb.
She slights his catalogue of
parts,
his clear-cut measurements
— lividity & arteries,
circumference of heart
— loathes methodic matters.
But how she loves
the body bag
in basic black,
the time of knives
& sowing of bone-saw,
when her cracked ribs
flower between her breasts.
(Dark Planet)
Working By The Light of Burning Bodies
for Kathe Koja
Call them corpse candles,
or noctilucent lanterns;
humans burn hot as carbon-arcs,
incandesce into calcium’s
lime-light,
scintillate phosphorescent self-generation
at 1800
degrees Fahrenheit
in just under 2 hours.
After a few hours the heat
shimmers into being,
ignites Ignis Fatuus
flame-thrown Fata Morganas,
& Radiant Boys.
I punch fists into sockets
& love the sensation
— the retinal excitation
when eyeballs are pressed
with the ball of a thumb
through closed lids
— the way it changes
the physiopathology of light.
The scientific study
of the behavior of light
is called optics, but
in Quaker doctrine, The Light is
that divine presence in each person
— so what does it mean
that Debbie Boone once postulated:
you light up my life....
Newton understood light
as composed of corpuscules
exuded from luminous bodies.
As I
understand it, Romans practiced Crematio,
a
punishment reserved
for
deserters, counterfeiters, & arsonists.
Law
specified the guilty must burn alive
become
combustible Catherine Wheels
—
the aboriginal Roman Candle.
Saint
Paul, a Roman citizen, believed
it was
better to marry than to burn.
We
don’t get many couples —
well — once — a woman requested
that
her urn be placed amid what remained
in her
long dead husband’s coffin.
True love, that. And how
I love my work.
It is not the etiology
of electromagnetic radiation
that appeals to me
— not even the psychopathy
of a statement like: let there be
light.
It’s the intention
inherent in incineration —
the
purifying properties of fire,
my
desire to light the way for the dead.
Do you
think Tomás de Torquemada knew?
Do you
believe an auto-da-fé was his way
of
lighting heretics through the darkness?
I don’t
know....
I don’t
know much about luminous flux
— the rate of flow of light per
unit of time.
I cannot calculate the refractive
index
— the ratio of the speed of light
in a vacuum
to the speed of light in a medium
under consideration,
but I do know the average human cremains
weigh
approximately nine pounds.
They
are processed into fine particles
then
placed in a container.
The
entire process takes
about
three hours.
For
eight hours each night
I keep
the lights burning
burning
the midnight oil:
amber,
copal, myrrh
a
florescence of resins
—
prayer smoke set alight
to
soothe my olfactory perceptions.
Once, I
pushed camphor
soaked
cotton balls
deep
into my nostrils,
but
they gave me headaches,
&
seemed to make me photosensitive.
Besides,
the Director claimed
it
showed a certain insensitivity,
&
anyway, he couldn’t smell a thing.
Most
nights it’s reading:
palms,
Tarot, the pyromantic
messages
found in the flames.
I pry
open each cadaver’s hand.
check
their life-line against my own;
my
fingers climb the seven mounts,
twist
along each wristlet.
then I
set my mouth upon the table,
right
in the middle
where
all four lines intersect.
I‘ll
lay out three cards
for
every one of them
I
arrange.
Rods
are good —
provide
vision in dim light;
coins
are even better —
they
activate color, illuminate
the
neural pathways.
I stuff
a card into
the
lucky stiff’s mouth
before
I pull the lever.
I
remove Judgment
from every deck.
The
laws of Resurrection
don’t
apply here.
Only
bodies harvested
from
the ground
will
rise at the last trump.
My
mother told me once that she feared
for my
immortal soul — that ashes to ashes
did not
mean what I thought it did;
that
God did not feast
on fat & fumes —
did not
flare his nostrils
at the
perfume of human
flesh
flash-fried…
Fear
of the Lord is the beginning
of
knowledge. Only fools despise
wisdom
& discipline.
I do not fear
God,
but I
am not a fool.
I fear
the notion
of the resurrected dead —
—
corpses worming their way
up
& out of the earth.
They
are immune to the light.
You
have to burn them
or they
keep coming back.
(Dark Planet)
Mythical Mother
after Denise Duhamel
My mythical mother never bothered
to weave a basket of river rushes,
hide from him who conceivably
fathered
me. She never had intimate brushes
with the Gods; no gravity of
judgment. . . .
She wore grief on her cheek, could
sink lushes
under the table, swore he came
hell-bent
seeking a semi-divine concubine.
He took her in a tenement —
low-rent
daddy, no shower of gold,
valentine
cupidons — not a single swan
feather.
Left her humming the Chiffons’ He’s
So Fine.
If he were mine? Our umbilical
tether
would writhe — a cobra of blackest
leather.
(ABCnews.com)
Highway
Side: Five Minutes to Midnight
We
ride the road to the City of the Dead,
mouths full & spitting Chewing
John’s juice,
ears pierced by Wolf’s howl: We
gonna pitch
a wang-dang doodle.... All
night long
down Highway 61, Blues Alley, you
can run
— you can run from Memphis to
Clarksdale,
past Smitty’s Red Top &
Sarah’s Kitchen,
past the now collapsed &
wholly moldering
Riverside Hotel on Sunflower
Street
where Bessie Smith came to grips
with the ultimate epistemology of
the Blues.
You can run on through, past
Rosedale
— you can run till you come
to U.S.49.
Never mind the Fuel Mart &
Church’s Fried Chicken,
never mind Delta Donuts &
Abe’s Bar-B-Q.
Robert
Johnson, tell us, if you know
what waits in that place outside
the borders of town,
in that place where two roads cross
at right angles,
where Mercury dimes dipped in
Van-Van,
dusted with ashes, & wrapped
in red flannel
might still due your bill in some
juke joint
where a drink of whiskey’s always
a risk
for a man with the mojo. Hands
down, your good-girl wasn’t
there....
Old man, if you’re on this road
tonight,
thumb out, boot heels clocking 12
beats
to the nearest bar, come on.
We’ll turn our strings to open
tunings,
roll our bones past Morgan City
We won’t stop at Three Forks
Store,
we won’t rest at Mount Zion.
We got to keep on moving
— keep on moving. . . .
(NPR Rhythms)