Free Printable Coupons

 

5 April 2022

Take this free pass to murder. Leave a dotted line of bodies on the road through Bucha. Leave trenches full of bodies you don’t cover with dirt. Leave chalk white hands in cable ties behind the backs of the dead. Leave a closed hand, nails red with polish and blood. Exchange your coupon for a slashed throat, a cut-off leg, a raped woman trashed by the road. Leave.

“They kill us for their sport.” Take this coupon for a dead hen, a toy for your son, an appliance for your wife, then load them on your armored personnel carrier. Don’t worry about intercepts; they already know what you’re doing.

A boy died in a basement because he caught pneumonia. An old woman shows a reporter how to get down her ladder into the the dark hold of her house. What they can’t see they can still bomb, because bombs have such amazing eyes.

Is that photograph voyeuristic, we wonder about a shot of a man on a lanai, looking at his phone? The model said yes, so our gaze at her naked body isn’t. You can’t exit a cliché without knowing its number. One student ate seven cookies; he counted them.

Desire to release the day’s news, to internalize my feelings in objects I see go by, as in a Chagall painting, flying like a dog in air in a bathroom on a wall. To take the bells and put them inside my chest, to pull their ropes and fill the cave with a sound at once hollow and dense. To make myself a bell and toll for every nerve ending’s complaint. After you complain, you become The Complainer. After you take a photograph of the homeless man bent beneath his pack, he becomes The Pilgrim. What is real doesn’t stay that way, or at least what looks real. On Kapahulu, they push their shopping carts toward the sea from under the freeway. In the morning, they retreat up the avenue, while at night they surge back toward Waikiki. They keep our time. Next to Zippy’s, a man lies partly shaded by a large umbrella leaning on the ground; he lies on a towel, and reads a book. Shall we call this the academic dream?

The war’s a metronome, like dementia. It clicks away in the corner to the tune of my keyboard, accreting words, if not their meaning. From a drone’s eye view, much of Bucha’s completely destroyed, except for the central cathedral. In Cambodia, the poorest villages have built gold-leafed temples. Worship what’s left behind, which is worship’s vestige.

An engine starts outside my townhouse. The contemplative life of a machine is noisy and stinky. Many days, I suspect mine is too. How do I act as witness to suffering I feel only as reflected light, pointed toward the subject, a small bunny doll used as sacrifice to an educational power point? My whole life has been an appropriation. My skin is a sieve through which it flows, and in that sluice I find pieces of us. A poet, wrote Borges, is a person who believes her metaphors are true.