The shooters

 

1 September 2022

The subconscious isn't armed, but the armed act theirs out. Hardly an instant between a door opening and a black man/woman dying. We see their smiling photos later. Time’s revision, micro-space between seeing and shooting by way of a trigger that takes its own time. Does the trigger have an imaginary life, like the fantasy life of boulders? Those boulders looked awfully sturdy, but the trigger’s another thing. It requires us to pull it, lest we get thrown into a nightmare of bad rugs and top secret documents. He wasn’t sloppy with his stolen documents, so don’t set him up like that. If you watch the rug’s patterns unfold, you’ll discover the hotel’s dream life, wanting to be punctured with high heels and watered with gin. It doesn’t lend as much to interpretation, perhaps, as his dream of a tent with holes in it; through the holes stormed an army of chickens, when the real problem was ants, millions of them in a desert. What does an ant eat in a desert besides our occasional toes? The chickens may have been there to eat the ants, but the dream was his, not the chickens’ or the ants’. Fine ants, fine art, the canvas with multi-legged paint dripped on it, still moving. Still moving is a paradox, no? Moving still is a movie. The surfaces are so busy it’s hard to imagine the depths, but they’re there, awaiting the critic with a Go Pro to find tears in steel sheets through which to shoot a blurry car. The car is your feeling, the hole is not. It takes off down the road, away from the chickens and the dogs and the kind young man who gave you a bottle of water. It’s inside of you, jostling your organs, chipping against your arteries and veins, spreading in invisible bruises throughout the infrastructure of you. If you feel pain, it can’t be seen. If you see another’s pain, it can’t be felt. This is a big problem, isn’t it? The crevice between the poem and the poem’s reader, who is not inclined to feel the poem unless the poem says “Feel!” then runs off the tracks of pain into more paint across the canvas. You’d get the bends, if you attended too much to the suffering of words like ants upon the page, even if they’re only agents of another’s feeling, having infiltrated the grand hotel with its horrible rugs, finding feeling as envelopes of top secret documents scattered amid the magazines. No, I can’t situate my allegory of feeling there, where there’s so little that doesn’t transact. I pay so little mind, a flower has emerged on the lanai, light red against the brown paint, faded black barbeque, green broom palms, white clouds and azure sky. I was told skies are plural. My daughter thought traffics were. To be trans- is to be plural, at least during the middle passage from one to the other gender. You might come out blind, but you’ve traveled through the middle way, the dark wood, and that was an epic.