Mark Sargent

FUCK NOSTALGIA for Doru



O cradle of the big lie
fuck nostalgia
the time zones work
so that it feels latitudinally
sync’d but nothing, fuck it,
is so.  The chronic tick
on the doom machine fuck
the fear of returning
that too
but still, yr spew anchors
in sprinkler & radio rant
oh say can you see
the dog peeing
on the barbecue
and that Austrian guy confusingly
calling himself me
but nothing is possibly new
and everything responds
to fire
which can’t be fucked
but sires
ash, pain, energy 
and heat,
faster than sun and trucked
in from Hun-fucking-gary
right thru the iron sphincter
like a dead-bolt dictator
posing before cardboard harvests,
papier-mâché donkeys,
piñata explosions, I mean,
is Romania about anything?

Here we suffer from phantostalgia,
the longing for what never was,
how odd to be the opposite,
the alternative or doppelganger reality
that drives all blames away
to a shimmering artless righteousness
a Teflon comprehension
you don’t encounter much seersucker these daze
or any who see much past the eyeball’s range
but the curve of planet, the fact of the sphere,
is not to blame.


“would give and spread like pliable,
well kneaded plasticine”
Javier Marías was talking about a mouth
but you sorted that
nerve fibers bouncing through the blood vessels,
mind too kneaded by pain
into survivable form
“it’s alarming how easily thought and speech
contaminate each other”
mind can’t believe what it is fucking hearing,
utterly flummoxed.
It discovers it can’t control the mouth anymore
and takes to clamping hands over it everytime
it senses imminent speech
but to no avail.
The arms tire but the mouth does not,
it feels like a youthful Fidel on May Day,
an amphetamine deathbed Artaud streaming
from the netherworlds of consciousness towards
a dark gash dissolving on the tongue,
a stomped-on-the-tail cat electric word fry,
all mental appendages at full expanse,
I mean fucking language ricochet blindman’s billards
on board ship in heavy seas.
O snookered by words
by heart beat by the whole dreary thing
and you discover you’re always
just lagging to the far rail.