On Malice Read online

favoured over deformity.

  • • • • •

  Our being ill together, the mingled good

  of our lives on the web,

  is not fault but whipped virtue. Our pride

  not ours if not

  encouraged by them. If I despair of vice,

  my ‘if’ is courage,

  a finely tuned one-by-one into the truly

  long weakness, it bisects

  pride, party of the proudly weak, named,

  mean, learning all having is classified.

  • • • • •

  If ever I accepted a return to your world –

  your shadow kit and

  compensatory appetites,

  your peaches on the verge, and transient factories

  pouring out pallet stacks of moist holes –

  it would be on condition it pass through

  renovation. A sea vent

  cooks, gargles, and the hot word ‘dignity’

  follows ‘sovereignty,’ burped into the whorl of soap

  flake and super bacteria. You all owe rent.

  What thin humanist krill.

  It never had legs, that notion. A toddler’s optimism grafted

  on to war plans from old maps

  of divinities grinning in the wings. Ah, severance pay.

  I’ve only recently cleared an area.

  I cleared an area in the tall barley at the orchard’s

  eastern edge for the purposes of reading the silver

  calligraphy on the rear-screen retina – and croquet.

  I cleared the area using a scythe!

  I didn’t. I put my fattened head down

  into it, pressing the stalks all one way, like zebra hair,

  and listened for the sub-terra lullabies of plate-shift

  and ordained extinction. As in, fuck you, hole.

  Think on your secular prophet

  blubbing through his infection’s duration

  • • • • •

  At the sufferings of a European mare.

  How the sister shifted her kissface and menses

  awfully close to the big cleanse. It was linkages

  wrecked you, and will continue wrecking you.

  Wake, Shrike, the toddler’s tattooing the display case

  housing the Lindisfarne Gospels across his face.

  Some other trend’s thin crosscuts of the brain

  as the sky resets its gelatin.

  Colour us diseased, for it pleaseth me.

  If I halt song entire in the dim, dripping

  culvert, this be victory enough. The echoes

  of me bang my head against itself

  and the pungent sewer mosses.

  Effexor, juridical hubris, and liberating

  the Dutch made me, and all my works but me

  decay. I vacuum up the streaming chirps

  and store all in a manger. Straw, and the ticks.

  I’m banished structure, and the smell when

  the lid is lifted. Predicate of presence.

  Imagine dimensionless white gallery space

  for the hell of it. ‘Gandolfini died. He was

  a good man.’ ‘ – ?’ ‘You Serbian?’ ‘No, from Nfld.

  You?’ ‘Ghana. Tell us a joke, Newfie.’ ‘Asamoah Gyan.’

  Silverfish are neither silver nor fish,

  little Robert Mitchums in their elysiums of piss.

  • • • • •

  Who’s to say no joy abides in watching

  the ant get crisp,

  pinch-rolling your own nipples

  as poplar cover loses reception.

  Pedagogy’s the same dynamic formalized.

  The only eye above Art. Me

  the hedge maze made redundant –

  the charter, amendment and treaty redundant –

  the contract and social contract –

  the tract of grassland in seas of redundant wheat –

  Grease pool in a Moabit pizza box

  made of pulped satellite printout.

  Ice mass heaven’d above the cross in the chapel

  during vespers at Camp Century.

  HD 189773 b,

  cobalt blue exoplanet, its winds made of glass.

  The spectrum continuous and infinite, consider its perks.

  Keep talking. I can see it moves your ass.

  Your Tomahawks, tokamaks, Takoma Parks,

  Junichiro Tanizaki, and watercolour

  Matoakas. Jupiter groans, I speed its frequency to an audible

  tenor by bringing the forces of famine

  to the matter. Flies. Cracked skin. White sacks slung

  from white ’chutes exchanged for white powder.

  The grease smudge on the black lens is Andromeda.

  • • • • •

  On Skye one ewe’s and her lamb’s blue blotches

  rhyme with the ethicist’s scotoma, his pulsating nads.

  The Lord requires his quotient of eyeballs, of jumps.

  Some JTF2 assassin’s mother, Camila Vallejo and

  a Guangzhou ECE all, at one time, held knowledge

  concerning your future. You sat out reveille

  in a Neukölln club, chewing the damp sutures,

  blending the oxy, DJ, playlist and the dance;

  Sybilization and its bisque of trance. Folded stars

  on Cassiopeia’s hip – go down

  the grid, then up, the nearest bright ripple,

  down and up again, see it? First ‘W’ in

  THE WEST IS FUKT: DROWN YOURSELVES.

  All lives leach off before they’re lived; it fattens

  me. Your currencies, labour value and cattle-

  minus-an-anus breathing their last in East Texas.

  I’ve been going on forever. My work is erosion.

  It spins around a dematerialized axis, motion

  like blind hornets in cyclonic ferment,

  or weather. ‘Is’ lies so very close to what ‘was’ meant.

  Black plague silkscreened on a throw,

  The settee’s upholstered in ‘Martian sunrise’

  German felt. Tea steeps in the amplituhedron.

  A hell, four seasons in a temperate

  Zone. True life is housewares. One floor below.

  • • • • •

  We’re here. Which is convenient. Match each flag

  to its corresponding methane loop. Yes, I do kiss

  Lagos with this mouth. Open a box of Turtles,

  it is Turtles all the way down.

  She’s had a briefcase cuffed to her wrist,

  her wrist, containing soppressata of chimp brain

  and can tell you things about central intel

  that would turn a cat on its T. gondii.

  If you think the hardware is worthless or a drain

  to them, you’re not fully

  cognizant of the referent the collective pronoun’s

  cuffed to. It wears a pink boa, a pink seed

  of order beneath the eager hood, the breast

  of the great gap approaching Dudinka

  and the truly long weakness.

  Now none is coming. Pudding and Execution

  while the frozen coward’s bucket

  comes up with a worthy object, or is laughed

  full of headache. Now, you tell the stunned

  villain, the nights decline.

  The dome’s aerial, a pointless radar of care,

  is now indicator, miner’s lamp, a symbol, a kit,

  routine descent into Orsk at the brink of the mind

  still fresh as staged flowers.

  No limit to the streaming of form from the machine.

  Why are first incitements to public sin

  now handled

  harder by the favoured

  dead? That so many

  face this distribution, which favours

  the author’s charity,

  ends in a public

  desire for occasion, sections desire


  into a book

  on why the convenient

  face of reason punishes others.

  Nothing preserves nor aggravates forms

  of life more than

  to proceed from

  a safer box of drugs,

  through immolation, to the particular sense

  of torturing natural

  action with a secret

  Law of Witnesses.

  We follow one without definition.

  Credited regularly to lusts,

  judges, medicine and

  an accepted secret

  command to preserve

  fame over the ordinary.

  Pelicans kill themselves. Men cherish

  the state, and the custom

  of wives corrected. Princes

  descend to the law

  of lower homicide.

  More died mutable, privileging

  external desire. Spaniards

  killing civility to proclaim bees

  the reason great persons, or women, succeed

  in solitude.

  Virtues are but degrees of

  an act that provide against

  liberty.

  A species’ first principles weaker than the notorious

  Good.

  Liberty delivers quenched

  life to the next

  condemned state. Corrected desire is almost

  preservation, almost a small

  martyrdom in a compound.

  One indiscreet death taught dignity, taught not

  a new laboured overtaking

  or well-policed conclusion,

  but a true rash on nature.

  Distinguish heretics from their enormous love.

  Another force gained

  remit to care for the primary

  human strength

  of the commons. Humans died

  certain that light exceeded their own condemned

  parts to oppose authorized

  labour, to oppose orthodox

  purpose

  here in enforced Utopia and examples of the missing.

  Condemned parts on the commons and examples

  of the missing.

  Two offenders point to their city’s opinion

  of a code kings and

  fathers meant as already-

  satisfied law.

  Why is it called dependency?

  Why do states condemn the primitive subject?

  Largeness is probably induced dying

  or desire dying in the

  body of a local slave.

  One town refuses

  censure, so a king

  makes additions

  to the buried code,

  hunting the not-as-yet

  in his first punishments.

  Time and the commons. Heresy of ‘why’ against

  the imperial vastness of the law of distribution.

  Punishment’s essence and the commons.

  Are the least not enemy as before? Our

  place in temporal

  reason rewards use

  benefits from

  the rule of severe

  theft as custom.

  Like laws against burying sunset, cutting off

  the little hand proves

  nothing, proves a comparison

  to dead Athenians

  is destroyed reason.

  If good were the worst god, reward would

  be to cause ourselves

  to depart

  by the hand of thieves.

  As before,

  so are we condemned, bound by arguments

  of divine reward,

  little bullbaitings,

  long duels that depart

  from fact, extending

  confession when

  severe theft differs only in comparison.

  The inclination to prevent nothing

  restraining a man from

  the sunset of a second

  death.

  Misery is not secret. Misery is the state’s

  data. Damage done upon

  life is justice stealing data

  as recompense for her

  elected

  privilege. Therefore no delinquent servant becomes

  part of the state when it

  relinquishes jurisdiction

  over the hurtful lord of injury.

  Against Aristotle, ask divine reason if life may yet

  kill a received secret.

  Herein the damaged data – the king’s data –

  We may eat better from prison,

  may pay virtue’s debts by refusing.

  I may be possessed of death and still neglect

  to prefer another’s opinion.

  Desertions guide me

  to a thief, to a vow

  of evil, to examples of first

  Paradise. I learned by refusing death’s corollary.

  Equal to faults. Equal

  to weariness. I may be

  refusing a better prison.

  Examples of escape: It is clear he removed

  the pillow. It is clear he

  used water on the infected

  houses. It is also clear one

  party extorted another

  and all forms of poison are heaven.

  Purgation.

  Examples of fallible will,

  and the breaking of legs

  ceased. Morally clear.

  Morally invincible being,

  apparition, hurt scholar,

  jealousy is a halter of fire.

  The breaking of legs ceased in the fire.

  I copy absences, and do my shifts at

  the scope.

  I give incitatory words to my masters

  who require them

  under law. Why

  cite this job

  as labour bound

  to the act of killing?

  Uncertain testimony,

  meditation upon

  fact. Such as history needed her, her drawn

  shift, and first blood –

  I imagined a fact to defend, I forbear

  bitterness to hunt

  with dogs.

  I copy the dog’s absence and hunt with

  a scope.

  Jailer, Self-concern, you may dispense with

  the greater instruments:

  measures, changes, harm,

  The Law, actions.

  I learned to impute to the body a despair,

  a kind well of exceptions

  that preserved the tempted

  body in a cast, safely above

  sound, the error preserved

  in written miracles.

  Avoid the diseases of Section 7.

  Purpose steps toward the self-authorizing

  death. Skin

  for condemned skin.

  Make use of the weak answer,

  description, an argument’s

  gradations are no better

  when the body is taken.

  Images remain of the dead in diverse places.

  Miraculous dead in miraculous places,

  arguing in a common

  room.

  Answer to Others! The soil is intolerable.

  Answer to Others! I recanted.

  A weak body in a weak

  room is a description

  of miraculous images.

  The patriarch’s hate for the flesh approaches

  the heroic, unconstrained

  strength imitating

  the plucked-out eyes

  of exaltation, an escape

  downward through

  history, a stranger

  perishing without actual

  emission.

  It blotted out damnation.

  It blotted out Section 9 with a bowed head, and

  wished the actual nation

  lay down its lives, correcting

  any slip upward.

  Escape downward through history, our own eyes

  hat
ing life, this life,

  the wetting

  rains direct you to do it

  with no reason for doing it.

  Any slip upward imitated the soul

  correcting the bowed head.

  Devil made of shadow, punished for loving

  a very sick mind. A

  certain urge plainly alleged

  in the shadow of type.

  I meant to celebrate the ground, to forbid

  no precept, no fire, to extol

  the history of instinct.

  To govern extremely loving

  my toleration of a lie.

  I meant to deny the work of order,

  the work of order

  buried in story,

  to contradict fire

  by loving a particular

  contempt. Is the text moral whose shadow

  confesses, whose

  invitations to its own

  death are a fire?

  Loving ourselves as

  we do, hanging in

  opinion, loving

  directions, the force of accepted order. I intend

  to answer to fact by dying.

  [Cetera desunt.]

  Notes

  SIGINT: These sonnets ‘occur’ inside the abandoned nsa surveillance station on the summit of Teufelsberg (‘Devil’s Mountain’) in Berlin, Germany. A manmade mountain, Teufelsberg is the result of the Allies’ decision to pile massive quantities of the postwar rubble of Berlin on top of a Nazi military-technical college, designed by ­Albert Speer and left unfinished after the war. As part of echelon, the nsa listening station was constructed in 1963, intercepting all telecommunications and satellite signals from the east. It was abandoned and left derelict after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the departure of the nsa in 1991. The cluster of buildings and radar domes remains empty.