MEMORANDUM
from Music for Porn

 

Pronounced dead, a soldier becomes my disappearing act. The consistency of the situation hangs on the body, being a hole around which everything that appears appears to cohere. It’s a spell that holds me in thrall, unable to distinguish my proper subject from one deceased. Being what the language doesn’t want me to do, the decision to autopsy all US war casualties helps the military eliminate equipment flaws by improving a fleet of crash test dummies. Whatever words exist for this fall apart at such a stunning rate as if to protect the value of each identity, parceling properties before they sell. Caving to these demands, I masturbate to fantasies of day laborers fucking me in the shadow of the screening station, a checkpoint beside the border’s river diversion system where they’re reinforcing old security fence before it can deform under a migrant’s weight. I can’t get hard enough for intercourse when the moment is sweet, but as soon as he asserts the fundamental right to liberty and happiness, being what my soldier has sworn to protect, I fall on my knees, take his member in my mouth, and beg him to discharge. Whatever shame I feel in the face of sovereignty is inseparable from this arousal. In a world of love and domination, sex becomes monstrous in just proportion to the monstrosity of that world. The skin, an endless organ of excitement and abuse, my own private pleasures being mere adjunct of that. Don’t confuse this sentence for a proposition. Time itself, having already become a hardened artifact of the system, renders my orgasm co-extensive with the demands of production, but this is neither true nor false. In other words, time is a fighter jet, the way spirit is a bone, and the object of my rage secretes the same auratic halo. Like the best philosopher, my soldier subtracts the real from what can be thought and this enhances his allure, makes me love him even more. Translated into military language, the point is not to shoot, but to clarify the shot. So precision bombing has penetrated my poems and yet not even a single one of my feelings is precise, the words even less so. Put another way, the self is a coin. And while a soldier’s corpse may be the limit of my world, his cock in my ass remains a vehicle of transport, the light by which I write this sentence, whose sense defies the stars.

 

 

 

OBSCENE INTIMACIES

from Music for Porn

 

My soldier died last September hit

By Taliban mortar while trying to fix

A tank tread his father feeling the boy

 

Had been murdered by insurgents

Wanted to see the post-mortem report

To verify other accounts he heard a

 

- bout the 24-year-old’s death so o

- ffer comfort I say to myself say

The reservist died instantly when a

 

Hot piece of shrapnel tore thru the boy

- ’s flak vest into his chest before break

- ing in 2  w/ 1 piece lodged in the left

 

Aorta leaving the other piece lodged

In left lung a mute & uncomplaining

Sleep being fatal form his figure

 

— my decaying dream.

 

 

·

 

 

The body appears to have been

Dead some time under a spell a

Dream nation water hood flex

 

- cuffs minor abrasions sub

- galeal hemorrhage bilateral

Frontal regions of scalp intra

 

- muscular hemorrhage of an

- terior aspect & nothing internal

Evidence of trauma scant

 

Cause of death indeterminate

Toxicology report negative

For alcohol and drugs I long

 

                        — for where yr pleasure lies.