a brief history of sonata form

1. exposition

despite my family’s ceaseless efforts
weeds killed our lawn again that year
while my brother and i massacred ants
danny with his magnifying glass,
me with my hose
in a book I came across,
i found that ants can bear fifty times their weight
like bulldozers and buildings and dicks,
in another book I came across,
everyone went blind,
and only one human retained her sight.
she was raped.

we’d hide behind our grapevine,
crouching down between green and
black watermelon shells
I’d throw from my kitchen window.
spying out between the leaves,
between the heat created energy fields
seeping from everything in sight,
there was a haze,
a queer steam,
and when I looked really hard,
I could see boils on the neighborhood,
and the sun left spots in my eyes so
when I looked at my hand
there were boils there too.

lines of solitary pine trees protected my
house, an honor guard.
they saluted the sun like russian soldiers
in those old black and white flims.
these real trees smell much better
than car fresheners.
I skipped soccer practice and had sex in
the mulch those trees rose out of,
with a girl in a uniform after school,
she was the first,
and I got black eyes like rocky
after getting hit in the back of my head
with a bat,
then in the front of my head with fists,
for fucking the wrong girl.
I tell my parents I was hit by a stray
lacrosse ball,
and I’m glad my hair covered the blood,
like teen people or time or cosmo.

I enjoyed these things because that year
I read a book,
about a samurai who killed hundreds of
people with two swords,
while declaring himself one with the universe.
I always hated gi joe.

the neighbor boy grew to thirteen that
year,
and killed three baby ducks with rocks,
they were caught in the algae,
because the water didn’t circulate,
and there was no wind.
I saw him in church a day later,
in between people singing praises,
and understood the words family and support,
so I learned big words like hedonism
and nihilism and hypocrisy and read the
anti christ
and scratched anarchy on the tops of desks.

we threw firecrackers in the sewers,
and weren’t surprised when george shot
himself in the head,
or when the janitor found a body
hanging from the rafters of our high
school
because he liked a girl.
(she didn’t like him back)
the intellectuals laughed and called it
melodramatic between ap classes,
and said things like juxtaposition and
paradoxical
and were mad when I called them redundant,
and I smiled when jocks stole their
virgin girlfriends, and gave them back
damaged.

that year I heard that technology
advances faster than man’s ability to
handle it.
our teacher was talking about cloning
and atom bombs,
but it’s the same with pretty girls and
their tits.
they end up getting fucked by guys and
guys and guys and the occasional girl
and the drinks make their sweat smell
like formaldehyde
which makes me think of 7th grade life
science,
of dissecting frogs on tables
and dangling their intestines in front of
the pretty girl in the lab, the one I’ve had
a crush on for years.
and I wonder if the frizzy girl with the
bug glasses feels left out.
I wonder if she wishes someone would
dangle their intestines in front of her.

my friends decide that ugly people
aren’t worth knowing
and I’m confused,
but they say that ugly people don’t
develop like attractive people,
because of new big words like
behavioralism and I’m pretty sure this
means we’re play-doh,
and I ask if that makes them retarded,
and if ugly means hermit,
and if hermits are people too,
because humans are social creatures,
and the very idea of no connections
means hermits aren’t people, right?
and they laugh and call me an asshole.

hummers became popular that year,
the car and the act.
I asked for one and received the national
anthem.
the school heard about this, because the
current pretty girl was notorious
and I felt oddly patriotic and heartened
during the pledge of allegiance,
but I hid my head when she walked by
between periods one and two,
while cell phones began to eat my
friends,
so they never needed to branch out,
and I envied their excuse.

my mom tells me about deserters from
world war two,
and talks about how they hid in the
jungles of the philippines
and still live there now
because they don’t know it’s over.
my skin goes cold,
my hair stands like plasma rays.

the people around me,
i don’t know.
the voice inside my head calls me a
social retard,
and recommends cocaine,
adding that if I’m going to fuck with
myself, I should go all out
and not waste my time with semantics
like pot.
I thank it profusely.

the cyclogenesis spasms at times,
and I wonder if this dimension is
collapsing on itself,
over and over again,
and I wonder if there’s a hammer,
beating us like a sword smith,
cause that’s what they do,
string theory with metal,
they fold over the steel,
and hit it,
and hit it,
and hit it.

that year I had a recurring dream
about junkyards as far as my eyes could see:

I drop to one knee, and

against the green sky
the ground stands firm
amidst old soda cans, and
tightly wrapped diapers,
and on the ground, there's a painting,
the kind that I usually hate,
the kind that’s painted in bulk
so there can be one in every household,
with the palm trees and the island
and the waves
and the birds in the air,
and I see my face in the dirty glass
and I understand
and I wake up,
and I'm sad.

2. development

from the second story,
they move like fish.
I watch them swim in tequila and wine,
ears still ringing from a show
two hours before.
sounds are muffled,
and in black dresses, as I turn my head,
I vaguely recall three clown fish
spraying each passerby
in hopes of finding fertility.
smoking cigarettes,
bubbles rise up to wear I stand.
from the second story,
I scientifically watch piranha
move from group to group
eating a limb every now and them,
reminding me that
I admire pragmatism,
and that I’m a juice filled worm.
from the second story,
despite my worminess,
the fishbowl seems inviting.
the tops of their heads float and bob,
their shoes,
they look like sinkers.
I’d love to cast a line,
to be dragged under, but,
it’s much safer from the top
looking down.
from the second story,
the light plays tricks on my eyes,
and I’m sure I'm inside water,
and I’m amazed at every breath
so I try a laugh, to make sure
I’m not drowning.
I swim down the stairs slowly,
and my head feels distorted,
and maybe I shouldn’t be driving,
but I want to be in my car.
the fish brush up against me, as
I search for a door,
sending chills down my spine
as their slime and cold rubs off on me.
I sit in the passenger seat of my car,
the one I had bought,
my submarine car,
and rub my eyes really hard,
till they water.

3. recapitulation

summer’s a little faster than our time
share allows,
so we idly sit on neon colored yard
chairs, waiting,

sunglasses facing the baby blue sky
that’s dotted by horseflies.
they buzz like electricity.

the bugs barrage our arms,
but we don’t move to swap them.
we are busy,
with all the yarn in our pool.

manually, we spin in memory-s
from genghis khan
to chernobyl
and I laugh and say

“looks like god had a case
of post partum depression
a day or two after creation”

“there’s those oatmans and tonopahs,
those ghost towns that pop up every once in a while
like kids to the fridge,
sort of like a guard or a soldier in a
shakespeare play, you know…
those vacancies that help move along
the plot,
those alexandrias, just waiting for some new
conqueror to move in and reclaim and
rename”

vacancies, you know,
fucking vacancies

yan yan tethera- the dead shepherd ’s language.
we’re still dreaming it everywhere.

kids, teens, adults, seniors,
they’re all sleeping,
talking to singing sheep,
“everything and everything, that’s us,”
sing the sheep,
“we’re like the comatose, the way we
sleep…
numbers and such, and bringing people
back to life on the ends of strings.”

it’s hard to talk to singing sheep,
ones whose thoughts are in
a dead shepherd’s language.
you might say they might as well
not have a voice at all,
but there’s just so fucking many of them,
singing sheep trying to sing louder
than other singing sheep
and until they lead themselves to the butcher,
the one they put in business,
they’re a bunch of white fluff balls,
fighting over the same fallacy.

the memory pool is deep now,
and bitter, and we’re thinking
of giant green adult pine trees
roped out from thousands of years ago.

soon, we’re talking to each other about
parsimony,  and cells,
and the fact that our particles were once trees.

i am not a tree.
honto? (really)
you can’t climb me
odoroku (you’d surprise)
you can’t climb me
betsu ni kammawan. (pretty much
don’t care)

communication breakdown plays
behind us.

june bugs fuck each other in the grass by our feet.

and I’m sure somewhere cockroaches
are fucking each other too.

isn’t it hilarious that every moment is
the final product.
the height of evolution,
the height of all proceeding moments.

probably some old people too,
are adding to our tapestry.

on the lawn, as we sit in neon colored
lawn chairs
with thirty dollar sunny glass pipes
in hand,
smoking,
for the future.

ashita (tomorrow)
wa onaji koto (will the same)
ni naru dato omo… (become I think)

someday we’ll make sense of all this yarn
because the quantity of one
still exists
even after
the numbers
one
through
infinity
are added.
nothing could be funnier.