The Hunger Games
By Joel Ephraims
Language holds total control. We are able to rest a kind of control from it sometimes, perhaps, but it remains the larger controlling force.
It is both magical and violent. Benevolent and maniacal.
It is God and much more than her.
Your son today, a behemoth’s lamppost tomorrow.
He rides his motorbike on the highway where the boats gallop forward with yellow bursts under the mountain under the bridge. The dark of the night is the same dark as the woman who cuts the chicken in the reflection of the window transposed over me as she looks away. Rain and insects on the boat’s windscreens tilt the motorbike into a tricycle under the traffic’s fragmentary collective gaze. How sinister the red talking of their lights as they speed away. The firemen’s boots and jackets in the decrepit hospital of Chernobyl. The aluminium homogenously logoed bags that the woman puts the chicken into.
It is mysterious.
It is segmented strangely. It creates series, deceptively, and these will always inflect.
They were organized in a certain way. When the disorganized one walked through their houses they knew. They were frightened and some stiffened themselves. Someshouted while others prepared. Paraplegic faces under the breaching of the great lamp.
Allhuman wounds are both belittled and exacerbated by language.
It allows Hitler and Keats, compels them. Two radiant blossoms on the vine of beautiful and terrible ghosts that ride its tandem bicycle still.
Inflections in an apocalypse bar cough operatically. Disconnects and traumas, they moan between octaves, oh disconnects and traumas. Rilke’s Panther shouts another round.
You are desperate but that lies outside of what it means. It folds it up for you like a sea anemone building a bi-polar laundry upon a raft made from the dust of your teacher’s chalk, floating like trigonometric hornets in your blood under the constellation that the forgotten clothes, even more forgotten then the firemen’s boots, tells you to see.
The behemoth constellation of God’s light is like the giraffe onesie of the bogan woman who crossed my path while I was walking here with a face like the exhaust nozzle of a cement mixer flying home without anybody inside for the evening performance taking place in the house that sometimes coalesces in the frequency of the horizon like a cobalt football stadium waiting in its own line. Lord Byron kicks a witches hat and disperses into the growl of the orange shirted construction men bunched together in the picturesque laneway, like Hitler’s eyebrows furrowed, overgrown.
The behemoth, only the size of the motorbike rider’s helmets under all his moonshine fur, will rest down my anemia like a thunderbolt of Zeus, slender as a sobbing siren, into the backyard of that woman scattered with its broken bikes and its aura of domestic abuse, bat-winged haemoglobin.
Like an arcade machine wrapped up in a lollipop both behemoth and lamp will soon fade away. I will win myself back. Fly my claw in the summertime.
She desired that she desired. She became a floating platform that lived upon multiple shelves but walked under herself too, refracting, seeing other platforms. How they burnt her.
Will they ever pull their arms out of the swaggering factory? As I ride on the back of mine toward Ursa Minor are my arms free?
No. But if I know that then maybe the factory’s legs will grow thin and its walk change. As I pass the stars it will touch me more softly with the new arms it has grown, capable of listing the bleeding out, resting its arms on its own windows.
A teenager with a buzz cut rides his motorized tricycle beside the highway. Footballers under the RSL’s red floodlight’s sprinting worming sprinting worming sprinting in the square white fence picketed field.
I watched them swimming between the tectonic plates dressed up in old flags, dancing on the surface where the shine sits. Their movements had a simple enchantment like children walking home from school beside serpents dreaming up floor plans but their sapphires, that is the way their faces looked when they rode around on those USS Eldridge salvaged bikes, they weeping Lucifer, were sometimes, always, awful.
You think it is you when the pressure of the ghost’s pets articulate. To train them, to teach them. Sun razoring and freezing surroundings. Radiating glaciers of the body. The red that combines from both hemisphere’s differently.
It lifted the prophets into the sky and allowed them to be the spiders that they always were. Poet spiders and other types with webs sphering in their foreheads flying dangerously droopy machines.
They drop their eggs into our laps everyday. Us who have long been eggs coalescing. I won’t blame them on you who don’t have an existence to lay blame onto. Only the billowing in the buzzing sky where grew these spider ghosts. Continuing their facilities, doing much good too it can’t be denied. I won’t echo their tone. The organism of the world is still growing.
Inside us are the thinking horses made of gold.
If we can herd their steps together…
But then diamond spiders, number spiders, gold horse spiders, game show spiders all ghosting us as their steps and the webs hail on. In my black hole that is a living sun I will attempt as hard as I can to unleaven them…to shepherd them out.
Les, am I subhuman, are you?