Under this particular mask
lies the beginnings of a strange tale
about voodun and the chicken killings
transported by freighter one night
to our sacred shores. It was that rare mix
of fear and frustration, God
dropping out of the sky like a shuttle.
Some were driven all the way back
to chains, or at least row houses.
Big cities demand a sort of syncretism
so everyone can pass as Catholic.
Possibly a hereditary ambiguity.
We of course wore the masks of knights
because, well, because we still
believed in the Templars! Look
at Hollywood, it knows when a good
fight can give rise to an ambivalent hero.
I mean who are you to parcel out
the historic phobias? Now put it
back on and keep marching.
(First appeared in Square One)
The problem with time
is that our thinking on it changes
with time. Clocks colliquate, their soft shapes
flowing down the corners of an adamant reality,
which is now also soft. Quantum quillets.
The underbelly of the universe. Such fears
perhaps sent Dali to the fascists. It is one thing
to fashion a world as change and impermanence,
and another to live within it under such auspices.
The ants crawl over the landscape of Europe
and time refuses to extinquish or coalesce
in the ashes that rise into clouds in avant-garde
paintings. But a painting is the object
of a disrupture, a parody of time, and in
the time it takes to lose a memory,
a picture becomes irrelevant.
(From All Night Card Game in the Backroom of Time)