The Bread We Eat in Dreams

  And Then

  It’s over.

  The glass hits my scalp. I taste scotch and blood and old, old wine.

  There’s a hand on mine in the dark. I don’t know if it’s New York or Los Angeles. I guess it’s the Groom, whoever that turned out to be. I think about Gilly Spur and the daisies. I think about Nevada and her kisses. I think about Blue Bob, about Ashen and Cutter and the smell of the wind through Burnt Corn Ranch. I can hear my beau breathing; I can smell the magic on somebody’s breath. There ain’t nothing in the world but the world, running funny, running down, winding up, busting its springs and looking for its repair manual.

  It’s black. Burnt Corn is gone and so is Gnaw Hollow. There’s a veil of glass and dripping booze over my eyes, and the Groom lifts it up. I know when she kisses me it’s the Wizard of New York, and when she kisses me she swallows me whole like she swallowed the sparrows. I’m a seed, I’m a wedded ring. I see the insides of her, and they are vast.

  You need two. If you’re going to start over. You need a seed and a dark place.

  Everything happens at once.

  Mouse Koan

  I.

  In the beginning of everything

  I mean the real beginning

  the only show in town

  was a super-condensed blue-luminous ball

  of everything

  that would ever be

  including your mother

  and the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles

  and the heat-death of prime time television

  a pink-white spangle-froth

  of deconstructed stars

  burst

  into the eight million gods of this world.

  Some of them were social creatures

  some misanthropes, hiding out in the asteroid belt

  turning up their ion-trails at those sell-outs trying to teach

  the dinosaurs about ritual practice

  and the importance of regular hecatombs. It was

  a lot like high school. The popular kids figured out the game

  right away. Sun gods like football players firing glory-cannons

  downfield

  bookish virgin moon-nerds

  angry punkbrat storm gods shoving sacrificial

  gentle bodied compassion-niks

  into folkloric lockers. But one

  a late bloomer, draft dodger

  in Ragnarok, that mess with the Titans,

  both Armageddons,

  started showing up around 1928. Your basic

  trickster template

  genderless

  primary colors

  making music out of goat bellies

  cow udders

  ram horns

  squeezing cock ribs like bellows.

  It drew over its face

  the caul of a vermin animal,

  all black circles and disruption. Flickering

  silver and dark

  it did not yet talk

  it did not yet know its nature.

  Gods

  have problems with identity, too. No better

  than us

  they have midlife crises

  run out

  drive a brand new hot red myth cycle

  get a few mortals pregnant with

  half-human monster-devas who

  grow up to be game show hosts

  ask themselves in the long terrible confusion

  of their personal centuries

  who am I, really?

  what does any of it mean?

  I’m so afraid

  someday everyone will see

  that I’m just an imposter

  a fake among all the real

  and gorgeous godheads.

  The trickster god of silent films

  knew of itself only:

  I am a mouse.

  I love nothing.

  I wish to break

  everything.

  It did not even know

  what it was god of

  what piece of that endlessly exploding

  heating and cooling and shuddering and scattering cosmos

  it could move.

  But that is no obstacle

  to hagiography.

  Always in motion

  plane/steamboat/galloping horse

  even magic cannot stop its need

  to stomp and snap

  to unzip order:

  if you work a dayjob

  wizard

  boat captain

  orchestra man

  beware.

  A priesthood called it down

  like a moon

  men with beards

  men with money.

  It wanted not love

  nor the dreamsizzle of their ambition

  but to know itself.

  Tell me who I am, it said.

  And they made icons of it in black and white

  then oxblood and mustard and gloves

  like the paws of some bigger beast.

  They gave it a voice

  falsetto and terrible

  though the old school gods know the value

  of silence.

  They gave it a consort

  like it but not

  it.

  A mirror-creature in a red dress forever

  out of reach

  as impenetrable and unpenetrating

  as itself.

  And for awhile

  the mouse-god ran loose

  eating

  box office

  celluloid

  copyright law

  human hearts

  and called it good.

  II.

  If you play Fantasia backwards

  you can hear the mantra of the mouse-god sounding.

  Hiya, kids!

  Let me tell you something true:

  the future

  is plastics

  the future

  is me.

  I am the all-dancing thousand-eared unembodied god of Tomorrowland.

  And only in that distant

  Space Mountain Age of glittering electro-synthetic perfection

  will I become fully myself, fully

  apotheosed, for only then

  will you be so tired of my laughing iconographic infinitely fertile

  and reproducing

  perpetual smile-rictus

  my red trousers that battle Communism

  my PG-rated hidden and therefore monstrous genitalia

  my bawdy lucre-yellow shoes

  so deaf to my jokes

  your souls hardened like arteries

  that I can rest.

  Contrary to what you may have heard

  it is possible

  to sate a trickster.

  It only takes the whole world.

  But look,

  don’t worry about it. That’s not what I’m about

  anymore. Everybody

  grows up.

  Everybody

  grows clarity,

  which is another name

  for the tumor that kills you.

  I finally

  figured it out.

  You don’t know what it’s like

  to be a god without a name tag.

  HELLO MY NAME IS

  nothing. What? God of corporate ninja daemonic fuckery?

  That’s not me. That’s not

  the theme song

  I came out of the void beyond Jupiter

  to dance to.

  The truth is

  I’m here to rescue you.

  The present and the future are a dog

  racing a duck. Right now

  you think happiness

  is an industrial revolution that lasts forever.

  Brings to its own altar

  the Chicken of Tomorrow

  breasts heavy with saline

  margarine

  dehydrated ice cream

  freeze-dried coffee crystals

  Right now, monoculture

  feels soft and good and right
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  as Minnie in the dark.

  It’s 1940.

  You’re not ready yet.

  You can’t know.

  Someday

  everything runs down.

  Someday

  entropy unravels the very best of us.

  Someday

  all copyright runs out.

  In that impossible futurological post-trickster space

  I will survive

  I will become my utter self

  and this is it:

  I am the god

  of the secret world-on-fire

  that the corporate all-seeing eye

  cannot see.

  I am the song of perfect kitsch

  endless human mousefire

  burning toward mystery

  I am ridiculous

  and unlovely

  I am plastic

  and mass-produced

  I am the tiny threaded needle

  of unaltered primordial unlawful beauty-after-horror

  of everything that is left of you

  glittering glorified

  when the Company Man

  has used you up

  to build the Company Town.

  Hey.

  they used me, too.

  I thought we were just having fun. Put me in the movies, mistah!

  The flickies! The CINEMA.

  The 20s were one long champagne binge.

  I used to be

  a goggling plague mouse shrieking deadstar spaceheart

  now I’m a shitty

  fire retardant polyurethane

  keychain.

  Hey there. Hi there. Ho there.

  What I am the god of

  is the fleck of infinite timeless

  hilarious

  nuclear inferno soul

  that can’t be trademarked

  patented bound up in international courts

  the untraded future.

  That’s why

  my priests

  can never let me go

  screaming black-eared chaotic red-assed

  jetmouse

  into the collective unconscious Jungian

  unlost Eden

  called by the mystic name of public domain

  The shit I would kick up there

  if I were free!

  I tricked them good. I made them

  put my face on the moon.

  I made them take me everywhere

  their mouse on the inside

  I made them so fertile

  they gave birth to a billion of me.

  Anything that common

  will become invisible.

  And in that great plasticene Epcotfutureworld

  you will have no trouble finding me.

  Hey.

  You’re gonna get hurt. Nothing

  I can do.

  Lead paint grey flannel suits toxic runoff

  monoculture like a millstone

  fairy tales turned into calorie-free candy

  you don’t even know

  what corporate downsizing is yet.