Free Supplice by T. Zachary Cotler Page A

democracies
    without populations
    entirely philosopher king;
    Supplice in her Artemisian skin,
    washing her painfully beautiful hair
    in the last of the potable water.
    She tells him one night of her long dead sister
    Helen, not a woman, but a narrow-
    waisted, asphodel-bedecked Idea
    with pornographic breasts
    and a mouth that shaped lies into song,
    song abducted across the sea,
    but he tells her it’s children’s minds,
    not his own, that he fears
    for in this noise that shapes song into money,
    the coins that break the scales that measure
    the coins that cover the eyes gone blue
    from staring into hyperlinks. She pets his knee
    and promises this noise is amniotic
    fluid of utopia, when everyone will be her sister.
    Temple of Discontinuity . . .
    a single night-long sigh,
    broken by broken
    egos and Is
    of a thousand nights, he
    turning on, off, and on
    a schizophrenic light
    in the lighthouse parapet
    atop his temple by the Sea
    of Sudden Discontent, the tide
    in the bedroom doorway carrying off the broken,
    curved
    planks of a thousand ships
    made of nothing
    more than words
    for all the thousand types of subtle heart
    attacks
    one suffers wanting “Helen” back.
    Hurt but to heal, to cool—what heat,
    what real but a fake
    touch, what pulls
    away like a craft
    sans
gondolier
    the tide keeps knocking
    against the pier. But real
    when the tide takes
    away what hurt but what one
    asked to feel—what never
    but what today. White shirt
    but to strip
    as you drift
    in the breakwater craft of burning one’s days.

Vacuum tubes from old TVs:
    void-marrowed bones of the
    alembic she supplies
    to transubstantiate a lack
    of faith into a clearer lack
    of need, a liquid so devoid
    of sediment, of particles
    of protein from the heart, that she,
    humming the tune to
Vive la
    Ressentiment,
consumes
    all night with total calm
    the two-cuts-
    per-second pornography
    of this particular century.
    â€”that she can hold his head
    like John’s from Salome’s
    platter or Klimt’s
    Judith’s Holofernes’ death
    after little death after death
    held by the hair—that she exits the bed
    without waking the head,
    leaves the house in its halo of lampposts
    and moths and wanders
    side-by-side with herself,
    arrives at the water
    and, lifting a platter
    of 32 Fahrenheit glass, talks a long
    time to her own death’s head faraway in the mirror.
    The other shore
    garden of untended
    heartstems, forked
    succulents, tangled,
    a seine to trammel
    all intimate talk that
    crosses. The coin-on-the-tongue
    price of crossing is that
    he retreats, she repeats
    scores of times “system
    error” has lost
    his mind at a fork
    in aortic, riparian,
    intimal talk.
    Hurt but what one asked to feel,
    I will,
so they wed
    with a ring of American rain
    disbanded by wind
    blowing newsprinted “ CITIZENS
    SCATTERED BY RIOT POLICE ,”
    along the waterline. Supplice,
    zeitgeist succubus,
    speaks English not
    to talk but to drop
    a drop in each void,
    each unplugged incubator
    lined up like world news
    monitors along the waterline.
    Raking lace
    at the fringe of the tide,
    raking with fingers
    the English and cutwork
    and French of the froth,
    with the negative black
    dwarf sun in her eye echo
    eye mirror eye, she,
    taking his fingers,
    English and Hebrew bones,
    bobbin bones,
    to lace with her own,
    said
love, if you like,
    but
abyss of light.
    Wax seal and watermark
    and copyright protection code:
    so go in through the crack
    in the aft of the ark,
    past helot pugilists
    petrified in armlock
    in the secular dark
    of the 600,000 ton hold
    with CAUTION -orange plastic crates
    of Third World aid
    and darker crates of complex
    not-exactly-shame
    and pirate gold
    and pyrite.
    Open your mouth, he will see
    ailleurs
(an elsewhere slightly
    more distant than
elsewhere
), where, if he
    forgets his Earth, he may found
    a city of rhapsodes
    who drink from their own
    calvaria inscribed
    with circlet arguments