We all believed the machine reached this “deep space.” No problem. We listened to the spooky noise and heard the NASA guy when he said that’s what it meant. We barely cared. We barely noticed. Who would care, a thing like that. And that’s how we let it slip by. Just like that. So who are we now. We sped it down. More than a thousand times slower, signal flayed from noise. Signal, that’s who we are, we almost missed it, but then here it is:

http://hosting.soundslides.com/37zgj

What does it say. Listen. What does it say?

 

 

Part II of tonight’s double feature. Maybe they’ll like this better.

 

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Faithful

by Rob Rice

---

 

You get to know the size of a room best

As you’re sweeping it

You feel it’s mapped flat and physical

So hardtop obvious

 

They kept a bazillion records of faithful people

Acting accordingly Models

of interpreted force and lust built like water

An ice monument melts in a pond and the water surrounding it becomes unswimmable

And irresistible you feel it inside your ribs between beats

 

“I hope it isn’t much longer”

Captured in real cassette tape

That inert sound it makes

Scudding your thumb across

We have a strong blood together knowing

The microwave makes the milk flag

 

Where the dream starts

At the verge of the room

Toeing over to bed and getting in with you

It’s a dream of a little girl

Standing skewed on cement at the right edge

Of a flat slab room

The moon shining in through crossbar windows

Exaggerated and loose

The only light and it makes a spectacle of her shadow

Pure long black and creeping up towards the wall

Getting faster

Until it whips around and out

The car passing

And the dream gone with it

 

The thing with death is

It’s forever right away

 

There’s a tree in Maine

Much like the others around it

Medium sized and just grey

And that’s all that can really be said of it

Other people’s work

Featured in other people’s work

Is hard to fault

Failing dissertations

Even using moon samples

But about before, the tree

The hard part it’s like you feel it in your teeth or appraise it there

There’s some function that deems things edible that it engages

And no, it’s too hard

We’re bonded by the ways in which we’re mutually disadvantaged

A nook in space we share bother in and warm

I saw personality templates

Reused out

near Nash Cabins

Who could think of anything else while

passing Pond and Gendreau

in Naples Maine

near the school at Songo Locks

Lauded hub tangle of great northern docks

Unenthusiastically buoying the day trip of stumbling émigrés

Dusting off their laps

A confused and joyous congregation of cars

At the Gagne family home and place of business

In simple unperverted well drilling

For clean water by men who don’t mix their velleity and concupiscence

But about before, the tree

It’s so calm and androgynous

Inaccessible but somehow

Warm enough in the winter

Holding its breath until the huge spring exhalation of leaves

The silent relief

Release that lines the scenic route

Itself a gentle reprieve

From the highway

Where an engine inhales a half-mile

 

Part I of tonight’s double feature. There’s something for everyone so show mom and dad.

 

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Faithfully

by Rob Rice

---

 

 

Faithfully and

All over spacious America

Our criminals are ripping pedophiles

Apart in prisons

 

It’s steady work

For steady men wordless

About their broken backs

 

And sticking up for our

Or their

Maybe at any rate someone’s

Intact morality

 

Or stratified morality

Just the idea of the thing

They’re keeping it alive

Generative in those furnaces

 

Regularly interspersed among the windfarms

And rolling lulls of corn orange

Reactors that keep our American decency

In stock for if we need it

 

That real violence moves us

The motivation in

The argument

To make relative their own misdeeds

Or our own

 

At any rate

Someone’s

While state reps send aides out to score Sodium P.

 

On the blank streets they organize and redistrict

Slinking in the alleys reluctant Dane and Roma people step

Bringing something home for pop to pray over

Then admin Back pats all around

Ex-pats

Time

 

And the search for it in small things

Pallbearers wetwinking at secrets they think He’s in on

Context boys gesturing at the ceiling not called anything

Without intersectional ideas motivating technologies

 

What happens as everything catches up

Cancers and strange base psychologies coaxing waves and

Drives into tonic grand malware

Applying themselves

Calmly seeking the same ancient sate

Of maligning systems

 

Server farms come down with datapox

Towers felled by bad blood

Reach into the news and extract the wet present

Remotely the ‘castersadness and plainness of living

In homes that fear

 

The synthetic grooming and clustering of cropped

Dot buzz hijinks

Misery of puckered vision

That works through grimaces to wager questions like

What can trick us into regression and

As a comedian generously allows an audience

To be satisfied by misdirection

What will send us back to the small communities

 

Ice Iron

Bronze Man

Succeeded

Without a ballooning commotion of pride like

Red cream clouding up lucent blue coffee

 

Freakish research and restaurants

New wave and

Undulating assfat in squat capital D due thighs

Isolated and frozen

Cheaply individuated with a candid look of surprise

But lasting and walking and introducing

And hating like scumsunk beans in water brought watched to a boil

Salted Explain and coin satisfying universal terms with

Definitions only as applicable as they are ambulant

While ingredients through the alphabet and back

Cost prohibitive

 

Too soon to bloom

Divorcing the past in daily tranches

Waking up unsurprised and comforted

To encounter once again

The fetal position

 

And when you start to wake on your back

With your hands laced prettily on your chest

You don’t notice

Because solace is solace is solace

 

And maybe there’s some honor in being the first the defining

Progenitor burial in a formerly functionless plot

But it’s negligible

 

Dying men of the flat night

Debriefing already dead sons

Saturating them with secrets for the grave

Secrets are currency there

They can swap them at the hellwait card table

For some simple jerky to drape over their collar

And recreate the skinfeel

Or a rotten peach to finger fuck

And let sticky the bone dribble

To attract flies

That then they all gather around

Giddy to praise life

In its mechanically full forms

 

Hard exampled irrefutable life

Not just spectre and memory and its progressing haze

Coming in hissing like rain curtains blottingout over the counterfurious ocean

Each story becoming less believable as told

 

And even though the audience is motivated to endorse

They are starting to itch with worry

Precautious to fully engage with What even is it

And they wonder which of them is still sure it happened

And defer to him

 

Let blond the black sap

Disoriented passenger-conductor

Like a citizen-soldier

Mock lost after a nation building exercise

 

The wonder of edgeless dull blockage

A whole sleeping calamari core of brain

Calling on

And getting nothing but clammy potassium slick

White matter’s breathy sweat sent

Out at pressure Nothing that feels hardcast but molten

And washing

And of soap

 

It feels like an expanding tinny aphasia

Leaving us without the proper words

That area having been overcome

That area having been overthrown dirty and hallow pained

Tried too much and too little

To have an effect

But they don’t

 

So TV persists

We think

Pleasantly At least now they’re including makeouts

Whole wet ones

In commercials about tech dating

The real and the super real

They’re worked matches

 

So they makeout

In the commercials

And I guess the logic is

Also in real life

 

Until eventually in super real

Matches and marks

Similar and often overlapping friends of the cause

Duped into daddyhood and mommyhood

Some worse for it

Some fed by it

Will always have

That mutual record

 

A shame foundation to accuse the other on

Persistent in boiling back up

Years after the early apartments

The natural laughs and parks and uncannily seamless vacations

Dixie cones plugged fat baby hands

And striped ice cream was thrashing around the stroller’s workbench like mercury

Taunting barometric augury was

Missed When they drove to Phoenix and

That bizarre night they stopped in Texarkana

 

But now the house is bought and the long

Yelling dullness

The vertiginous extended eternity and super eternity

To wait love and endure eachother through

 

There will be nights of creampure accusation

Where that basis will underlie each taunt

And they will abuse each other’s

Real or otherwise love

For its being bought on an instant

Neurological default to gameplay like cards

Futures

For sad and individual men

 

While inexhaustibly still

Spoilt on admiration

Cataract skyscapes peacock

Espousing they’re fully blind

Begging at least that for their son’s sake

They be entombed in oil

 

And Jokers

Pervade decks

Pervert them in sinister and mocking laughter

That’s sticky and smells

Shading the grain

Outing the creases at the dog-eared edge

That superimpose character onto quitting muscle

And again argue for age

 

Movement and concert

Spinning is to cones

As bones pose as all matter of things

Half buried in red desert sand

Half in red desert sun

Bleached waxy yellow

The fat still grinning

And fed from the life it had

 

In Massachusetts

Innocent dead kids stand by

The rites of chemical passage

A duty

They feel

Whining a gift of imaginary context

To those responsible for them

That lets poison into their memory

Like smoke drawn across the moon

And into a mouth

 

And out in Arizona

They’re unaware of the other

Too focused on the laced X’s

The scoring of their sleeping ankles

The viscous slowly evaporating spit from a

Copperhead’s tongue having thatch-licked hexes

 

Gratefully crosscutting that well organized chickenmeat

Tender against the grain and

Committing it to muscle memory

Bodies outfitted with the means

To tentpole electrofinance

Self-sovereignty as routers and

Conduits subliminally participating in

Redirection And trafficking in commerce and signal

Counterfeiting data as status

Completing the transfer from society to market

 

Sensual bad news when that sweet Thai food smell

You’ve been tracking with your mouth watering

Turns out to be the default funeral home

In the midst of the cooling unit emergency that will finally shutter its doors for good

 

I am just not interested in your blood

Like I am mine

There is no great fascination

It just looks vaguely dangerous and flavor-poor

While mine is pomegranate and impossible

Exceptional in color and content

Flamboyant and evident and

Minerally opaque

Surface tension tents pools upright

Must be magnetically floating cell rafts saying north

 

Too much so to dry and grey

Fibrous and supporting scaffolding of an interstate bridge

Straddling an unnamed and municipally nuisance waterway

Silent and humiliated and passing with its head down