ACT III
(silent actors who posed as cowboys
who were secretly robots) You remind me of someone / You
provide the assurance that it won’t spill
ACT I over into a bleeding guessing thing /
I’m a stone unaccommodating / You’re
Illusionary asphalt / Falls back the stone that carves–
at the limit line / Count it down, 5
seconds. “Is that what makes you fascinating?
–Blood at the bottom of the
Spare no country for old men / dirty basin / circulate, spit, recircuit /
standing in a bloody trail of bodies (not only were they robots, but they
and dollars and a burning sun / call were also secretly vampires) / & you’re
the land a desert, call it neo-Western, begging for someone to ask you the
/ transient, stop in the road, escape question / (why do you need to prove
/ Well, for young men, like myself / it to anybody else?)
this place is permanent for me.
THE LAND, TAKEN AGAIN,
Horsepowered, no horse / Pow- 100 YEARS LATER
ered, I run the road down.
I’m using the word wrong,
Circulate, circulate. A bleating goat, a bleeding fruit
Bend them to their own meanings. You can’t expect a silent actor to put it together right. I’m posing as a cowboy
ACT II and posing as alive.
Look at the year, we’re neo
(to be a politician, / you have to neo-Western, the land is rewritten into
be hungry for something.) the same empty slate,
& my body does not survive, but
MY NAME IS HARRY 200 of my films attempt to. At a red
CAREY, IT’S 1924, I SHOOT light, there’s a robot posing as a man,
OUTLAWS AND WRANGLE and he’s reprising my role. There’s 1
HORSES WITHOUT SPEAKING second left.
A SINGLE WORD.
What do you think happens when
I live secret parts of my life at you chew two things at the same
night / and a body is a body, can’t time,
do anything a body should / tobacco tobacco and electricity?
lined throat, / this dirty basin of a
mouth / spit sideways and spit tar.
The hope was that I might have
consequence / My ranch and estate
will be purchased by a meat packing
company, / & then by the city /
restored, preserved as historical / &
a young man posing as a man / will
visit the site with his mother / and
everyone else will forget I had ever
existed / but he will not.
Ranchers, real estate developers,
cowboys / posing as cowboys / rake
acres into their wide open jaw / always
hitting money’s roof. Raising it / A
real Western heist.
Circulate, circulate.