Recipe for The End of The World
A head in a cage
Cash on bread
Masses of hair on salami toilet rolls
A crying turtle
Ducks in jeans and boots
A stuffed child bobble-head
An apple of bone
Hairy eyes
A video camera in a white nightdress
Rock phone
Teeth sandals
His nose vegetation
Empty magazines
An elephant of gray rock
The sweat of an ashtray collection
A galloping horse of water
A hand of mud from the bank
Hands sewn to legs
Also, the rest of her cash, birds, and
The ghost in a brown paper bag
They all lay in pieces at the kitchen table
Indifferently, she stirs it all
Into a pot of boiling water
With the parts of a lot of old lawyers
To season, she adds their last years of childhood,
Sugar, and rose salt
All this leaves a void in her hand bag
(Every feather costs you around
Twenty thousand dollars as a
Whale falls onto the cash register)
She stared out the window
As if her own head were in a cage
Her shadow flat on the kitchen table…
As boiling stew steamed the window
She phoned Manet
On the stomach telephone
A dinner invite ensued in a
Paced, cautious, swollen voice
With her arm stretched out over the bay
Manet came over
Every step taken flaggingly
Thoughts of bacon forming a cloud
Before Manet arrived she felt
The Shadow staring at her
Prone on her bed in a chain-smoking suit
While pushing The Shadow into a closet
Her hand passed through him
Bubbles broke open and words came out
The wardrobe rose up
Impaled by breathless sound
And meaningless words
Upon arrival Manet
Pointed at the hovering wardrobe
And asked “What’s that?”
“The sun,” She replied
And so, Manet munched the sun
And threw up the brain.
Note: Most of these words are bits of selected text from Texas Fontenella, who outlined them on scraps of pages torn from pulp books and mailed them from Australia to C. Mehrl Bennett in Columbus OH USA on 12/01/2017. On 4/09/2018, CMB selected phrases from that envelope (view some from 2nd section of this collaboration in the image below, scanned in order), and she stitched together this collaborative poem (patching in articles here and there), and gave it a title.
On 4/17/2018 she revised this poem & added the image below.
