The Bread We Eat in Dreams

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.

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

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.

And what I got

isn’t really much

What I got

is a keychain

What I got

is the pure lotuslove

of seeing the first lightspray of detonated creation

even in the busted-up world they sell you.

Seeing in me

as tired and overworked

as old gum

the unbearable passionmouse of infinite

stupid trashcamp joy

and hewing to that.

It’s the riddle of me, baby. I am

everywhere exploited exhibited exhausted

and I am still holy.

It doesn’t matter

what they do to you.

Make you a permanent joke

sell your heart off piece by piece

robber princes

ruin everything

it’s what they do

like a baby cries.

Look at my opposite number.

It was never coyote versus roadrunner.

It was both

against Acme

mail order daemon of death.

Stick with me. Someday

we’ll bundle it all up again

the big blue-luminous ball of everything

your father

the Tunguska event

the ultimate star-spangled obliteration of all empires.

I will hold everything tawdry

in my gloved four fingered hand

and hold it high

high

high.

It’s 1940. What you don’t know

is going to break you. Listen to the Greek chorus

of my Kids

lining up toward the long downward slide of the century

like sacrifices.

Their song comes backward and upside

down

from the unguessable extropy

of that strangesad orgiastic corporate

electrical parade

of a future

Listen to it.

The sound of my name

the letters forty feet high.

See ya

see ya

see ya real soon.