AUDIO
Marcel Duchamp is singing songs once sung by Doris Day. Under the high ceilings of an old warehouse in Soho converted to loft space he is curious: where is the furnace? A man in a day dream is writing a letter to someone disguised as Anselm Berrigan. I am in Soho riding the Blue Line into mean Greenwich Village. Yes, I am dead as Marcel Duchamp. I am still singing in movies. After all what else is there if walking on cold & belting one out can’t cure my insomnia? I got this look once. I guess he was enamored. It meant little to me at the time of my death. & Marylyn Manson is ripping off lyrics from someone on fire up here in Soho. His sources are ghost-like, the echoes of phantoms on a Hollywood sound stage: When I was just a little girl I asked my mother what will I be? & someone looking a lot like Ben Lerner replied via email: No one informed you? This francophone Greenwich Village is a spectacle of painted green doors. A séance of sudden entrances & exits. If I put on my tee & go out for a smoke then I stand on the roof where the pigeon roost is; where I am “the kid” now stealing the scene from a young Marlon Brando. Someone has dangled a mannequin’s foot from the branch of a tree & filled it with soot. Your’re all about the glam—I would use that to yr advantage. End email. I want to grow a demonic goatee or a cool looking soul patch like the one I saw in a picture of Noah Eli Gordon. One that says New York I’ve arrived I am raising hell & I am wreaking havoc. Things are more real here than they seem at first sight. The scrupulous hours are mirrored in words. Please take yr time & read what I’ve written. I am reading & rereading a poem by Eric Baus. What is this thing he has about the to sound, & the pertinence of tuned droves? It is currently dusk. I am eager for nightfall & the animus of that whiskey-blooded someone that loves my post-dada stuff. He is no one I fool with. Le garçon in the lobby says he has proof that Kennedy is alive & living in Harlem. I am running late, hearing his story. He showed me his proof: a hundred dollar bill he got from the “gov” boys “on the down low” he claims. No chains to hold him. A girl on the Blue Line is talking too loudly. She screams at her cell phone: I sd she sd: I want to fuck you with my long urban epic poem. Why would I lie? What did you do with the files I downloaded you? I should never think twice about spelling or punctuation marks as long as there’s spell check. Or the vixen on Delaney Street who tells me she’s fertile & living in Brooklyn. Now where have you gone? The facts are convincing. I am one hungry carnivore. I riff off a line of a droll bawdy limerick: there once was a man on the Blue Line who thought he could dance and not feel a thing. I am contained & self-immolating but only in verse. I am dubious about the allure of poems whose subject is shit. Or the wanton allure of Guillaume Apollinaire. Should something go wrong tonight in mean Greenwich Village I will adapt with my reasoning. What I’m discussing is neither self evident nor a bird I disguise as a nature motif. It is a task I inherit. The one voice I sample like free cheese at the market. My subject is paramount: a life in NY. If I go to the house of the all-mental wizards I indulge their cool tricks. It is only good business. If I let Don Amechi be the girl in my soup then my guide to the underworld has taken a sick day & never called in.
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