There is a pianist who has been forbidden from playing at a concert.
In protest he is carrying a dead deer on his shoulders, from time to time rolling it on the ground or up a hill. He will carry this deer until he reaches the doors of the city, and play piano there.
I can’t remember why they won’t let him play—it’s a matter of government—but the man’s got to have some authority to have this many news vans following him around.
Nobody asks him where he got the deer.

What an artist, people say.

I’ve heard people call a guy who set fire to a piano on the beach an artist too, so maybe it’s not the person that makes the artist, but the piano.
Which begs the question: If you don’t have a piano, what do you have?
Maybe this is why they don’t let the pianist play.
He’d be wildly popular, his music new and unfamiliar.
He’d probably play on the strings of the piano, not the keys.
He’d start a movement from the inside out, where he’d draw on a history of teachers, pulling them out from under the hood of the piano, gutting the instrument.
He’d start with Van Cliburn, who learned to sing piano from his mother long before he even knew how to play it,
and she learned it from Arthur Friedheim, who learned it from Franz Liszt, who in turn
studied under Carl Czerny, who himself was a student of Beethoven.
And Beethoven was taught music in the mud,
his teachers radiating from the palms of his hands in an eclipse of sound.
And this is why people say that a man carrying a dead deer on his shoulders is a dangerous artist, because a labor of love has history.
Why else would a pianist put so much faith in animal sacrifice?
Although, granted, we don’t know if he killed the deer or found it that way.
But the point is that a labor of love was loved long before anyone else got there.

For all I know, the pianist is still trudging uphill, wearing his muse like some burdensome, antlered scarf. I’m sure he looks ridiculous, like a peacock.
Did you ever hear the story of the peacock?
The story goes that when the world began the peacock was ugly.
It was ugly, but it could fly, and it would fly over everything and cry at how beautiful everything was. In the end the peacock got his wish to be beautiful, but at the price of becoming flightless and having limited mobility. Like a glorified turkey.
Poor guy.
But maybe not.
People tend to dismiss the aesthetics of things under some sense of superior morality.
Like you would read a book in a font you didn’t like.

Maybe the pianist just wants to give us our bread and circuses.
Maybe he’s attempting alchemy, trying to breathe music into the dead deer’s fur.
Maybe he’s desperate.
Or maybe he ends up sitting around his house like Liberace, keeping himself secret and doing anything but play piano when he isn’t at a concert,
the huge gaudy things gathering dust like Christmas ornaments,
the faceless piano player crying all the way to the bank.

there’s a dead bird dead
on crystals with thorns
like piss
i’m going to cvs for
heavy public toilets

sad debris is my vampire
under day sun
let’s use the puppy dog
filter as i perform breathing
faces through bird beaks

i say we need fat cheeseburgers
you ignore my fat nails
i apologize and settle for dead
mouths i’m growing pains with you

i’m eating dead seaweed and
will save humanity

let me spit hair and thread
fake sperm in balloons
blow now

dead birds dying is a first
world hypocrisy i have
to pee in cvs

i know my rights as dead
cheeseburger my
fingers are wet.

—-

i. Scene or Posture

we are the bitches of Avenue X
most of us are dead anyways or drove home
there were Reward Miles involved
butted lines at concert, that kind of thing
weavers of failed delivery sexts, fishers of drive
c’mere and founder on the shoals kind of thing
a suspenseful clutch of talent, who knew?
mature would be ignore it
go home at noon like 4:50
sleep it off at the altar of the not totally unfortunate looking
any wad that gums it up
it’s yours for blowing, like
have you ever been punk?
it goes like this:

ii. Competitive Fictions

The closer they glom the more they
know about derailleurs and shit
you’d like to tuck them in
at home, plant &
add water till they grow willowy
mean & well-behaved, each
bowing to a blaze of mirrors like the Eve of an Eve

who can’t get hard or down, whose eyes
won’t bug. Was it grace waiting all night at a keyboard
for an unmentionable chord, was it kinder to be 40?
From her perch reciting: Homer calls it
atrugetoio the sea, unyielding
a barren downy bed, a nymph’s mucosal hug
Oh, baby girl. Your princess, etc. Find another row to hoe another.

iii. les neiges de J/O, New Jersey

Wake up in the 90’s like you crashed
the walking tour of the decade’s tallest
girlfriends and their driveways
& broke up the band
the names are still kinda special
they’re all burnout
vegetarians or you get the idea
bam!
they’re hot and you’re naked
Everyone looks good here
you could be a +1