Friday, May 10, 2013

Mark Sargent

“Detroit was once America’s fifth largest city.”

I.

How large is that?
Who counts?
In terms of mass, or vehicles?
Number of Catholics per square block
or Jews, do they live there too?
How many?
What about darker people, how are they counted?
And rodents.
And transsexual toothbrush repair people?
Where fit?
This guy sucking bad coffee, looks a bit like Bolaño,
whispers, reading is more important than writing
and I no exactly
with a heart gob tourniquet tightened tension that
MADE IN DETROIT
was always a jive sentiment
much as
I COME FROM SOMEWHERE
gives us nothing.
What about raw food advocates?
And staggering figures built from bacteria?
What’s the math?
Who makes the numbers crunch like breakfast cereal
like electric canine therapists like
like, okay, sure
Zarathustra in Timisoara
I mean the
eternal recurrence of the same
counted over
über counting
super duper über counting, muthafucka
seven, none, forty-eight, ninety-nine
whats?
being counted skewed?
One hundred and twenty four humans of indeterminate age and shape
are sent into the streets with hand clickers and instructed to click once
for every living thing over the course of eighty-three hours…
When Pasolini died,
what was the percentage of loss
and could that loss be prorated over the next millennium?
How many comrades really died during the fake Romanian revolution
and how many merely made television?
What’s the ranking of Detroit if you count windows?
Three-legged dogs?
What about leverage?  May the city borrow
against its human mass?
Or do they call that illegal immigration
or economic flow or I got it,
flexibility.
Collective worker yoga, yeah.
Only by dying at birth can you
occupy one space
that can be precisely counted.
And the null set,
where is that inserted?
We do not eat math,
it works the other way.
Our hunger isn’t a quantity
can’t be placed next to anything
doesn’t add up
but shouts out
GIVE ME THOSE FUCKING WORDS
GIVE THEM TO ME NOW
and I’ll post them
to the void.

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