Poems and Texts

“THE BEASTS” by Purdey Lord Kreiden

THE BEASTS

Night forbade by a sunray. Not a bird to be heard, not a herd of grass to clunch, no vengeful sun to
pray. I graze my little finger with the tip of my pierced lips ; a sound flutters, a sound scavenged
away by a forest of juicy, glimmering preys.

Give me a sign that the ghouls are real, the soil unclean and removed from the blood of the
earthlings,

They were told by the archangel that the city would be destroyed.
They walked past the ocean, chose a shallow curve in a whale’s belly, slept and meticulously
transformed their food into nightmares, arrows and beans. This way they gave us the thought, the
weapon, the feed. I surveyed a single wave and you surveyed a single leaf and in between us our
purple cock removed from a heart bleated and writhed. In between us the cock sung the cum upon
which the ground would feed ; they were told by the archangel that the city would be destroyed, two
different hammocks in two different heads would look exactly the same, the twins of the village
would be each of them on a sofa and in a different position and severed from their keens

And alone they will extract the semen, the glow purple that was kept in the jar above the
abominagle city, the plump rainbow wave pulp upon which the little bug feasted.

I arose, eureka, I arose and puked sugar brown shnapps, I arose
And puked a drop of rose milk, a drop of vodka, I arose
And chose the road upon which my walnut bonbons would be spread
I arose from a clear ginger bed and chose the forehead of a cyclops
In which my heart would lay.

In the village were I grew up cyclopes were posted at the four elbows of the sky, abricots burnt on
skewers dipped in meadow-hare hearts, the sun was widely spread and roses were forbidden ; they
brought bad luck, and black fire to the drops from the shore alleys. Antelops were burnt and named
after the shades of the cloudless eyes, the eyes of the angels firing their furious sperm into the kabds
of sapphire sand where no rain had ever roosted.

See my antennaes ? How they grow inward, how the sunset plunders their aura, how they shine ?
They were gilded in the slums where the slugs are little buns of black-on-yellow sun and their
structure is this tree we’ve seen spreading a town of darkness over the waterfilled dumplings boiling
in the sky. They are the looks of the innocent beholding us breaching the glimmers of our semen on
twin dildos, a great branch of time leaping from your asshole to mine.

You people living off the sea, you people harvesting the sky, you people living on salt and soil and
the fruits of the earth’s entranced entrails, you people live in a small and human pagoda, a pagoda
shaped like your bodies and made only of your own craftings and commands. You people of the
earth, your eyes thrown out of the sea by error, puked by the sky on a trivial nightmare a stoned
angel had, live in a great darkness. A darkness among the darkness where your absence lives an
infinite song of schpuff, schpuff, schpuff holes with no human soul in it. You people of the land,
bathed in the unclean soap of a semi-god’s hair, coiled upon one another like a monkey moth’s nest
of eggs, I blend you with the greens and I blend you with a vegetal sadness,

the sadness of the uprooted turnip,
the sadness of the uncooked beet,
the sadness of the unmoist corn
And the sadness of the unblending greens.

A man high on heroine turns the volume of the television down and make all the people on TV speak
with the same high pitch voices, saying bad words and rude things. The little girl on the sofa laughs
and laughs and laughs. It’s so funny and the people on TV are so silly, she can’t stop laughing.

When you chose poetry you knew what was coming : Ancientness, handsome angels sealed in
ochrous bloodreeds, my odd drawings turned to a somnolent skin pacing the graves with clovers of
peach.

The link between my grandfather standing on a chair above the balcony’s fence and my mom’s
perfectly done toenails is the Francesca Woodman’s picture of the half arm and hand coming out of
the wall in a fist.

“At other periods and other places, man regards the Power
as greater than himself
and tries to propitiate it by means of prayers and gifts, which
may include sacrifices of all kinds
and self abasement in every forms.”

My people, shaped as monsters of calm flesh limbs, carved into the lumps of the living, allow me,
and my belief, already doomed to make you be
To make your fate as soft and velvety as the softness of a hand
Reaching the surface of a sea, and your heartbeats coated in reeds
And hard liquors and the blood of my own hands and the burning stupor
Of the liquorice. Allow me always the cold to the touch plant
Where the leaf is watery and fragrant but not rigid, except
Down by the stump where the little seeds, stubborn and mean,
Allows the soil to fist on the phantoms of the mysterious testicles

To smoke the jewels out off the sea carcasses
To swallow the vegetal back to the place Man desputes them
Among the great darkness where my people for always
Will sleep, among the great darkness of a forever ripe greenish rainbow
They will live, among the great darkness where you will also
Go, there between their long bone scattered upon blades of azul
And the houses in which you’ll dwell, it’s cooler there, you go back there
why
To sit in the coolness, a shade cropping your face into layers of lemonade colored
Morsels, to be the monk and the bee to the crop of dark cherries
That beheld your resting, a drunken mumbling on your fingers
And a finger on your knee

Purdey Lord Kreiden

Purdey Lord Kreiden is an accomplished paleontologist who travels the globe in search of dinosaur digs. She won the Iditarod dog sled race in 1985. She also rationalized that the new continent of South America was the “Earthly Paradise” that was located “at the end of the Orient”. Her book Children of the Bad Hour is available from Ugly Duckling Presse, and she co-translated Tony Duvert’s L’Ile Atlantique with Michael Thomas Taren (Semiotext(e)), forthcoming.