Terence Winch

 

 


Memoir

 

I remember a party, he remarked.  Her underwear

signified the grueling rehearsal.  Infectious.

Outgoing.  He picked the place.  He whispered

excitedly, in a trashcan. He was really angry.

 

I remember the spaces stuck out like an armchair,

she said.  Small light green masterpieces

went back and forth. He said a mask on the face

in distress is like seven chains around his neck.

 

She said some people have it, some don't.  He was

among the last explorers to reach her, not the first.

 

 

 

 


The Banalities

 

The contest is over.  I lost, you lost.

I had an intensely anatomical body

and gave it to you.   Thirty years ago

you dropped the bomb on me. I submitted.

 

I like the exam, as long as it's tasteful.

You remember personality?  How it posed

naked at all our meetings, till the bulb lit up?

What was so wrong with that?  What was so wrong?

 

The stigmata felt weird, especially during the love-in

when we noticed the beautiful pariahs across the yard.

 

 

 

 


Germ Plasma

 

Using verbs that bite, the cold period stands

in before the troops. Snow is on the way:

we tell our fathers that we love them.  He spies

a spear on the hard ground. Never give up

your weapon, he says. Destroy it or bury it

 

If you are about to be captured.  The maps

are being redrawn as he speaks, drunk with

promises of victory. Even if I decide it's time

for a haircut, newspapers proclaim the dawn

of a day that will never reach its own edges. 

 

 

 

 


Bourgeois World

 

At the party, we shouted insults at the hostess.

She served us raw fish/ we wanted red meat.

She hated our jokes about the dry heaves.

On the way home we saw a bunny in the headlights.

 

You smash the windows and toss the feathers.

You sit in the kitchen weeping in the dark

listening to the debate on the Senate filibuster.

Time is immemorial if the self is inconceivable.

 

The ceiling fans all fixed and going at once,

the house on the runway ready to take off.

 

 

 

 


Captions

 

Left to right: Sigmund Freud, age sixteen, with Schopenhauer,

Glenn Miller, and a naked girl, in front of Wal-Mart, pondering

psychic disturbances.  Freud had just completed electrolysis treatment

and was feeling an active desire to investigate the sexual hereafter.

 

Fig. 27: Kierkegaard, once again, after his conviction on multiple

fraud counts, just before his famous discussion with Wittgenstein

on the hidden meaning of  brain travel, ca. 1873.  Photo courtesy

of the Dark Network of Light, © Curtis S. Edward (deceased).

 

(Opposite) These high-definition 3-D mock-ups of the man standing on the bed

were thought initially to prove that amazing things can and do happen.

 

 

 

 


Full Disclosure

 

The way things come apart.  Information leaks

all over you.  Sharon was nude.  We refused to eat

on the basis of video surveillance dogma.  My salad

is in a persistent vegetative state.  Meat means war.

 

The drums joined in from up above, as though

our scans matched your phone records.  Everything

is legal, everything is wrong.  I get a bad result

out of you. I can't give you anything but habeas corpus.

 

Imagine you are playing tennis.  Now imagine the ball

breaks the window in a blue house where violins lurk unseen.