Written by Johannes Göransson 
Illustrated by Jelena Pesic

Published 12/31/2012

The corridors seem empty, as after a parade or an invasion. All the reporters have moved on, leaving garbage and random pieces of media instruments. I pick one instrument up. It’s a smooth, white shell. I admire its shape but when I’m about to put it to my ear I see a snail stick out of it. I drop it in disgust and it shatters, leaving the snail there like a turd on the glossy floor. That kind of shit belongs in the cancer ward, I think to myself. 
*
The doctors try to explain to me that meaning resides inside of every individual. The dangers of writing is that it may ruin that self. And what would happen if we were all walking around intoxicated by beauty? “There are all these would-be candy-surrealists running around ruining Art with their masturbatory Art.” They have nothing, barely even books. It’s all reproduction, kitsch. It’s as if they were infected and keep reproducing their disease. “You can tell a surrealist from their pale skin and shivery hands,” one doctor tells me. The words that keep playing in my head is “cold war, cold war.”
*
The expresident needs more drugs than I do. He needs morphine and substitutions.
*
The television crews have left, sensing that the Black Man either didn’t come or came and left, but the soldiers refuse to return to their barracks. In fact their pageantry becomes more and more flamboyant and disturbing: imitating horses with skeletons drawn on their pajamas, sooting their faces black and staging mock executions for the anti-abortionists, decorating certain nurses with horrible trinkets, communicating with the dead through obscene acts, smashing windows and using the shards in atrocious dances, and beating up random inmates while shouting, “The Black Man did it!” Unfortunately, nobody seems able to get them back in their room. However, the soldiers tell me they’ve finished their poem about Baghdad. They want me to pose on a mirror for the publicity shot. Smile they scream and scream, but the makeup is too thick on my face and the tape hurts the skin on my torso. Smile they scream while my daughters give birth to insects. Smile they scream as they douse me in gasoline.
*
I am intrigued by the numbing quality of sperm. 
The most romantic act is to kiss a girl who has just given you head. The lips tingle and go numb from the traces of sperm on her lips. The evolutionary reason for this is possibly similar to orgasm: a way to paralyze the female’s defenses and allow impregnation, allow the foreign material to enter her womb. 
My wife has been using my own sperm to keep my body from spazzing out. When I feel like I’m about to spazz out she ties me down to a bed and rubs the sperm out of my penis and then rubs in on my breastcage, where it can quickly reach the heart. Then she dabs my eyelids and the inside of my thighs. Then she places a raw flower on my belly until the attack passes. 
She wrecks the mirrors so I won’t reproduce. 
*
A foreign body is always a nonproductive body. Non-reproductive. Always reproduced. Ghastly and flat. Over-reproductive. Carries viruses in their fetuses. Generates too much poetry. 
There is a travesty about foreign bodies. 
They’re counterfeits. We don’t know how to wash them properly. 
They are so bang-bang in hotel rooms. 
They look horrified and come from the golden age of cinema. 
That’s where we learned to deal with them how to give them another voice one that sounds less awkward. 
*
At one party someone made a doll of me. It was a scratch-doll. It was a charged body. There were a lot of tasers at the party. We were partying on media. Now, a child said. Blue, a child said. Now now now. a child said. I knew she must mean me.
I am supposed to build a barn in order to burn down with the pigs inside. I mean the garble-garble inside. Which belongs to the radio on account of the bite.
This is a rampant state. Everybody wants me to leave now because I failed them. Or because the Black Man is no longer coming for me, I have lost my celebrity status. 
*
The Soldiers are dragging around leftover equipment from the TV crews. They want to make movies, become famous, and they think I can help them make it big. The soldier nicknamed “The Poet” wants to make a movie featuring “rubber gloves and mirrors, wires and hoods”; he thinks it will be about Beauty. A couple of soldiers want to make a movie about child abuse and wonders if they can use some of my daughters. A sharpshooter wants to make a movie about assassinations and wants me to play the role of “Viktim.” One soldier who can’t speak (his mouth is stuffed with pork) gestures wildly and puts his hands behind his head as if to imitate a diseased deer and when I don’t understand him he starts to bang his head against the wall. Some other soldiers have to restrain him and wipe his face clean. He wants to make a movie about you, they explain, somewhat apologetically. The expresident shouts that they better clean the blood off the wall. Nobody is listening. By now most of us are watching the soldiers performing a war in the empty swimming pool.
*
The expresident needs more drugs than I do. He needs morphine and substitutions.
*
The hunt for the black man seems to have expanded the media landscape as the news shows chase him across the country, reporters following all the possible leads into backwoods towns and abandoned roads. And to our town. It’s like the railroad was built to accommodate the gold rush. Makes me wonder if we are the gold. No, we’re the buffalos. 
*
I am writing to my daughter: Sometimes when I’m drinking a cold glass bottle I think of my lover’s mouth sometimes when I’m alone in the dark and my body is acrawl I think of my lover’s mouth. Sometimes when I’m cutting and crying and putting out cigarettes on my arms I think of my Mother of the Snipers and how she carried my limp body through the riot, how she wasn’t my mother but more like my mother than my mother. She was gunned down in another war: the war between my heart and the head of an eagle. In those wars, my eagles always win furiously and the radio is mucky and full of holes. I’m nostalgic. Arm yourself.
*

Three soldiers are drinking Kristall in our bathtub wearing white bikinis. They claim they’re there to kill horses. They want my daughters to tell them about the desert, the one where people go to invent gods. Take us there, they shout and shake my daughter. She can’t speak, I explain. She’s just a doll. But she can close her eyes. One blink for yes, two blinks for no, three blinks for paradise, She blinks twice, blinks twice, blinks twice as the soldiers drag her into the discolored bath water.
*
There’s a rancid quality about Art that I have always thought made me susceptible to hospitalization. I’m susceptible that is to Art’s rancid stench. Some people call that Cinema. I call it Influence. 
*
Father Voice-Over: Your body is not that different from the fetal pig we perforate down the hall in an homage to our cultural predecessors, ghost-dancers and dandies, cake-eating beauty queens with cancer of the lips, and rat poisoners. 
*
Hotel, motel, shivery inn.
Hotel, motel, sparkling skin.
*
The message I receive from the Abortionists begins: “You have become theory’s effigy, you have become an inmate to your own mythologies, you are housed in your naive assertions about the birth of the clinic.” It goes on from there. It is one of the most refined notes they have sent me and it came inside a condom. The spermicide caused my fingers to go slightly numb. Further, they want me to be part of a pervy new play about death. I would play the mascot. A fundamental pleasure. I would move in the arms of a wilding holding up headlights. 
I agree. I was made for this role.
*
It’s been a week since I thought about nature. Nature is like fame—the photographs, the death, the deer’s rotten eye.
*
We begin to hold seances to contact the Black Man. My wife enters into a trance, letting his unknown spirit enter into her body. When the shivers in her body tell us she’s possessed, we ask her, “Who are you?” But she doesn’t answer. Instead she stands up and begins to dance in a circle, her toes turned strangely inward, her arms going up and down in a stabbing motion, as if she were performing some kind of sacrifice. Then all my daughters—though we’d told them not to disturb us—burst into the room and, horrified at their mother’s movement, rushed over to her and tried to stop her, hanging from her arms and legs. But my wife continued the endless sacrifice without a victim, small girls pulling at her limbs. The expresident burst out laughing. Why are you laughing, I ask. They remind me of the war, says the expresident. 
*
Teenagers are repulsive and smell bad. Some times I think they deserve nothing more than mass graves. But they look good for their age. They’re all covered in milk. The age is the Age of Reason.
*
I just killed an ant on my desk with one finger.
*
The expresident thinks the black man on the run is not being portrayed correctly. The expresident would like to see him naked in the sand, salt in his hair, his skin almost bleached in the sun, a drowning victim of sorts. 
*
The Today Show: There are fewer and fewer sightings of the Black Man in the mansion, but he’s being spotted everywhere else, according to the news. Today alone, Americans have seen him at a public urinal and at a showing of the latest assassination movie. I could star in a movie like that. I’ve trained my whole life to be shot in the head.
*
For example the kind of trash that is thrown in mass graves.
*
My wife is not afraid of clichés. She uses the shards on my body afterwards.
*
The expresident wants to know the truth about the Starlet. What did her lips taste like? He suggests strawberry.
* 
One soldier wants to make a movie about the Starlet. He wants to cover her in red orchids, he wants me to pass out in the shooting gallery, he wants to loot a museum for ceremonial daggers and stuffed hyenas, he wants to stage a romantic scene in the court room, he wants helicopters to crash, he wants to use the footage to imply the sublime, he wants the animal sounds to be real. This isn’t about the real Starlet, I say, this is about Imperialism. But I’ve watched all of her movies, he protests with tears in his eyes.

Father Voice-Over: Get out of that shell.

This poem is an excerpt from: 
Goranson, Johannes. Haute Surveillance. Tarpaulin Sky, 2013.