Gordon Massman The 2River View, 6.4 (Summer 2002)
Shim
1301

Step outside your body sucking a hole in the air and make it
get divorced, debased, or sick; lunatic, it does not feel, per-
mitting you—the authentic self—to turn away, a stranger; the
shill love—conflagrates lighting the dark with flame, acheless,
providing combustions of air, he’s a sick fucker anyway, it’s
not you burning but some depthless maniac; you possess
rectitude, do not deserve to curl, let it lie beside her path-
ology while you, racing, orchestrate, accomplish, deposit,
virtually innocent; split, it dopplegangs admirably, certainly,
sweet,
it purrs indubitably, familialy pecks and accepts
pecks consecutively; pride to God, thanks. She’s stiff-necked
but it nuzzles her edges seethingly, a prince of numbness,
a pain-absorbing fake suffering nobly the disillusionment
of love like a made-for-TV stud, flickering, on peripheries,
bracketed by Campbell’s soup, while at the world’s center
you cooly by the fingers of your eyes peel words off the
page and paste them to your brain, a flapless scholar and
devotee; let us praise detachment, compartmentalization,
inaccessibility, indifference of the heartless warrior to the
side of his slaughtering—and the splintered man in the cor-
ner watching himself being slaughtered. Will not break in-
to blossom,
the stepped-out-of body, but will absorb ov-
er-plus till blood. The Lord is a shepard that maketh, no
hand shall smite, he shall protecteth as of a wing over sor-
row, shall be no heartquake in love’s pressured jaw, nor
green trepidation, and man shall walk away from his corpse.

Shim
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