Daniel Y. Harris – Frantic

Daniel Y. Harris

Frantic
                              for Brian Brophy, Chicago 1987

Play to remain ahead like a godling who does not want to be the plea which runs like a prayer through the large black door where not even the reach of her arm could for that matter bring to climax the pale rough glide of ecstasy where the white glow of then like now not be confused with apparitions that form crescent-shaped gravity hedges near the birth that has nothing more than notes of guitars stretched tight letting no harmony drift forward from what the critics cynically suggested was neither the bestial nor the bestiary but rather the evaporation of matter as it quenches thirst on that face you dubbed thirst as Chicago grew like moldy figs on the heavenly gates of North Wells now left for the actors of lice who lip service their way to fame with the smiles of income and the waves of commercials left to spring from Second City the improvisational rampages now more insipid than the lady who was the meaning of life before the quake and the lusting of LA with white sports car and biggy Hollywood parts surreptitiously concealed in fame which barks its way beyond the pale of human potential a god of detergent where nonsense like a hot lick and smoke allegorically represent the sadness littering the soul like oil in an ocean you called the heart which is so immense the strongest seem bewildered by its very touch or the exposure not more than vines from a lost epoch of romantic visionaries reciting the iambs of Shakespeare with whiteface and masks through the archaic and plasmarealism of now like atoms spiraling in seven dimensional vector spaces of dark streets from convulsions of the shaman’s ritual rites in the laugh-pun-spark-itch of so much comedic abuse they say is all any able-bodied red-blooded American man would need to toil the fields of creativity fermenting like fine rusted bolts labeled elixir or aphrodisiac or Theater of the Stock Yard marked by the cold we dread so much like iron cranes now a discarded clip where Marlon Brando vomits away the light he fought for but called nausea as pure form of you who jotted everything down in twenty five journals not to be seen by the famed audience knowing your name and chanting your contribution in supermarket lines which resemble a theater enough to be its idea or at least a painting of real estate with men who are women who are gangsters but love you because the goddess spelled your name out on those shores Marlon called broken glass and kept his hand on until the blood was too much and love too powerfully suggestive of the pull that has you by the neck as you shine alchemically bringing magic to everyone you meet everyone who hears about you and your inability to choose between the choice and its enemy decision haunting your dreams like the ideal women never to be known but to be washed with scented shampoo or the eternal cliché rambling unpunctuated in the words of mold and dust your friends have become.

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