My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

7. ode to autumn

the human bomb is ticking

the handsome blond robotic bomb with the gorgeous pecs and the cleft in his chin and the cute mustache is purring: tick tock tick tock tick tock

he puts a pinch of smokeless tobacco between his cheek and gum and watches a monarch butterfly mince gingerly across the hot hood of his idling chevy malibu

and little lovely winged electric razors hover about his head, gently kissing it until he is bald — and he dreams of John audubon and his lovely watercolor hummingbirds and his lovely watercolor chrysanthemums — though, unbeknownst to the human bomb, the ceramic cranium developed for him by Japanese high-tech ceramics engineers to protect his brain is beginning to crack, so that really his watercolor dream of john audubon is not a dream at all but an aberrant pattern of electrical discharge generated by moisture seeping through the fissures in his glazed skull

and unbeknownst to the human bomb, he's been tampered with by terrorists who've rigged his detonator to his prostate gland, so the instant he ejaculates—boom!

it is autumn

and i am remembering autumn nights long ago when we watched those early episodes in which the handsome human bomb was motionlessly posed in the men's department at macy's in a van heusen cream-colored button-down, pierre cardin pin-dot lamb's wool tie, a nut-brown ralph lauren shetland wool sweater, stanley blacker corduroy sport coat, and bass weejun tassel-front brown leather slip-ons regularly $68 now on sale for $54.40

you were just a flag twirler at pocahontas high in mahwah

it was homecoming night when i met you

i remember you giggling shyly at the seniors bobbing for veal medallions in a metal basin of marsala sauce

you smelled of lilacs

that night we learned that ecstasy means the collapse of time

past present future perceived in a single instant

you were watching the trajectory of your own words as they left your mouth

words which disappeared into the horizon

words which, due to the curvature of space, returned many years later like murmuring boomerangs to your ear

you looked like an italian starlet — jet-black hair in a thick braid down your back, sloe-eyes set deeply above high cheekbones, olive complexion, full sensuous lips, the strap of your nightgown fallen languorously off your shoulder, mascara smeared, your eyelids heavy with drowsiness, your hair now spread across the pillow like a trellis of vines, your voice low and husky, your breath still redolent of anisette

and tonight as we watch television on the porch

your buckteeth seem shellacked in the cadmium light of the harvest moon

look at the screen

that's me with the amulets and anaconda pelts and the saucer-size lip plug distending my mouth

that's me crouched in the backseat of the human bomb's chevy malibu with his chubby friend ulrike grunebaum

though, without the proper software, ulrike grunebaum is like mrs. potato head — without eyes, ears, nose, or mouth, without id or libido, without creed or lineage — a featureless and vacant globe of flesh

but with the proper software, she is ulrike grunebaum, the chillingly eloquent marxist ideologue and machiavellian technocrat in a gray three-piece suit and red necktie, ruthlessly purging the upper echelons of her ruling politburo

with the proper software, she is ulrike grunebaum, executive curator of the jimi hendrix museum in baden-baden

and with the proper software — with a twist of the joystick — she is ulrike grunebaum, the hamburg erotic-film queen whose screen credits include smell me tomorrow, the edible fixation, we'll be nude at noon, and the odyssey of gomer

we're taste-testing four varieties of lebanese halvah: druse, phalangist, sunni, and shiite

the flecks of shrapnel in the phalangist halvah give it an unusually nutty flavor

we're doing our cellulite exercises; we're doing the nine or ten beautifully firming things you can do for your derriere

they're showing the video we made together for mtv in which i play the naughty con ed man who's been discovered by ulrike rummaging through her laundry hamper, sniffing her brassieres, and ulrike wraps her prehensile eyelashes around my delicate reed of a penis and slowly and erotically strangles it until its head is the brilliant red of autumn sumac leaves

when i put my ear against ulrike's temple, i can glean her thoughts — because her thoughts are transmitted in the morse code of her pulsing arteries

the human bomb throws his hot dog in the bushes

i'm about to say something horrible, something horribly unchristian… and please don't start singing, because no amount of mouthwash can camouflage the foul breath of hymn-singing Christians…

this is my horrible statement: there's mustard in the bushes

your eyes follow the squiggle of yellow mustard to an ant who's about to be squashed beneath a shiny tooled-leather tony lama cowboy boot and the ant looks directly into the camera and says in yiddish with english subtitles, "i want to live as much as you do" — and this image traumatizes the country in the 1980s as much as the image of my head rolling from the guillotine saying, "i'm sorry, mommy, i'll be good" traumatized the country in the 1960s

i am on every channel and that infuriates you

that i have the ability to jump out of the television screen, burrow into your uterus, and emerge nine months later tan and rested bugs you very much

you're using the violent vocabulary of the u.s.a., you're violently chewing your cheez doodles and flicking the remote control

a computer programmer and mother of two from bethesda, maryland, puts her fingers through the holes in my head and bowls me

i'm rolling through roanoke, city of rheumatism and alzheimer's disease; through memphis, city of ulcerated tongues and saliva turned bitter and glutinous; through pine bluff, whose inhabitants store the ashes of their cremated dead in those white cardboard cartons with thin metal handles made for Chinese takeout food; through shreveport, whose population lacks the enzyme necessary to break down spaghetti

i appear on the phil donahue show with other children of parents who'd had unsuccessful tubal ligations and vasectomies

my path connects every dot in texas

— oh dear, i'm quite lost; kind sir, can you tell me where i am?

— my, you're a peculiar sight, young man, you're balding but so pretty, are you gay?

— no, sir, i have a cute girlfriend at home who is waiting for me; please tell me where i am and lend me a quarter so i can call home and reassure my sweetheart that i have not been slain

— i am ordinarily the very soul of munificence, young friend, but today you find me rather strapped for cash or coin… perhaps in lieu of this phone call you will retire with me to a public lavatory and i will initiate you into the splendors of synchronized swimming

— i repeat with all respect, sir, that i am not homosexual; who are you, sir, and… who are you?

— i am not an octopus or a hen

— that i can see… nor a crayfish

(later)

— things didn't, did they? i mean turn out the way you expected

— no, i was incapable of accepting my mother's death and i frantically embraced fundamentalist Judaism because i refused to accept a world in which people were so completely vulnerable and so capriciously and arbitrarily victimized, i refused to endorse the purposelessness and the randomness and i rushed into the arms of the paternalistic teleological belief system of my ancestors, of my parents, the very same Judaism i'd so contemptuously eschewed my whole life — but even my newfound jewishness was fugitive

— how tall were you before your mother passed away?

— i was five-seven

— and the day after your mother passed away?

— four-one

— and today?

— today i am eight inches in diameter

— it sounds like you're going to disappear

— no, i'm in a perpetual state of contraction and expansion; now i'm contracting and just as i'm about to become smaller than anything, smaller than even the most infinitesimal subatomic particle, i'll begin to expand and i'll expand and expand and expand until there's literally no more room for me in the universe and my head is knocking against the ceiling of the space-time continuum and then i'll start to contract again and so on and so forth

i'm rolling down the pacific coast of south america, but i never make it to tierra del fuego

i'm a gutter ball

i was made in hong kong

i have reached a level of unparalleled ugliness — revolting bloated oily ugliness which has metastasized across every square inch of my body

sexual relations are impossible — i am hopelessly ugly, hopelessly silly

masturbation is impossible — my penis shrivels at my own touch and i lack the most minimal powers of poetic imagination necessary to conjure autoerotic fantasies

my gastrointestinal tract is listed as a must-to-avoid in the michelin guide for intestinal parasites

wherever i am at the moment is the remotest frontier of the diaspora

six flags, each depicting a still-frame from the zapruder film, flutter above dealey plaza

and diffracted shards of sunlight impale the ornamental carp who cough little bubbles of blood which cluster above the pond's mosaic floor whose tiles of azure and crimson depict an exploding head of ideas

as nearby, at james dean memorial hospital, nurses use cold bottles of milk to cool the perspiring brows of surgeons who are engraving ideas into the smooth tabula rasa brains of fetuses

an idea being that which exists at the moment a fly ball pauses at the apex of its flight and bids the sky adieu…

that moment is pregnant

perhaps at that moment, in an s&m bar in plymouth, massachusetts, the 50-ft. woman straddles your face and defecates 17,000 scrabble letters, fertilizing the fallow fields of your imagination…

and a new american style is born

when dawn came it was as if we'd been delivered stillborn from an assembly line

identically curled in our bed

our arms crooked in perfect symmetry beneath our pillows

we were like twin fossils

two tipsy vertebrates who had crawled into a tar pool in the wee hours of the pleistocene and slept through the tumult of history

in our mouths the rich creamy taste and texture of raw sea urchins, our breath was rank and aquatic

i pushed the hair from her forehead and her face was taut and limned in shadow like a death mask

when the forensic pathologists performed their autopsy on you

they cried, those hardened professionals,

because peeling the skin from your head

was like peeling the skin from an onion

the flesh between your breasts

was a thin and pasty dough

which yielded easily to their scalpels

and the forensic pathologists, those hardened professionals,

shook their fists at the photographs of the 10 most wanted men,

one of whom murdered you, and wept

oh amy, what threnody matters

in a world whose software

enables a crossword puzzle, orphaned by your death,

to ask, "who now will do me?"

i am not roller-skating through piles of brittle autumn leaves

i am roller-skating down the aisles at macy's in narcotic slow motion to the music of john philip sousa

i'm skating past every surveillance camera

i'm skating across every closed-circuit television screen

salesmen come and go, murmuring, "jerry lewis est mort.. jerry lewis est mort"

if only i had the software to conjure one macy's salesgirl at the end of this endless corridor into whose arms i'd roller-skate deliriously to the optimistic cornets of john philip sousa

but i don't have the appropriate software

and it would be brainless to continue skating