from BEWARE OF
A HOLY WHORE

Dear Lola,

Everything can be exchanged in Capitalism, even the afternoon light that oozes through my window as I prepare my shovel for one last dance.

I keep talking to my sister because her cunt is showing in all those photographs from the web and she’s my alter-ego of sorts.

I won’t die unless she feeds me sugar and arsenic.

Sometimes I want to blow the whole town up so that I’ll finally be clean

But then I realize I’ll still have the sugar in my mouth.

Hey poodle I know that I can’t go back to the 1980s even if it’s to look at my childhood on surveillance footage.

But everybody loves surveillance footages.

Especially of the slaughter of horses and/or war dances with a lot of make-up.

Everybody loves photographs taken by spies in part because not everyone is allowed to look at them. I’m the one pretending to be a whore in the pictures of my mother that look... kind of underwater... kind of like I’m stoned and how many bodies are dead in the rubble?

I make some noise.

Goo-goo, I say and completely freak out with my wound...I lie still on the futon but one futon-vertebrae is broken and jams into my real back and that’s why I feel relevant... kind of cloned.... Lambs on TV again... Are they the cloned kind? It’s so much fun to let the camera whore out the lambs...

I’m undone in Berlin, Tokyo, Seoul, Stockholm... like an ad for fashion but with more squid... When I take off the fox stole it’s like I’m no longer underwater or when I take off the underwear with the cigarette burn I think I might be three bodies already cloned and with cutting disorders.

It’s so much fun to be hot in Berlin and the sugar drips on the floor.

Can I get a witness?

I’ll draw pictures on a torso.

It means I am cannibalizing your words: Dear Torso open your shooting range to the rabble. To the poodle. To Jesus Christ our Savior.

I take the fox stole off and look at the beautiful eyes.

I watch a movie in black and white but I turn it fox-colored because the declining star uses cocaine... My girlfriend poisons her mom with sleeping pills and kills the baby and gets put in jail and when the devil and I show up she doesn’t want to leave... It’s a movie about making movies. It’s called Kokain.

The medium is the message and the message is whored out.

Burn this essay about iconophilia because I hate confessions.

I hate the violets and I hate the hair on my face.

It’s like the sorrow gondola all over again.

No sugar, no death.

‡

Dear Lola,

I want to write some gray literature for the film because you are the best whore... Instead I light a cigarette and think about the gaza strip...

I light a newspaper and think about my sister.... I drink what they call black milk which tastes like venison when you’re high...

I write about blue angels.

I write atrocity kitsch and I can’t escape from the fact that the ivory tower is built from ivory or did they cheat and build it from cattle bones?

What is the reverse of an auteur? Is it a whore? Am I drinking coca-cola? Is a child a knife? Is this the 1980s? I’m just trying to find the original trauma: through the viewfinder of a rifle. It’s a suicide rifle, not a deer rifle.

It feels like a kiss.

I want to write about japan now or I want to make a film about japan or I want to burn the film about my sister or I want to interview whores about cinema... The auteur should be more like a hero, should abolish divisions of labor with his vision... with the hooker with a heart of gold...

A whore in a dictatorship: I am reading poetry. The book is pink like plastic. I stole a copy of the book Debt and I gave it to some whores... Eradication songs that go with this mood.

Death smiles at me and I smile right back with my bloody mouth because I’m stupid like that...

I think it’s all about money and that death’s pimp will actually pay me or give me a beautiful new t-shirt... no I won’t get a new t-shirt by smiling at death so I go to H&M and buy one: blue, v-neck, made in Bangladesh. What if it was made in the Gaza strip?

I hum a little song about being dead. Without death, no images. I have a vision in hot pink vision of a poodle following me home and then it tells me to sign this in your blood and you’ll get everything... It’s a devil thing so I agree, I spit some koolaid on the contract.

: : : : :

JOHANNES GÖRANSSON has written six books (including the forthcoming The Sugar Book) and has translated several books from Swedish, including works by Aase Berg and Johan Jönson. These poems were originally written as part of "Beware of a Holy Whore," a performance piece created with Cassandra Troyan and staged at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.