The Deconstruction Song of Henry Avignon (Part I)

For David Shapiro & Rosanne Wasserman


Henry is eating poetry and it tastes nothing like (him). 

Henry hears the visible about them. Eyes like two thundering skies, twin storms scattering rain. The complexion of luscious is rainbow: warm sun amid momentary moistures. Lips purse gentle around wings, her butterfly flesh. Feats of pleasure take flight, find rest. Only distance belies this culmination of satisfactions. Hearing how she tastes, proboscis mouthing a slow word: saliva.

Henry is equal parts wall and graffiti, prescription and pill; his cerebellum tattooed with billing account numbers: 54649-31223. Life amounts are past due. He balances on the wings of vultures in flight, patterned after Kierkegaard. Debt is a glass of cold that aids the swallow of anxiety (is hearing the timber fall, the anviling of the nails, the ache of those being remaindered).

Henry slips on the black ice of a white church that will be the last site remaining at America's gravest end. White man cracks his skull on the alter, bleeds red; black man taps his soul on the pulpit, bleeds red. The difference between a future and all failure, between agreement and apocalypse, is the mandible of a savior in the cross-hairs of our darkest legacy.

Henry is back from the sea and rough with barnacles. His eyes gathered wisdom, the lunar tendencies, from being among reef and shark. Swimming is in the rehearsal for his funereal, performing well. Passion, vertical depth, evidence of infinity grazing the notes of the song's movement: unbearable rhythms across the page; flesh concealing a fathom of more. Back from the sea...the body tender...the lips salty.

Henry is (deus ex machina) man! my cape is made of AgION! Not afraid of campy (von) lobacter jejuni any more than deaths mindwash! though i'm prone to posterity anxiety around certain bacterrorias, i mojo the disability chic with bush lux. its a batbelt fool, drooged in sonar-shifting paint. all the interruptive contrablulations in the reduxionary can't make a bioneer out of a carbon sink cogged with cold bananas.

Henry is (in) the third degree...master of mixed verbal arts representing the United State of Debate, specializing in inter-textual striking techniques. For years he trained under Shapiro and now, a veritable arsenal of postmodern forms, weighing in naked at over 10 thousand books, wearing the agnostics dull-gray trunks. Attention please: A virtual-cage Faceoff has already begun.

Henry works the streets of memory, prostituting animosity to John's dangling big sticks of Black Nag Champa. Then along comes the Om in a seersucker suit of scarlet polyester oozing argyle at the collars, mournful flowers dying in a desert nether of under watered zeitgeist below a heavy belt of copper wires and lead pipes. Henry works the night, the angles without light, the streets of dead delight sowing seed.

Henry knows all flows, independent of exterior forces, are key to the survival of (we): Air, Water, Blood & Thought. Never without a need to breath or thirst for quenching freedom. All the names of love, the pains of living by will, we blot the ink (we) bleed.

Henry is statistically familiar with fire-heads and chumps down low on death row. All hands and hell hounds, holding bars and howling at blue oasis hung from perpetual night. Gunshot of electric intelligence surrounding every move. Angst of victims chopping the black block of marble air into equal but smaller points of reference.

Henry was born halfway between 1971 and Highway 61 to a proud pair of unplowed fields who remain, without shadows and so without guilt to this day, raised on cocks crooning renaissance far from Machiavelli's Prince; untitled, their only masterpiece, he learned every 40 acres belongs to some other time or state of mind.

Henry was diagnosed by a monocle to be suffering from myopia. A description was written for a bottle of pills. The partial, fourth-wall observer decreed "take all of these and your stigmata will no longer bleed." To which I replied, "by these unnatural laws you obey I would have up and died yesterday."

Henry is moving to St Augustine: city of Godot circa 413. He peddled loneliness: the great snake oil anti-psychotic. Rome again was rotting on stage 4 with Gothitis; the holy populous again set fire to the lung of existential desire and staked a lofty claim. But everyone knows by now and then a village madman is more than a foil for a bum.

Henry is crumbles of stone, the wail and the moan; sinew of shell shocked nerve stretched to a far curb; sporadic as shots fired at all white schools; cruel as the familiar shoe in a backyard pool; honest as carnage in black and white; And heavy as a flat bed of salt hauled in to censor a field of amassed dead. 

Henry is the love stained vinyl seat enslaving and sliding beneath (you on sweaty seams); a coastal land of geriatric lies; a posted land where rusted red toxic waste barrels are dumped among ivory white amputations and yellow wallpaper on which so much of animosity depends.

Henry is who? Others presume he deserves no business, (is not) to be or not to be spoken to but around or through. Is just 1 aberration of the Human Nation. Left unexamined even 1 turns the flour sour, the blood into to wining bouquets of air born disease: meaning, remedy, fairness, ideology.

Henry is a Darwinist at dawn, a Communitarian by day, agnostic while the sun lays down her black particulars atop the hour and Marx's girl after dark when democracy can wear a slinky dress and still squabbles less about "I know so and who are you minus we."

Henry is coming for the jack of hearts, for impure forms in fits and starts, hungry to undermine a sea that floats a ship of fools, to free all navigators from captains from generals from gruel.

Henry is a sword swallower like you...try so hard to digest what it's like to be here without a ticket to the republic of bones where all expect you've complimented the professors to get; got on about their looks not undercut the one-eyed hierarchy of your books (do you) Mr. Jones regret the volatile politics of your first threat? Well do you, Mr. Jones.


Henry likes a stiff gin and echelon(ic) to shake off the aristocracy he smokes like black Maui chronic, or a Dirty Pythagorean on Mandelbrot's rocks hold the olive branches and he doesn't do shots of Elite which meticulously drag him into the "perfect state" of defeat.

Henry is not simple, was not born under any ruling star, not easily molded around play-dough skepticism. He is a mouthpiece for blue chip minions, a codpiece hiding onions that made Socrates weep. Rarely engaging down this deep where unnaturally, subversives swim and prefer to sleep.

Henry is a strategy for reciprocity that is relative, not stress free. Hollow is where the bullet left his wound to define it as love; to accommodate its grievous need for the flesh of foreigners to Athenian Democracy

Henry is a montage of game theories each more complicating than the next each eventually a statement: death is nice for selfish reasons and life a predictable way of capitulating.

Henry is a tic without a face, all ten toes and no tribe, a singular place with diminutive value, generosity without co-operation. He is a demonstrative drawback to disobedience; one after an ( ) other; full as non-conformity becomes a mile beyond one's own base camp. He is a scar once unimaginable, a hunger for ever unmanageable, the feces of Aristotle feeding feral maggots and its viral. 

Henry never willed his return to the scene of a crime in the boroughs. He cannot prove the effects of a million forked words on the evolution of a vex. But to (un)build gross instinct, to recognize and rattle a double crossing breed who hyper-imaginate their heels when inhumanity and greed do convene.

Henry is a physical body unstrung, a broken guitar's neck, a surrenderer to sanctity, murdered by the page, canvas, and vocal range that rise along copper hair and nylon wire; interwoven tufts grappled by pulleys up the Andes; pinnacling, youthful spine jutting to oblivion.

Henry is a day in July, 1952, wondering what kind of man? Funeral fanatic, a farcical victim, passive-aggressive impostor, undignified cynic, prodigal boy in a grown Hamlet.

Henry is the rise and significance of the judges right arm; the essential significance of To See, To Take of irony that art history would be different had Mona been lost.

Henry is one tempest in a tea pot tearing at a leafy lot, to the core, to the pores of hypocritical thought, to shattered things and broken means steeping.

Henry paid 3 Shillers to say: what would pass for song in life must first by death be paraphrased. Immortality, we trace the insignificance of breathing 'this' air.

Henry is asking God for the fever to re-lent, for the strength to open the window and crack the vent. When three fears road by on a dead white horse he felt life and creation and nothing of remorse.

Henry is handsome as a painting by Picasso circa. 1913; red as one (3rd) line of Basho; alone, without his Platero for a lifetime and now disavowed by the rejected teenager and a furrowed brow.

Henry is a brown moth with stubby fingers, wrestling for a path to the blue moon; a fan's blade rounds off the day tethered to treatment(s) by them both: nausea and delight.

Henry has never published and will not remember being seen or screened through elder-eyes cringing and crazed. In a bag of sounds he sucks, gasping, ugly, unnamed, out of flux. 

Henry is a collection of floater ribs, wisdom teeth, doubled joints and hand remains of ambidextrous poets none could ignore given Sophie's choice.

Henry tastes sweet the succulent sap on his crucifix; ivory pus of middling fatigues oozing between porous sheets, the burning lines, on his tongue, his lips, his cheek and wink wink.

Henry is CUT to veritable shreds of acumen. To many brilliant directors for one lowly actor...cut! Cut! The unfinished thought is night blooming jasmine.

Henry is in line at M.O.M.A readying himself to bear witness to the unstable aperiodic behavior of tomorrow's genius: "combusted enamel and velocity on ether."

Henry is a narrative that reads like the French passport and notebook of a Moroccan militant with a miraculous weaponry and heart full of negritude.

Henry is more a carriage of characters than cleverly disguised; is unfounded as any rumor in the trenches of war; like a six shooter with five vowels.

Henry is feathered in a suspicious manner, not speaking fearsomely enough to be ratified alive among cyber-junkets in the lurch rattling death.

Henry is so vain, he probably thinks her pain is about him. O' Henry, poor Henry, costumed as they prefer a tapestry of innocuous eyelids pulled down over clarity.

Henry is the occupation of a foreign nation under a moon shared by the world at night when shielded from true light the condition of facts is unknown.

Henry thinks he is the conductor of waves. Arms crash against a contrary evidence, five fingered tips dive in double helix of gulls to the caw-maw of their metronome.

Henry is a mouth full of water being airlifted to a war torn zone of thirsts where clear passages have been cut and death smiles from ear to ear.

Henry is trapped between the violin and the audience, between the lips of a deer and the ears of a truck advancing on the night; the pulse of death quickening.

Henry is running contrary to the fiction of survival, divided into arms and legs with disproportionate egos and voices that echo the materiality of nothingness.

Henry is the surprise of blood on the body and the hand that finds itself as minimalist subject matter in a canvass study of the motions red requires to exit.

Henry is an incomplete text, a half glass of milk spoiled on the window sill where sugars lift to unfurl on a sea breeze marching past in boots of salt.

Henry is a prologue that begins 'The End;' footsteps leading into a night of blizzards, where snow falling is a gestapo and its forecast the execution of dawn.

Henry is motionless among movements, listening to arias argue their intents with a blathering mob of incurable laments, surrounded by chairs and wigs and darkness.

Henry is the clever placement of weapons, a closeted procurement of elements and the incontrovertible accumulation of remnants with a heart made of poetry.

Henry is the black skin around the heart; undressed wound of a womb; the frenzy of devout moments in a fire devouring; a child with prosthetic legs of smoke running across a sky all white.

Henry knows the architectures are a moments pause, the mighty structures of all past now folding on themselves; wooden eyes ignite and each last breath turns to stone.

Henry is an untampered bottle of Mirtazapine not yet abused; a leafy scab on the psychological amputation; Handel's Sonata in D Minor wearing thin as mirror.

Henry sees that eyes do not have governments; tongues are wild and without law; the heart lacks society and "citizenry" is the artificial construct of civility.

Henry saw a yellow flower with a black eye pushing up through snow. His first instnict was "this is proof." We pick her to live and everything changes.

Henry reached black dahlia, extending their myth, translated by a force stronger than its root, lifted by her conceit: five phalanges of light.

Henry is blue. Aqua skin and the drum; tremor of oceanic thrush and vowel; lung of light suspended in the grieved muse; this mourning: my black starling, my dune.

Henry is a sentence constructed out of vermilion and alabaster feathers clipped off a bird in mid flight; clipped to the absence of the bird now cast as earth.

Henry is lonely for more words like "clip." Words that attach and detach in the same breath; words that make all the differ(a)nce in the world.

Henry walks a cemetery fence far from the sea by soundless halls of bone; undressing the heart, the body of shells, salted blood.

Henry leans into the shelter of shadow lines; sillouettes of trees that are nowhere kept and time has cut to the scorch.

Henry is seeds of dawn in palms of earth. The long rein of darkness extinguishes and blue embers catch fire to apples, blinding worms. 

Henry is alive among roughened elements. Winter's heavy boots trail mud, the green carpet is vividly brown; each bud is a match and sudden conflagration of hope.

Henry is blue curtains of morning drawn; strands of delicacy, fibers of light; fingers of the hour sound the sitar(a) of wakeful solitudes.

Henry is silent when the moon speaks; knowing night is natures paslm, blessing the desperate with sleep; the broken with blue salves of sustenance.

Henry hears a cricket cry. Blossoms dry petals of honey on moon strand. Hours thunder by; thrice, roots and grass are lit by the eyes, blind.

Henry is one eye refusing to blink, with tongue enough to bridge the isle of sorrows to a mainland of words; the burnt day at dusk cools. 

Henry feels language as enormity; cascade of moments, id of atoms, animus of God, all of us: subjects in a run away sentence without predicate.

Henry is laundering the earliest graves, sifting monosyllabic shards of shattered language, slit fingers dripping ink; blood blots in the sentiment of deep soil.

Henry is mauled birds under the paws of cliche; how time passes at a rate of the enjoyment of life. Three children die each second of the day.

Henry is running for the Noble Place Prize. Believing wherever one is belongs to whyever one must be there: from "The Manifesto of Existential Darwinism." 

Henry is solidifying a most impoprtant list: "Top 10 Books To Be Buried With Just In Case We're Allowed To Read In The Afterlife."

Henry is intoxicated...a dream of a valley between peaks, embracing the distance; a stream of pollenated light; exhale of yellowed memory and flowers.

Henry is a quartet of mornings in late April, the pastel pollens of a disapearing tribe, the walls of a parisian salon in 1905 and miasmas of profound light.

Henry is strung up, cauterized by traps; child beaten to a pulp of fear, of brokenness; immigrant self decomposing along borderlands of incarcerated souls, amassing.

Henry is is clear torpor, a violin's tear; bow of the mind outstretched, amending the strings of wind, a sonata of urgency: ripples on darkest pond, waves of malaise.

Henry awakened with a potters wheel where yesterday were hands and lightning where the night before letters managed to speak a word--agony.

Henry is one of billions. A woman and child hurriedly gulp a refuse of unsanitary water, choking on us all; the horrific tar of tomorrows excrement, they pass death as food.

Henry is meant as critique of dying; another random act of identity in a crises of kindness toward fellow sufferers. Forgive in him the putrefaction of words