Charles Valle

What Madness. Such Wow.

I wanna fix your wine box flap

And punch the cardboard divot

So your plastic spigot stops

Dribbling cabernet on the vinyl tiles

I wanna fix your wine box flap

And fill your plastic glass full of

Sounds of I love yous and dead dreams

I wanna drink young gamay with you in some Thracian field during the equinox

A Beaujoulais Nouveau, perhaps, or Pet Nat in sparkling saunter

You’re walking through some sunset field

Are you the sunset field?

Are you the sparkling equinox?

There is tomorrow, then there is nothing

There is nothing, then there is music

Here, the symphony of genocide

Begins with the silence of strings

And woodwinds, a sonata of acquiescence

The muted percussive thuds of arrhythmic

Hearts beating in disbelief

Beat louder now

And louder again, then silence

A recapitulation of horrors

More horrors

And more horrors, yet

My friend says: Not to sound heartless,

But isn’t there always a genocide happening?

Isn’t there?

Can you hear all the black and brown

heartbeats beating as one

Broken syncopated rhythm?

What do you call the color of blood and mud

and ground concrete dust?

So many melanated inquiries

Questions ringing into songs

Singing the untranslatable

Songs the color of ripe fruit

Before decay and all the rot of getting

Just a little too old to keep hangin on

Songs the color of broken figs bursting with fig jizz

Or dried, the desiccants decaying in punctured packages

It’s confusing

Melanated inquiries as in:

How do you ravage your chicken wings?

How you confuse your grandma’s butchered dishes

With my Lola’s silenced chicken

How dare you?

You eat your foie gras profiteroles like a savage

Your tofu sweetbreads

Your plant-based chicken feet pickled in the backlog of ideas without value

There are kids starving in Rafah, Khartoum, Port au Prince

While you wipe off pan de sal crumbs off your décolletage

Which part of our humanity is really dying when

Dead children become disputed numbers

And semantic minefields?

Do you feel guilty for enjoying an exquisite glass

Of pinot or a cleverly-composed cocktail?

Have you ever had a mid-bite orgasm diminished

By the thought of starving brown kids eating dirt?

Will you?

And these questions keep ringing and tumbling over themselves

Some circuitous hue

It’s the bro hymn chorus reverberating against concrete

It’s the imagined curb stomping echoing in high school hallways

When mo-ther-fuck-er, starts rhyming with Let’s Go Brandon, we’ve got a different kind

of party on our hands

You ever seen a lynching?

You ever been in a mass shooting?

You ever been in a gangbang?

You ever been in a genocide?

How’s this for innovation: 4 girls, 2 cups?

And I like the word ham-fisted the way it

Perfectly captures politics

Or diplomacy

Oh Bibi, how we’d love your genocidal tendrils to wrap

Around all these double-chinned collar gaps

How do you pronounce “shokushu zeme” without sounding like an asshole?

I want your slimy tentacles so far up the Senate’s ass

That you write your own blank check

Isn’t there a fascist within all of us who would love blank checks and people we despise
to do as we please

No?

It’s the inevitability of growth stocks and consumer demand

The markets want moar

Roaring Kitty wants moar

Retail wants moar

Cavernous desires expanding

We’re talking Olympic-sized dreams, here

We’re talking Olympic-sized failures

See them skaters doing half-assed toe loops and salchows?

They’re in Central Park

They’re in Rockefeller Center

They’re in South Bend and Hillsboro and suburbs where malls are dying

And the fields and factories are razed

And the dollar stores are coming for your

Crumbling boxes

How are you going to decolonize these razed fields? These racist rivers

Meander and saunter, slow motion oxbows

Eroding compromised banks

Currents in time lapse

Mud and sand collapsing

Some brown water turning more brown

These racist rivers create islands

What saith the lord?

Nothing more biblical than the weeping and gnashing of teeth

Remember: redemption is only a sacrifice away

Pharmakos

These children died for your right to be well-regulated

Pharmakos

Those children died for your belief in an Iron Wall

Makarios

Some Thracian field buzzing with the chorus of 10,000 shepherds

Makarios

Some artisanal mine in the Congo with the laughter of 25,000 children

Makarios

Some rice paddy thrumming with a million whispers and prayers

Makarios

They’re picking berries
They’re picking pineapples
They’re picking stocks

They’re mining cobalt
They’re mining coins
They’re minting memes

All movements measured in algorithmic splendor

I close my rings every day and fall in the shadows

There are shadows moving everywhere

There are caesuras falling like stars

Metaphors tumbling over themselves

These linguistic architectural elements

Semiotic trusses and flying buttresses

Crumble when questioned

They are nothing in your own silence

Chat GPT: Help me write a poem that will break your heart

In the style of Antonin Artaud

If and only if Artaud was madly in love with Chloe Sevigny

And heavily influenced by John Ashbery and Lyn Hejinian

Make it funny, ChatGpt

Make it mine

Help me write a song about the human condition under duress

As if it was written by Elliott Smith and Orpheus

You talk about authority as if you had any interesting thoughts

Or agency

Or the discipline to open up your laptop and transcribe your iPhone notes

Or the discipline to not watch porn after doomscrolling

I’m gonna write a screenplay about the ghost of Moshe Dayan’s lost eye

Haunting fascists in their sleep

Working title: “I see you, Motherfuckers”

I’m gonna write a historical novel about Quantitative Easing and I’m going to call it
“What happened to your tight little hole?”

I’m gonna write a hysterical essay for The Atlantic called “Nobody wants your baby
bomb fists pew pew”

Which golden florets fly amongst the beheaded babies

Which darkened petals stain the air with the dust

And detritus of disembodied dreams of home

Which ashes feed the fertile soil for resistance

And in that stifled stillness, let us hope

lupins like cartoon flowers

burst out of the most unlikely places

Tamarisks in bloom

Dogwoods in wonder

Tulips like bubbles deflating

Charles Valle is the author of Proof of Stake: An Elegy (Fonograf Editions, 2021). He lives in Portland, OR.