The Shirt That Smells

Buy the shirt

the shirt that smells

the monastic self-contained

germ-saturated suppurated drip

Shirt of self-flagellating stink goo

gaminess of original shirt the shirt

that smells the pressurized coprolite

coal-to-diamonds carboniferous ooze

the curse never directly uttered the milk

 sprout-discharge that sent skunks running

  through stadium floorboards under the

   awnings of rain-soaked street-corner

    cafes beneath wooden-slat bar-board

     shellac-stained by years of soaked in

      beer n’ scotch-whiskey polluted milk

       festered fly-eggs n’ discharge wept

        through enzymatic micrometers

         thick bug tweedle waddle in

          self-indulgences of mud,

           and hair-shirt hunger

            crying out “forgive

              me for I have

               sinned and

                wish only

                 to return

                  to the di-

                   amond

                    corner

                     edge

                        of

                      God’s

                     tornadic

                   kingdom”…

                 Of relics and

               flagellents and the fam-

             iliar twitch of desire to mock

          all gratuitous forms of self-aggrand-

       izement as we revisit the serrated knife

    edge upon which the diamond of compression

forms itself from lithic mats of Pennsylvanian carbon

gradually sunk into its own permafrost  afro-moss thick-

ness of stretched and pressurized heat-driven condensate

soaked finally into the shadows of its own outline lived and

 bound within a circumscribed field of tertiary palimpsest

  the blue-print for the hard-stone jagged crystalline edged

    atom-squeezing hot crowded Coney-Island of hard

     stone molecular aggregate-pressure over a local

       filamentary fragment of torrid density like the

        tiny embryonic locus of concrete convection

         which animates the active cynosure of

          incubatory graphite as it shrinks to                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

            its own tumescence the meme stink

             olfactory bulbs with shirt fragment

              tatters soft like a gel after crying

                a long suppuration of memory

                 into its irreversible mutation

                 from a shirt—a human thing—

                  now down to a diamond an

                  industrialized institution

                    of pre-planned multi-

                     tudes without the

                     obscure off-center

                      interwoven kudzu

                      of memory; its stink

                      a chaos of mildewed

                        wind-blown laundry

                         that stagnates even

                           the ghastly pressure

                           of ugly industrial

                            fields of stagnant

                             diamonds only

                              to exhale again

                            in all of its malodorous

                        macro-passionate expansive

                     chaos of sometimes disenfranchised

            glory…The Stink Shirt the emblem

the flag the smell, the drip-drip-dropped sweat swollen suture

of mushroom cloud inversions—a sign, a tweed, a gabardine

diversion of a flattening of all affectations into the roiling liquid

mackerel shit bloated oil-stained oyster smell convective diamond stink reef

where we have come up against tidal boundaries splashed over without use of

grammar save waves of turgid earthy sweat machismo into unshaven cotton-shards

of granular poppy-headed epistolary opium-horned conversions into graphite stained

underpants of a preferable softness to diamond needle hemorrhoidal hardness

as it washes over beachiness in fine grained corn-powder now  wetted over into mats of seaweed foam

future across contested ocean-shore palimpsest wave-waving wagging back over the tail shards of sand-

smoothed history, a natural history woven once on an industrial sewing machine, the history of a shirt a shirt

stinks to combine industrial effluent with pre-hominid arm-pit, shit, groin-stink.

The shirt as history, as an emblem of shit, as a flag waving emblem

Of shurt waving flag-like across a beach a desert twilight eclipsing into history as

An idea one hatched up half-albatross amphibian, an idea

Of history—a shirt waves across an empty sandstrewn coast-

Line. Beach sand, clothing and the stink of

sterile silence,  a static of sterile,

sand-strewn silence…

 

JZ Rothstein/ final edit—early am 6/28/2012