The English Language Needs a New Dad

“Every rogue bowel moves daddy’s cabana / for the comb through bib tied high and dangling you,” is the first sentence of Sean Kilpatrick’s fuckscapes, an 85-page onslaught of entirely hyper-textured language destruction recently released from Blue Square Press. Don’t worry that you don’t know what that sentence means, because you do. You have closed your eyes a lot and seen a shitload of hidden colors. You have eaten at Arby’s and grown lard. You have been very near many people who were not you and you will never see again. Such is the nature of some of the ways the word of Sean Kilpatrick has been preparing in you throughout your life. You know, like a tumor, or like the most stubborn segments of your fat.

There is a sense of something very volatile lurking all the space of where these words work. Kilpatrick’s language seems to challenge the very space where it’s been placed, the paper heavy like a toy box stuffed with flesh. While others known for working in the supposed shock systems still seem to produce menace and disgust in how it becomes layered among calmer points, Kilpatrick’s tenor is so unrelenting, the words so beaten down by each other word he’s rammed in between, that where we end up is immediately the high register, as if the notes all fall well beyond the frame where the feedback has been clipped: “which one of you gave my sister tennis elbow / and nailed the blinds shut / closed the refrigerator door on Pooky's tail /  put dishes under car tires for a block / all our neighbors are pigs / written in lipstick / mine / across Mrs. Bottleby's greenhouse / cigarette butts stuck to the ceiling / gramma's lazy boy / mutilated by patches of still-hot jism / everything's tinted yellow.” The result is text of such implicit tension that the tension has killed itself and waits to rise again; we can hardly measure where the spikes are, nor where the bed is. “Gravity will be replaced by AIDS,” Kilpatrick predicts, and here certainly it is: an imminent virus in the mechanism of what has held the world against itself.

And again, this is an illusion. Underneath the fucked veneer and the endless ramming, what wells up during the course of fuckscapes is not only a wide white field that seems more everyday than we’d like to admit, but exists an understanding of language and how proper manipulation of the syllable and sentence can create something at once both previously impossible and always having been. The codes Kilpatrick ejects one after another in furious lineage in mass form a kind of alchemical fire for new speech, and here that speech even is grafted to nowhere. “In ten years I’ll be writing stories about my mother for New York magazines,” Kilpatrick writes in a text titled Business Plan. “I’ll be chewed by sundials until cancer fills my pocket.” You hear a lot in the writing world about the necessity of the prowess of a sentence, of a piece of writing’s ability to invoke the shape of something like a trance, but where so many of the syntaxes of these writings still deal in the trade of emotional human relationships, Kilpatrick goes beneath. His writing, if not vital to your mother, is something monstrous, terrifying, invertedly anthemic in its tenacity for shaking at the place where many would prefer it slept, then shaking that shaking. I’m saying Sean Kilpatrick makes Lars Von Trier and Marquis de Sade look like they paint in watercolor. And it feels vital.

“While this play makes light of incidents such as Columbine which hadn’t occurred at the time of its writing,” says a character to the audience in the herein included post-post-Ionesco play, Progress, “the play is guilty of shock value because it betters the world by explaining the world to you because you need that kind of explanation to continue being part of the world. Goodnight.” Goodnight is right. Where the overload the book works in hits, it hits like a whole body kind of bruise, so that you can’t really see the skin all getting changed. I like the idea of an inert thing working, words that in their arrangement seem to be saying ten different things at once, therefore creating not a literal image or an action, but a kind of barfing floor to walk on, toward what.

OK, that’s enough of my going on. Sean Kilpatrick is the shit, man. One of the realest heads we have. You should just eat some. Here:

Ode to Lynndie England
By Sean Kilpatrick

Praise She Luciferian Wombat Goddess
Who molested our birth certificate so we could age
Drove a unicycle up our foreskin to explain what dangles
She taught us leukemia secrets carved party hats into our hats
No one complains with a cumshot my address is most half loved men
We could smell our brains in the rejected pale we gave the dresser every sleeve
Met other hallelujahs in the salve and avoided phones out of self-defense
Mommy of stereos barking mouthwash at our jeans
Silent disemboweler of smooches how clouds disguise the planet
Her period contorts our eyes like player pianos crucified by seeing
O lost egg of Satan the pill we grew our tongues for breathing is a last resort
In the cannibal dingy our grand odors for a nattier Christ
Whose Sistine anus squeezes epic babies from the rain
Wills bladders with Nazi crayons weeping gold
Regardless the bastard sores a fancy masochist chats nonstop
We calamity goons showpony our bling hint rubble necklaces hum
Dickclamp memories shucks about everything shucks about life
A squeeze of chemical precision files obituaries down to trophies
She hasn’t opened her pores in twenty years to sweat cream-slick
Like a gravity of hornets in our cystoscope malfunctioning flowers
Hustle to bloat plant the knife wrist to happy tremble the prostate fatter glees
The rope shat from Mother around our neck in the shape of a heart
As the girls starve we keep their showers warm as the till box
Becomes lush with freckles we peer review big-ass wounds

You’re all senators to me senator

She of American     garbage betrayed     by her separate arms     calling tornados
Barbie     satellites     big-tooth jello     a pond-scum of bosses     lived her smile
pumped game in trailers     boys administering itsy foam     roaches petted the floor
perfumed leathers gleamed     molecular     measured her untucked maidenhead
a tag for no use     voodoo bust chafing     masturbating to the weather channel
dynamite regulated her puberty     a Boy George kind of night     from tree house
to honky tonk marriage     she did laundry like Satan     or hid dreams in meat
all who postured grit     missed good neurons     mean games of footsie
dressed up as Mark Twain     dust of hickeys     an almost mother’s pucker
squatted over mirrors     sorting the stillborn     gender from her whip    
scooting three saintly     haystacks over     she stuck the storm
eyes worn fancy     tampon for the drill     she straightened a mouse maze
with her germs     helped gravity become humungous     G-force was handy
saddled a friend     baby chickens     giggling sexless hymns     torn
nine to five     barked at rivers     her revenge to knit endlessly
awesome tradition     brassiere stank like pig sex     bruised tattoos     manning up
heavy sinew     collided dandruff     like lollipops of church     the daisy gnome
supple guardian     pimento gal of much recession     the pinups had Chlamydia         
jump ropes in their underwear     sang icy of high school     ate lunch with the alpha
broadbanger     pubes stuck in his burger     they collected blood alimonies
her piss let hens breathe     she had this hyper sensitive skill     little advertised
showed the stripe     huts smaller than a fingernail     clue of bowels
imagine tattling how deserts vibrate     no one ever noticed     caucasians in the sand
thought of concrete     munched eight hours      thought of collocating flesh     thumbs up
jerked her face a second corner     sir that shit’s a triangle     a tangled pyramid of butt
he flossed her sourballs with a textbook     she posed gloat     quicktime motherfucker
broke the corpse thumbs     to show them nicer     stress positions     the petite furnace    
giggled nasty yoga     her baby curdled forth     in slaughter she knew
weeping fat cabbages     for safe order     bland S&M     front page nothing
the dogs were peeping     flat Valhallas     directions for their own hair
prayed in jail kitchens     sat free at bars     hunching bung     hero of getting named

@blakebutler