if i was a pearl i’d feel itchy scratchy stuck inside an oyster shell if i was a tree i’d  be a big fat redwood fantasizing about Julia Butterfly Hill living and peeing around me if i was a dog i’d be a Catahoula hound if i was Italian i’d be Sicilian if i was pasta i’d be spaghetti if i was Icelandic i’d be Bjork if i was a rock star i’d be Elvis Presley Bob Dylan Jimi Hendrix Jim Morrison John Lennon Bruce Spingsteen Maynard James Keenan if i was i writer i’d be Herman Melville Mark Twain James Joyce William Faulkner Thomas Bernhard Yukio Mishima Naguib Mahfouz Phillip K. **** Gabriel Garcia Marquez Annie Proulx Lydia Davis if i was a poet i’d be Walt Whitman Sylvia Plath Ted Hughes Gwendolyn Brooks Pablo Neruda  Heather McHugh Carl Sandburg Robert Frost Arthur Rimbaud Dante Alighieri Homer if i was a painter i’d be Leonardo Da Vinci Michelangelo da Caravaggio Johan Vermeer Rembrandt van Rijn Paul Cezanne Marcel Duchamp Jackson ******* Mark Rothko Ad Reinhardt Anselm Kiefer Susan Rothenberg if i was a photographer i’d be Man Ray Ansel Adams Edward Weston Diane Arbus Robert Mapplethorpe Sally Mann Helmut Newton Richard Avedon Annie Leibovitz if i was a philosopher i’d be Socrates Plato Aristotle Jean Jacques Rousseau Sören Kierkegaard Immanuel Kant Karl Marx Georg Hegel Friedrich Nietzsche Henry David Thoreau Ralph Waldo Emerson  Jean-Paul Sartre Jean Baudrillard Michel Foucault if i was a singer i’d be Woody Guthrie Otis Redding Grace Slick Bob Marley Joni Mitchell Marvin Gaye Johnny Cash Patsy Cline June Carter Patti Smith Chrissie Hinde Nick Cave P J Harvey Beyonce if i wa a band i’d be Velvet Underground Ramones *** Pistols Clash Cure Smiths Joy Division Uncle Tupelo Pixies Nirvana Nine Inch Nails Madrugada Sigur Ros White Stripes Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra Justice of the Unicorns if i was a boot i’d be Chippewa Frye Ariat Red Wing Tony Lama Wellington if i was a shoe i’d be Christian Louboutin Jimmy Choo Kedds Chaco Chuck Taylor p f flyer if i was a dress i’d be Channel Dolce & Gabbanna Giorgio Armani Marc Jacobs Comme des Garçons if i was a cowboy shirt i’d be H bar C Rockmount Temp Tex Karman Wrangler Levis Strauss Lee if i was a hat i’d be a Stetson Borsalino Stephen Jones if i was a fruit i’d be a mango apple banana blackberry if i was an scent i’d smell like fresh perspiration jasmine sandalwood ylang ylang the ocean if i was a doctor i’d be a gynecologist neurosurgeon if i was a flower i’d be a hibiscus rose orchard if i was a stone i’d be a sparkling ruby diamond opal if i was a knife i’d be a k-bar switch-blade machete if i was a gun i’d be a Remington Winchester Beretta Glock AK-47 if i was a car i’d be a Lamborghini Ferrari BMW Saab Volkswagen GTO Ford Mustang Dodge Challenger if i was a  TV show i’d be Law and Order if i was actor i’d be Charlie Chaplin Humphrey Bogart Steve McQueen Robert De Niro Ed Norton Shawn Penn if i was an actress i’d be Marlene Dietrich Ingrid Bergman Natalie Wood Audrey Hepburn Marilyn Monroe Helen Mirren  Meryil Streep Brigette Fonda Robin Wright Julianne Moore Angie Harmon if i was a female comedian i’d be Gilda Radner Lily Tomlin Nora Dunn Joan Cusack Sarah Silverman Tina Fey if i was a  football player i’d be Sid Luckman George Blanda Walter Payton **** Butkus Mike Singletary Joe Montana Jerry Rice Payton Manning LaDanian Tomlinson  Drew Breeze if i was a celebrity i’d be Charlotte Gainsbourg if i was a rapper i’d be Tupac Shakur if i was a movie director i’d be Sam Peckinpah Robert Altman Stanley Kubrick Roman Polanski Werner Herzog Rainer Fassbinder Louis Bunuel Alfred Hitchcock Jean-Luc Godard François Truffaut if i was a bird i’d be a eagle hawk sparrow bluebird if i was a fish i’d be a dolphin shark narwhal Charlie the tuna if i was breakfast i’d be a French toast pancake folded in half with 2 strips of bacon in between if i was a cold cereal i’d be snap crackle popping rice crispies shredded wheat cheerios oatmeal if i was tea i’d be Japanese green matcha Irish breakfast Tulsi Thai holy basil Lapsang souchong Luzianne Lipton if i was a soap i’d be French hand milled ayurvedic Avon Ivory Dove Pears Aveda  if i was a man i’d be a football basketball baseball tennis swimmer athlete if i was a woman i’d be a track star runner writer painter gardener doctor nurse yoga mom i'm just scratching the surface and the beat goes on lahdy dah dah

The Sinclair police force isn’t large. Most of the officers former frat boys and two-year college coeds straight from being your typical campus drunkards and *****, the ones lucky enough to avoid one too many DWIs and able to stick it out through police cadet training. They were young, white and gifted with two-dimensional thinking. Two female officers, Stephanie Humbert and Regina Fassbinder, were assigned to the Randall killings. They didn’t have a clue where to begin their investigation, other than with the anonymous reports of a large dog in the vicinity. This struck Fassbinder, a pretty strawberry blonde, as similar to a case she’d read about in the paper.
Sitting with Humbert in the back booth of a diner, she mused that maybe the dog had crossed the state line and was now roaming the suburbs.
Humbert scoffed, “Come on now! How big a dog we talkin’?”
“Not a little dog—big enough to eat a woman’s leg off. That’s big enough to tear Mrs. Randall to pieces.”
“And tear his head clean off? Come on now!”
About the woman whose leg had been eaten; there was a mystery. The body had disappeared from the large New York City morgue after the coroner himself had been torn into pieces so small and messy they had had to mop up his remains and store them in Ziploc bags. The detectives assigned to the case had had nothing to work with besides the rumor of a large dog either, and were in fact having troubles of their own and were presently on official leave of absence. One of the detectives, Ron Capshaw, took his in great stride. Having just lost his wife in a tragic shooting incident, he had proposed to a female officer and gone off to Atlantic City to be married. The other detective, Jake Knudsen, did not sit so easily with his virtual suspension. When he heard that a large dog might be responsible for the mauling of the New Jersey couple in their home, he drove out to see just what the hell that was all about.
He arrived in the small town and went into the precinct. There is only one precinct in all of Sinclair, and the desk sergeant on duty told him that officers Humbert and Fassbinder were out on patrol. They weren’t detectives. Sinclair detectives were apparently far too busy to be bothered with reports of prowling dogs; even, or especially, if the dog in question was capable of dismembering a grown woman and decapitating a grown man. He saw the police car parked in front of the diner and went in. Seeing the officers sharing a salad, he walked over and sat. “Ladies,” he said. “Name’s Knudsen, Detective, NYPD. I hear you got a problem wit’a dog.”
Both women looked at him bewildered.
“What’d you say?” asked Humbert the skeptic.
“A dog. We got a case in New York. A dog,” he started again when Fassbinder jumped in.
“Ate that woman’s leg off! I read ‘bout dat!”
Knudsen was pleased but didn’t show it. He wasn’t that pleased. The waitress came over and asked if he’d like to see a menu.
“Sure,” he said and she showed him one. “Gimme a burger, no—make it a salad.” He then turned to the officers. “I’m kinda off meat.”
“What about this dog?” Humbert chimed.
Knudsen leaned in on them, saying hushed, “’Tween you’n’me, there ain’t any ******* dog.”
Humbert sat bolt upright and shouted, “Ain’t none! Well, how do you explain…?”
“Pipe down, Stephanie,” Fassbinder scolded mildly. “Let him explain.”
Knudsen, leaning back took a pack of smokes from his vest pocket and tamped it on the back of his fist. Both women scowled as if at the thought that he might light up, which he did. He wagged the match out and dropped it on the floor. He didn’t care whether there was no smoking. He didn’t give a good ******* whether there was no ****** old ladies and shooting smack. The old rules no longer applied. The ‘dog’ had changed all that.

i brush the popcorn off my jacket.
outside the theater where they show
fassbinder films
i dig for spare change in my pocket
for the homeless man on the corner of
seventeenth and arbor.

heard through the psychobabble
as he extends his hand:
“get a girlfriend
get a job
stay warm”

the things we do to be human.

I notice you see me before I watched you clinging in your window
If I cling to your window, would you let me watch you?
Do you think you’ll ever notice with so much within your fortress?
Getting lonely at work and sick of nobody noticing you
The people your age love fast food and trouble, living against purple trees and near the Atlantic
Don’t get so frantic from being so lonely and far away so distantly
Fassbinder’s has you on Camera two so he’s switching your attitude to 35 millimeter
Making you gentle like the sands of Portugal

The tendons of your right knee is hurting me intensely
And Astro-projection is a spiritual travel to reach me over the dimensions
It’s so hard to sleep when your heart’s sinking in deep
Watching the sheep float by like the betraying lover’s that never say goodbye
There’s something in me, something in me that wants to steal the holiness
from the Vatican standing still swiftly down in Italy
maybe the next Michelangelo  art masterpiece
I notice you see me before I watched you clinging in your window

Vasili Kandinsky, Sally Rand & the Bauhaus
were way out ahead of their times,
the Beatles & Stones were retro then & avant-garde now---
**** is instantly retro;
not just any music is avant-garde but any naked woman
is no matter what she does or is currently doing,
Bettie Page & Marilyn Monroe,
Virginia Woolf even in their graves
Are ahead of their times;
Marquis de Sade & Masoch avant-garde;
Jean Genet retro---Blaze Starr avant-garde,
Lili St. Cyr modern & retro---Paul Klee avant-garde,
Marilyn Monroe both Modern & retro (A Gibson girl reborn---Elmer Batters a throwback w/ a camera---
To Diamond Jim Brady he & Lillian Russell were avant-garde---one day we will all be rich & naked,
dripping w/ jewels & connoisseurs)
Sol Lewitt retro; Judy O’Day modern,
To the DPRK, Kpop is avant-garde---
No one called William S. Burroughs a Modernist---
Not to his face anyway, nor Hunter S. Thompson
but the critics did call Thomas Wolfe a Modernist
& avant-garde---F. Scott Fitzgerald heralding a new age
that passed away w/ Zelda in the madhouse inferno
& Scott trying to write screenplays
but movies were retro by the 30s
& the avant-garde already history---
Modernism vanishing decades later w/ Basquiat
& Warhol & Schnabel & Fischl et al---
Martha Graham was Modern, Isadora  retro
all the way back to ancient Greece naked & barefoot---
Robots get smaller & put u out of a job,
yet so efficient fembots become a reality---
Putting women out of work in a world
where no one needs strippers---
living in a technological delusion w/ the illusion of religion
confusing their imploded minds---
The world will always need stripper retro,
modern, avant-garde & beyond
from the beginning to the end of all time,
in the Crazy Horse multiverse,
When no one needs prostitutes
only drugs will do---drugs & technology, global psychedelia,
Nationalism, racism & violence are all so retro;
Modernism has simply ceased to exist
& the avant-garde has yet to be---
Women would dance naked for drunken men---
Not anymore---now it’s fembots playing virtual games
w/ video ******
Toulouse Lautrec & Eugene O’Neill
were avant-garde but not modernists---
Dita Von Teese is postmodern as am I
& Lady Gaga & Bettie Page & Blaze Starr to this day---
Let she who is w/o sin cast the first stone
at the ghost of go-go---
No one ever complained
about an old-fashioned cooch show
except the girls that were in it
although they loved it & would do it again & again
well into their sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties---
No one complains about long forgotten stag films
left in boxes on basement floors
showing grandma w/ the neighbor
circa World War Two and into the 1950s---
No one complains about ****** harassment
unless they’ve been harassed---
No one complains about ****
except those that have been ***** & not always then---
No one complains about ******
except those that have been murdered---
No one complains about postmodern burlesque
Although the rule is ‘if anything moves, **** it’
& if any man reaches for his *****, arrest him---
The Modernist/postmodernist Marcel Duchamp’s
bride stripped bare by her bachelors even
gets no complaints from MOMA or  any other mother---
I can’t wear this mask anymore
& there’s nothing behind it---
If I kicked ur door in & shot ur mother dead
several times just to be sure
she was ******* deader than dead
& said I must have made a mistake, would that be cool w/ u, officer?
The Frankfurt School & Fassbinder & poststructuralism
are the heirs to Maria’s estates
from Frankenstein to Superman,
At the school of the Soviet fembot---
her Japanese mother is a witch who is not a stranger
to myths of night; eating off ***** plates on the floor---
Her name was Amelia then---
She’s a pig tonight---
I & the son are one
with the background radiation---
Getting people to help her
carry her ***-stained mattress
around campus is neither modern, retro & or avante-garde---
Its plain disgusting, help me carry my *** stains across campus
So you can see where my period bled & I said no---
(The ancestors of the the fembot are not strangers
She is named Emma tonight,
she is the pig tonight)