Free Digital Edition

HEART SUTRA HEART SUTRA

Adam Tedesco

REALITY BEACH #6 Print edition of 108. Digital edition 2020.

REALITY BEACH Albany, NY

REALITYBEACH.ORG something infinite a Pizza Hut your last line a brown paper bag a place of eagle energy an amen of pains a room a villa in Naples from Walmart a mantra a clown who knew he wasn’t a clown the worst reality show ever a throne a framing device the keys to being the only squid the toothless lover head bangs in the mirror

My heart is something infinite and really underwhelming A weak light that never goes out that dims itself once every two weeks in memory of that time ten years ago when I did way too much cocaine My heart’s a Pizza Hut that doesn’t serve beer that you have to walk to through a cherry orchard By the time you get there you realize you could’ve eaten free cherries You wind up hating yourself for eating this garbage instead My heart’s fat and lazy done too many deadlifts with horrible form Its back is shot It’s tired of dieting Orders a pizza then watches every episode of Law & Order with Paul Sorvino My heart’s your last line dissolving into condensation on a toilet tank

You stare in disbelief

A bouncer pulls at your collar My heart is a brown paper bag full of shit on fire being stomped by a slippered foot on a front porch at dusk in a neighborhood with a great name and a history of violence where all the birdsong sounds like screaming

I am hiding under bushes across the street watching and laughing because it’s too cold here to cry into the earth My heart is eating an umlaut of ooze at the end of the endless All Things Must Pass horn section hallway In a place of eagle energy a secret room of trance an all-night operation loosening clothes to air the horsed guitar My heart is a face that stares too long stupid little thing we all want to choke to tie down, remove the heart inside the heart, the brain inside the heart inside the heart a handful of Vicodin whiting out a weary watchout to beware of darkness in the brain and keep a hurtful curfew My heart eats an amen of pains the length of fingers that take and take the heart from brain inside the heart inside the heart eating at the end of endless dark My heart is a room full of people I want to hate slow scorpions hissing through the dream door to medicated equinox

A halfway house chorus of wet silvered violence

A panel discussion on aches and arcs where no one knows anything No one knows anything

I owe everyone money and nobody is holding inside the heart of luck where veins take tea from magic words like stupa, an arrow bomb right cleanliness or time

All things I can’t take back My heart’s a villa in Naples you cashed out your 401k to rent for two weeks Now you feel like your living in a JAY-Z video except without the dancers

You don't know how to dance unless you're high and when you're high you're the world’s greatest dancer until your nose starts bleeding or you throw up on someone or you piss your pants then take a Seroquel to pass out In the morning you walk out onto your veranda because you don't know the Italian word for patio and you can smell a landfill and lemon groves with every breath and you don't know how to hold your breath

You begin to hate lemons You begin to hate yourself My heart got fired from Walmart for cashing in empties it found in the parking lot

Now it thinks it’s a boxer My heart got fired from the forest for calling the sky god for praying with flame

Now it thinks it’s a fire Farther down my heart’s on its knees though it’s nothing these days

Nothing, these days

Keep moving Adam my heart says

Keep moving toward the nothing My heart is a mantra seed of sound carrot and whip everywhere except inside

Inside’s a little chip of Stonehenge exploding in time to beat my blood around the track Don’t fear the nothing sings my heart Don’t believe The NeverEnding Story My heart is Doc Louis running me into nothing in my cute little chickenshit hat through my cute little chickenshit life My heart is the ghost of a toughguy from the streets of a city that never existed that follows me everywhere My heart labors over getting me to the nothing knowing almost everything fails

My heart knows I’m nothing

It’s trying to take me home My heart’s the worst reality show ever about middle aged white men chasing ghosts There's a team of them wearing dirty sweatshirts pacing the hallway of an abandoned hospital where a nurse killed a patient fifty years ago

There's a mirror with a neon light and another mirror inside it but they don't call it a mirror they call it an Infinity Trap and they take turns staring into it screaming at the ghost they all believe in They get winded screaming SHOW YOURSELF screaming MAKE YOUSELF KNOWN veins pop from their temples their faces red and purple flowers

They sit in a circle convinced their excitement and exhaustion is about a ghost they all believe in

They’re still shaking when one of them picks up the mirror and lays it on his lap then pulls out a bag of coke My heart is a throne of snakeskin upholstery still moving slick writhing knots of scale atop cold splintered break boards over a bucket of rusty knives My heart is a lawsuit waiting to happen on the poorly dressed set of a low budget fantasy really hard R torture porn

The director speaks Italian and just wants to get the shot so he can get on with it the parenthetical seafood of life the feast of seven shames boiled babies of yourself salt cured desire vinegar of hysteresis stains The lump of your corpse combing car mats for an ancient french fry to smoke across the trail out of the city out of the body out of our minds into a sleeping world wide armageddeon of thought up there beyond our eyes

Flying over the ocean my heart is the captain’s seat that cracked part of this plane where the sun never shines I always write about the heart when I write about a clown who knew he wasn’t a clown

The trick to being a clown is to make yourself believe in the clown inside of you just like any lie any use of the word benevolent or a pole-vaulter selling us on wingless flight I write about a clown with a mystic torch that’s really just a tattoo dancing like cheesecake bikinis in the Citi Field bleachers

I write about a clown talking importantly about the masks outside Bandiagara like they could get you high like a clown that’s never been high About the clowns with no makeup ever since the bombing starting making severe faces like the ones frozen onto severed heads

About how real clowning’s the scariest when you’re twelve and daring haunted carnival rides and you reach the end and see the lights and hear the whistles and smell the grease and right before the ride stops a worker hiding in the back seat reaches forward and slaps your face because psychic warfare is real and seldom demonstrates self-restraint This is a framing device the heart, nature a gif of restraint

Only the implication of desire can be conveyed through my motionless hand over my motionless heart

Hanging in there the all kitten depiction of cultural revolution in the restaurant of my youth

A glass and brass table flipped The wet fog, the upturned top The slow loss of want for breath, an exchange of nothing The heart is made of nature A cat stares at a blank wall The building around it implodes Over the embers, poets stew jambalaya Waiters bring swords of grilled hearts Encountering dawn my heart intimidates the watering hole My heart spits on a cock then drowns in splitting belts of skin around the heart rings around the sun and what we call these

The rub of muscle in sleeve of many egos hiding behind no ego My heart rests silent in the room where time does not exist

The sky here a cancer we all want to die of the gulls trooping in to the beltway to have known no wheel My heart’s the only squid driving this rig into sunset the flocked murmurs over a nation of Whammies

My heart spits the starchild into its own mouth and swallows birdlike gold crest stoned remote under Cloud Gate Black and cockspit nothing My heart assumes its true form digging deep in the dadrock of proof My heart the toothless lover has chambers inspiral cessipts spinning brains holy wholly unbloodened in the park grass bed speaking of bodies

The unanswerable

Question body Machine body Mined body Sloped body Ghost We think of these then notice clouds like dicks and pussy merge to form hearts

We stare until they burst My heart the vagina monologue of hearts It walks into walls because sooner or later this trick will work My heart a rupture in language empty thought balloon twisted into poodle

My heart backs over time to crush his head Lies low in the weeds My heart the lipless reach to sing these dreams so every moment I'm awake the further I'm away

My heart calls the shellgame out on the bluff

What it is goes on to live another life My heart head bangs in the mirror

The GG Allin of love love love

Acknowledgments

Infinite hearts to the editors who gave homes to portions of this text:

Keegan Lester at Souvenir Lit, a prince of smiles and kindness Emily Sipiora at Moloko House, the radiant ruler of windy city poesy

Infinite+1 hearts to all the friends and loved ones I’ve bounced hearts off of, who’ve supplied me with the support and line edits necessary to shape this heart correctly:

Lisa Tedesco, Anna Kreienberg, Anthony Robinson, Sommer Browning & Amie Zimmerman

You all have done me right.

Infinite+Infinite hearts to Bernadette Mayer, whose heart really is a fancy place.