on the novel White Noise
how effective is fear of death as a theme, if I,
two-year Catholic, have previously feared Oblivion but never
death: or are these the same? material death, body in
shreds: my wish is tree planted in rib-cage, for this
my surviving family members must fight the funeral establishment, say
no chemicals dousing up my membranes, the face injected
and rousting inward; no strip-tease of white
foundation to give the pleasant goodbye at the open
casket — no casket at all, straight into the ground, and then a good
peaceful rotting in the earth, thematically the whole affair the offspring
of my juvenile obsession with femininity as goddess, druid, fluid
and bright mango between my legs. but if I have had
the fear of nothingness: Heaven too good
to be true (though maybe proved
now more true in its weirdness): that I was a mind floating into
nothing, this sucked into
great open bloodstream of time with the neurons wrung out, hung
like bleached diapers under a devouring sun. here is my singular
atheistic proclivity. but if anything the theme I am
getting which rings true as fear
is there is no just living in modernity, the complexity overruns
the simplicity overruns, there is the little family unit but we
are all strangely foreign, aliens churning in unknown
unknowable grounds.
the last pavilion 