AGE OF MANIFESTOS
1920s – Antonin Artaud, erratic, mumbling, joins Georges Bataille at a café.
BATAILLE: Are you not the great poet and actor Artaud? I believe we met once in the company of that fool Breton, who spurned art for common ideology, like a dog that has licked itself infertile.
ARTAUD: There are no Bretons, just as there are no dogs. A pimp has stabbed me, ma’am. By this joy I effect my means.
BATAILLE: You are indeed bleeding. (Licks lips) Shall we alert the hospital wagon? Shall we take a point of view?
ARTAUD: If I die before I wake, I pray the lord my cum to take right up His ass for acquiescing to a wake in the first damn place.
BATAILLE: Worship women galore. Mary the whore, tits to floor, passed round the clouds, patted down by a gauntlet of god’s donors. I pathetically obsess over Simon Weil’s ugliness. She nicks me in the sex.
ARTAUD: (Swats hovering corpses of Robert Montesquiou, Leon Bloy, and Alfred Jarry) You are a faker of yourselves, Ramayana antagonist, passing sbirros wind with she-death. You sac.
ROBERT MONTESQUIOU: Make room for art’s death knell. Strindberg keeps measuring his dick in hell. Podsnappery replaces aesthetic. You will wish Revelations was more prophetic. Only fashions last.
LEON BLOY: Avast! God hates art. The vanity of every new god falls apart. Pay me to say the rest of my part.
ALFRED JARRY: Shithouse sauna! Goodbye to life without dogma. I bragged myself the longest dead of any death and profit off the spread.
Artaud drops, frothing.
BATAILLE: So photogenic a myth split down the middle. I’d froth with you, if I really knew the riddle.
ATOMIC POST HYPER META MANGA THUD
1946 – Emil Cioran in a café.
CIORAN: There sits Sartre, taming theses from an innocuous cup of coffee. He drinks it cold and a wife spritzes the rest in his cunt. Enter Camus, boulder screwed to a pan of tofu. Spam boys of the grayest fade, metaphysical gravy. They write like they never left the waiting room. They write like a depressed notary pawing through his mother’s rubbish. They write like kittens batting string in a girl’s birthplace. They write like suicide wouldn’t be enough. They write like even their reflections could get cut. They write like they threw getting pussy to the wind and it came back in and disposed of them. They write the propaganda of the lisp. They write as if the census took their piss. Burn out their eyes and delay the parade. Restroom’s gone concave, but I’m shitting anyway.
Waitress pours Cioran coffee.
CIORAN: Thank you, dear.
1968 – Jack Kerouac on Firing Line. He opens his shirt and vomits blood into it, patting the material down into the blood, extending a hand toward William F. Buckley Jr. in drunken confusion.
BUCKLEY JR.: Please don’t touch me.
1983 – Vincent Gallo in track suit. Boyd Rice in SS outfit.
GALLO: You shoot hoops? Boyd…Yo, Boyd? Alley oop?
Rice stares.
GALLO: Hack silent treatment? We a homo combo of grooms in bloom? You go half fag after tinkling esoteric tunes for the audibly ruined honeymoon? Hey. Check it out. Here’s a secret. Fuck you sideways. Okay? You’re a gay.
Rice staring.
GALLO: Wanna know a little known fact about Prince Vince? I take flight with Christ at night. He made inquiries about me in the manger. Now we ball. Parse that, maybe. Stick the key to what I said inside yourself and twist till literate. Or keep running looney toon pussy behind your mom’s eyes. Beat boxing with Himmler’s giblets on your chin. I gotta be stockpiled in a train car every time I clean my sneakers? Dap on the black hand side, shine. An ongoing no from Boyd? Guess what. I’m going to give you the Lennie treatment. One to the back of the head. Save them rabbits, George. Maybe he went on to shoot the fucking rabbits, too, when they weren’t looking. Maybe we all go to heaven as retards. Hear me out. I’ll let you watch the bullet launch. How’s that? Big dummy.
Rice holding Nazi knife. Gallo has a knife ready.
GALLO: Let’s dance, Rice. Fuck yourself with that antique dick sucking fire poker gonna rust to a nub before I dice you blind. I’ll cook the gook out your name. Come say hi, baby.
Rice pops Gallo’s basketball.
GALLO: Oh, that’s real rich, Boyd. That’s real rich. You owe me a rock. Write it down. No. No. No. No. No. Chalk it up. One rock.
Rice racks submachine gun. Gallo, leaving.
GALLO: You maim a man’s game, you slight his name! You’re a real piece of work, you know that? A real character. One for the books. The Fig Newton of myths. The piper’s gonna circle back and empty the spit from his lute in your boo boo. Wait and see. Mind your six, tough guy. Roger that? I’ll upstage the rank rest of you. Disperse your ilk. Think you’re all cool with Satan, your bounce house majesty? I’ll sing you a song. So beautiful will be this song. Know what you’ll do? You’ll weigh the weather with your heart to hear it. And every textbook sinister thought drilled into your dollar fifty skull about our cruel surroundings will discharge like squid ink, dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a receipt for your mother’s diseased fucking lactate. The hugs then will flow as if the two of you just met. You won’t feel like a thing she lifted her leg and passed one night, immediately charging rent. Little buff birds will park themselves on your shoulder and force you to decipher their oratorio, which will equalize with mine, proficiently mixed, and change you for the best. (In the distance) So resplendent a tune, Boyd! You asshole! Prick!
1994 – Slick, rockabilly Jim Goad. Kurt Cobain in dirty flannel.
GOAD: Aren’t you the lady from the TV? How about an autograph? We can use my magazine you’re reading.
Cobain lowering Answer Me! Suicide issue.
COBAIN: I’m trying to smoke, dude. When I smoke, I smoke alone. Whether I’m with someone or not.
GOAD: What a professorial and fey quip. You’ve been nourishing quite the little friendship with your generation by declaring yourself essentially genderless.
COBAIN: I’m too sick to add up anything asked of me. My agent said I wouldn’t have to interact.
GOAD: You’re priced out of playing frail.
COBAIN: People sell out the second they wipe. Don’t be a buttinsky dilweed for irony points like a groupie resenting having swallowed all twelve candles off her cake.
GOAD: Never met a musician who didn’t fly himself like a flag over anything amassed. You’re just chewing gum at the podium. Ever process a thought?
COBAIN: My inner monologue is a constant cornmeal scream.
GOAD: Ah. Perhaps we might decipher it and pursue those instructions down a gun barrel.
COBAIN: Fuck it, man. Whatever.
GOAD: ‘Fuck it’ is the only operative forever. Thing is, Kurt. No one in your life ever hit you. If they did, they didn’t strike with enough conviction.
COBAIN: I spit on your definition of anything. I don’t care.
GOAD: I don’t care harder. Fag. How about I beat you up by sneezing? How about give prayer one last shot before I’m done.
COBAIN: They want you full of hope so there’s a path of blood behind the deer.
— Sean Kilpatrick studied forensic photography, holds a Master’s in writing, is published or forthcoming in: Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, evergreen review, NERVE, FENCE, LIT, VICE, BOMB, DIAGRAM, New York Tyrant, Sleepingfish, Obsidian, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Quietus, Hobart, young mag, forever mag, The Collidescope, La Petite Zine, Pindeldyboz, Expat Press, tragickal, fluland, Terror House, NOÖ Journal, Jacket2, Exquisite Corpse, MiPoesias, Tarpaulin Sky, Forklift Ohio, Arsenic Lobster, Melancholia’s Tremulous Dreadlocks, Sixth Finch, Epicenter, Skidrow Penthouse, The Lifted Brow, Black Sun Lit, maximus mag, elimae, The Malahat Review, Alpha Beat Soup, Safety Propaganda, Countere, Fugitives & Futurists, The Peach, The Crank and is soon to release a film and a collected works.