"Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives" (2010)

Of past lives the future remains the medium.
Television for instance.

One watches the Tube
& is transported to the future-perfect
of the void.
Which is to say, one
(will have)
watched oneself --
watching the tube --
being transported by the tube.

A monk in this life, a secularist
in the next.
Faced with the plurality
of worlds, we must admit these two
are one and the same Being.

(We film and photograph

what we expect to return to us.

Yes, including the prodigal son,

the rituals, the customs, the hot

shower when he recalls the body

to mind, and bathes it.)  

Thai pop songs are the vernacular
for the coextensivity of all media,
including transmigration.

A righteous way to "go out"
at the expense of "taste."
What is taste?
The christmas electric lights
that grace Uncle Boonmee's tomb.

The authenticity of thai life
requires no intersubjective understanding --
only participation.
The skin of this film presses against the screen,
at you. Fluids. "Screenness."

For example, when the catfish
performs cunnilingus
on the ape-mouthed princess.
The fluids, the pearls.
Thrusts and fins and scales
and the pressure of water
on the inside of closed-eye
thoughts. Ecstatic folk-love.

The "beautiful," a wise creature asks,
what does it amount to,
when you could be a monkey,
or a fish,
or a man,
and yet love?
We are all creatures, aren't we?

The createdness of things.
Screenness, perhaps:
We all look thru screens
not at them, sans regard
for the frame, the skin
of the screen
that breathes for us
like the lungs the heart
the senseless organ.

Sense-fragmentation.
"Screenness."

To be conscious, for once,
of "consciousness" (whatever
that means). But of screen-
ness, that is a step forward,
at least. Into the womb.
Where a galaxy nestles
in a silver untapped vein.

The flesh which is divided
by space in 10 directions,
undergoes Ovidian fixations.
Desire in the key of life --
on which hands form,
on which hands play melodies.

When a man dies, he should be
led by the ghost of an ex-lover
back into the cave.
If he is to find his birth again.
If he is to desire again.

Ultimately what is the pastness
of the past? A photobook
in which the nostalgia for things
glows in the dark, red-eyed.
An eros of situations,
a lush sleep.