First published in Art World (UK), 2009. The editor was looking for an ekphrastic poem. I had written a poem inspired by Olafur Eliasson’s 360 Degree Room of All Colours (2002), which she accepted. I had walked into the Eliasson art space & was immediately freaked out by how easily time became unhinged for me in this room designed so you couldn’t tell how close the walls were.
Here is what was published in the magazine:
“While visiting the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the MoMA in New York, I entered a donut-shaped room with walls of indeterminable fabric glowing softly in shifting bands of color. The saturation of light immediately began working on my sensibilities. I had been reading Foucault’s Discipline & Punish, about panopticons and how lighting is being used as a torture device, where prisoners have no escape from the all-seeing eye of their guards. Also, my father was a jail guard for 16 years, so I’ve met a few prisoners in my time. They used to peel the lead paint from the walls, make a ball out of it, drop it down a sock and beat the hell out of each other with these things. Prisons to my mind do little but to train people to be better criminals or to hold them still, both mentally and physically. It was a very intimate, sad sort of experience.
The suffix OS in the poem’s title stands for “operating system” (eg, Windows OS, Mac OS). In “Chron*OS” that operating system is Time, working upon the wrecked consciousness of a newly released prisoner.”
Chron*OS
One zebra skin wallet, won at the tables
One exit
One pocket watch, one arm wickedly awry
Two strikes
One epicenter of free will
One Fodor’s Guide to Internal States, abridged
One chalice full of luck
One mallet, rubber
One rubber, busted
One ankle-biting snot-nosed brat
One biblical allegory, memorized, forgotten, lingering
One more missed opportunity
One gaffing scar, won poaching gators in the marshland of Malabar
One whimpers in the dark
One exwife, brunette, battered & fried
Two bits, bitten
One hundred dollars in ones, sequential
One war, retired
One paint ball, peeled from the lead walls and thrust down a sock (confiscated)
One exwife, a blonde, a-blubber
One ticket to the Metrosexual Lyceum of Snort, white (rehabbed)
One porn mag, onanated
One more gesture toward the infinite
One memory of snagging a line drive hit by a neighbor boy turned pro
One means what one does
Three brothers, one biker one bugger one above-it-all
One jingoistic racist worldview, emboldened
One fierce feral face to meet the faces, embittered
One panopticon complex, illuminated
One begs indifference
One less store clerk
One more slice of key lime pie
One “trust in the commonality of experience,” expired
One job laying brick on the outside
One wishes it were so
One more cosmos trapped in a bubble on the lips of a babbling fool
One worn copy of Blood Meridian, bloodied
One last motherfuckin chance
One vacuum-sealed vacuum, call it eleven-dimensional space
One point of entry, here
One man
Once
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