Royal

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.

They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned

to call this a nature show.

Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for

the face.

Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed

meditation.

But the song was never familiar.

Because this was the only room this was the only room where we

undressed—:

that was the plot.

They moved across the screen across the room but it was not happening

to us.

The image burning in.

Coated with hair & then a lighter area for the face meaning exposed

skin.

We have learned to wear the architecture despite the sky’s numerous

advances.

All these things—the speed & the music & the room—happened but

not enough.

We undressed in the room we could not take off where I handcuffed

you to the story.

This is the work of the brain—itself a bloody spring or electric wire

wrapped in ripe gray gauze—

you like it.

(2 lobes resembling the holy tablets delivered into the veldt’s dry

speed—the Laws

prefigured in the neutral network’s burning thicket.)

They moved across the screen howling but the sound turned down.

This happened over & over again—the blue light leaking into the

room like sand.

Burning into the brain in a finery of filamental fire.

The Laws which do not unravel into noise & make a kind of story of

kinked plot

which can’t be straightened like a motel wire

hanger looped around your wrists.

The loop like a computer simulation—the thought of the thought—

the image burning in now.

We began to understand what they were—:

the Thou & the shalt & the not

Source: Madonna Anno Domini (Louisiana State University Press, 1997)