Norma Farber First Book Award - 2013

The life of the party slits its wrists. Its wrists
          slit their wrists. The wrist of the world
           wears a Patek Philippe Henry Graves

Supercomplication. Which is not a wristwatch but a pocket
          watch. Among its twenty-four complications
          is one for the hour in which you hang

yourself by your wedding tie and another that counts the number
          of people whose livers can no longer self-repair
          and have begun to eat themselves. The man

who commissioned the piece may or may not have lived
          forever. He may or may not have been part-owneer
          of an explosives company that may or may

not go by the name of Blackwater. You
          may or may not believe this, but when I was a boy
          all I wanted was to push a big red button.

Imagine a million crosshairs congregating on the last
          illegal alien on earth, who resembles the shape you
          clock time in front of the bathroom mirror

re-imagining. Or the clock tower you climb
          as Charles Whitman did in Austin, Texas
          (it was not a clock tower), lugging

a duffel of guns and a hatred of the kind of muffled
          conversation he always walked into
          in the rooms of the house he grew up in to hear.

Meanwhile Blackwater backpedals. Blackwater occupies
          the clock tower, killing time in the peculiar way time
          and money prepare you for. The thesis
 
statement is that privatizing the military
          privatizes the boredom of observing
          an alien people who busy themselves

with the rituals of the free market. Learn
          from the example of the markets in Jerusalem.
          The seventh complication

is a koan wrapped in an enigma. What are you doing?
          We're innovating.
          How?

We haven't ideated that yet. Eight resembles the head
          of an amber fish, the body ripped away
          by a motherless shark. Nine accrues interest

in the leper colonies of the imagination
          (which may or may not exist, lyrically).
          Ten through seventeen take a few

bongers while watching The Wire on DVD. Eighteen
          is your father's will,
          which faded as the years passed

while burning a hole in his afterlife as the lawyers recited
           its damages to your family ten days after he poked
           a hole in the sky with his third eye, which, technically,

is the eighteenth complication.
          Nineteen is the dream in which you marveled
          at a child's art deco sand castle

while the lion paced a few feet away.
          Twenty was last century.
          Twenty-one occupies the analytic couch

your father fashioned out of chocolate glazed donuts. The next
          two slob the knob of the infinite
          40oz, dreaming in daiquiri, screaming

to the open field in a Whitmanic mania.
          Twenty-fourth complication
          of the Patek Philippe Henry Graves

Supercomplication is the server space of your next
          ten years, where dust compiles and Blackwater
          offloads the epic we all had hoped one of us would write.