Disfigurement: a Manifesto

1) To wit: that upon the unsealing on the day of _______ in the Port of Long Beach the horse-shaped cargo container marked METAPHOR, which your clients in Greece agreed to transfer into our name 2, 500 years ago, the heroic similes of Homer had been replaced by several tons of snakemeat and petrified figs;

2) to wit: that receiving no answer to our repeated request for payment in kind, in fine and by point of fact;

3) to wit: that due to the devaluation of the snakemeat and snakeoil market by the unscrupulous speculations and insiderism of Judeo-Christian teleology;

4) to wit: that figuration of a serpentine type in painting has again slinked out from beneath the slurry of complexity theory, as a fine ring of dancers might widdershins and erotic, like as-yet-unbreakable code or negative energy, thrown from inside the event horizon of the laptop black hole, be and be and be;

5) we heretofore agree to extract and delete from our eyes, ears and genitals the likening, integrating function which would see your clients as a tornado lumbering through Gibbons’ The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire;

6) and moreover having copyrighted our own genetic peculiarities;

7) having flipped all of the distressed mirrors in our bored houses in order that the walls might better articulate their own predicament;

8) having in sum more years of abstinence from perception-bending drugs and alcohol than humanity’s impotent occupation of the Earth, which is one day; having tired of the MLA style guide;

9) and being still with jive and fire refractory and unlike, unlikeable, unlikenable;

10) we declare a war on all comparisons and their sons; because it is in fact the real (as painting has told us) that is the figural and fabular: like the Venus de Milo orbiting the moon

11) we assay to write the final metaphor which is the final metaphor, period;

12) we decline to be as the designer-labels sewn onto the over-represented garment of the city;

13) we like football and NASCAR (especially the crashes) but remain staunchly anti-American;

14) we chopped down the cherry tree and ate those lumpen plums, which were sour as rainwater in a wheelbarrow;

15) as language is too often the experience-dulling condom of the mind;

16) we have chosen to reincarnate as inanimate vanitas afloat in a field of passive voice;

17) about which our childhoods in Detroit and Lahore are mum;

18) in sum, we declare Frost’s woodpile void

19) we have distributed its secrets at distances not permitted by quantum mechanics, such that nothing may be communicated or revealed, thank fuck;

20) we declare a wet speech of open-source code; of nodes, nests; without privacy or power