TONY LOPEZ

from The Hawthorne Effect

When you torture people you get bad information. A big yellow taxi. It was a formal decomposition: linear elements followed each other like parallels and distorted the object. More Brainless in Brooklyn than Sleepless in Seattle. A new juvenile body buds off and swims away. Go ahead: call it a comeback. After the Lisbon earthquake they rebuilt the city with wide streets and open plazas, using a framework of crossed wooden beams and metal tie bars to resist future shocks. An early morning drive to the East End docks. The Pope is breathing on his own but has been told not to speak. Boscastle pixie shop washed away in the flood. The hunt rode out with a full pack of hounds. Each sentence is complete; it gives pleasure every day, every other day. In practical science, bad theories have a short life. I found them to be magnetic, disagreeable, yet strangely sympathetic characters.
    Phoenicians lived on the coast in today’s Lebanon, north of Israel, and invented alphabetic writing. How are we to resist the fear-mongering rhetoric of the far right? The first man in Chicago to ride a bicycle, first to have his portrait painted by Whistler. They were jagged paths to multicultural education. A whole planet system, using the active processes of plants and animals as component parts. Total absence of good or bad taste. Animals can still be starved, slowly poisoned, burned, deliberately infected, maimed, electrocuted and brain damaged in the name of research. A toy tank transporter carried the latest and most powerful tank. A person without identity struggles to maintain a memory. Remember when domestic violence was a familiar experience. Buying land is a real statement of intent. Think of a sentence peacefully. We are creating and sustaining scarcity.
    The mountains are temples of living Dharma. If hot coffee (for instance) is poured into a plastic cup, these animal derived chemicals come to the surface and combine with the drink. Home sign isn’t handed down, it’s re-invented each time it’s needed. A squirrel runs across the windowsill and down the lower roof. A town in Ukraine, near the reactor, abandoned for nearly twenty years. The head teacher took my hand at the zebra crossing on Stockwell road. A luxury cruise ship called Spirit under rocket attack from pirates, one hundred miles off the coast of Somalia. Winston Churchill liked to get his decisions down on paper. The car was parked beyond the pedestrian border crossing, back in the first world.
    There are sixty errors that affect the sense in each new edition. How do you feel about soft touch plastic? Google noticed the priority of links people built up and the text gathered around those links: think about it.  This black British farmer never saw the countryside until he was eighteen. The air is invisible, almost intangible, unless you look at it from space. Condensation obscures the landscape. Twenty-eight thousand French cars burnt in small-scale riots. Feeling mostly content with form. Schwitters could no longer move around the column to work, it took over his living space. The moon had been made to jump over the cow in a world of superabundance and excess.
    Most music critics ignore musical anxiety. She received a box from Iraq, filled with her son’s belongings. Intelligent design posits that nature cannot explain life’s complexity. Shoes piled under a radiator, coats hang above. Horizontal movements of the pelvis during walking are more complex than vertical movements, since they involve both rotation and tilt. I’m sweeping wet leaves when a white van stops and the driver offers tree pruning. What would happen if a machine admitted the possibility of accident or non-repetition; are these exclusively human attributes? The middle ground between family therapy and legal bargaining.

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