by the sandal of Hrothgar

i reread my novel. i've been thinking it was good-ish but, you know, uneven, containing too many things i don't understand personally, etc. ... that might be true, but i think it's also pretty good.

and sad. it's weird that i don't like reading books with unhappy endings, but never seem to be able to write anything that's not bittersweet at the least. the thing is, it's not taken from real life, because it's a fantasy novel about stuff i don't understand, but the things that make it good, if it is, if i'm not just reading what i want to read as opposed to what's actually on the page, are from real life. i know about alienation (you know, sad, over-precocious only child middle class girl alienation, but alienation for all that) and about belonging and love and stuff... i know what it means to not be able to say what you have to, to not be able to settle on a single explanation even when you desperately need to, even when settling on said explanation would make you able to move forward... fear, running, uncertainty, dark desire, etc., that stuff is all par for the course.

the weird part is that for me as the author, i know why kaya wrote her book: it's because she wants to bring her friends and lovers back to her, even if they can't stay. but i don't know if that's the actual explanation. i don't know if kaya actually wrote it because of that reason, or if it was something else, and that reason was just a part of it. she might not "exist" per se, but she isn't bounded by my understanding of her.

the beginning's still crap, though. and i know there are parts that get way too involved in themselves.

and i really really wish i could find the next, you know, book somewhere inside me. i get the feeling that it's waiting around in there, but i don't know where. aside from the lesbian modernized retelling of jane eyre, which is just weird, and has problems. maybe i could make it a fantasy lesbian retelling? as, for example,
"There was no possibility of taking a walk that day, by the sandal of Hrothgar! We had been wandering, indeed, in the leafless gresaltha maze an hour in the first sun's cycle, but since our noonfast (Archmago Reed, when she had no affairs of the hopthar state to attend to, dined early)..."

this is literally the best idea i've ever had.

cooking with long nails

it might be obvious that i'm taking a hiatus from poetry, but just in case it's not, imaginary reader, yeah, let's make it official: i'm taking a hiatus from poetry.

it's one of those things where my head has to haul its ass into another frame--as the previous entry will demonstrate, i appear not to be one of those people who can write well about what's going on in the moment. judging from last time, it'll be something like two years before what's happening now makes sense enough to write about.

i tell these things to myself so that i know where i think i stand.

cooking with long nails ought to be a no-no.

the split

re-entry of a state

in which

i put me nearer

to me:

this sad arrhythmiac music.

hauled out of church, i stood in a courtyard. it was sunshine. far away a dog was barking. the sun fell on the garbage bags and relieved their black surfaces with static, gathered rivers of reflected light.

the sweet ancient smell of thin heated plastic: garbage bags in the sun. nearby there was a hill rolling, green from side to side. behind which the sun would set.

because i do not trust

the things of the light.

host o' things

it wasn't hegel; it was heidegger that i was thinking of.

good one me.

reading kirkegaard. i really miss english classes, i think. singing school is HARD. but in a way the non-intellectuality of it (sorry, i don't mean that in a rude way exactly--i go to school with a lot of smart kids and smart teachers, all of whom are better at getting their assignments done than i--i just miss theoretical readings [of which i have had a few, but not enough, i guess] and theoretical discussions [which you can't really cram into a history review class, and we don't have a large enough format for me to unload my ridiculous thoughts in papers--lucky for our teacher, really]) is good.

good, because i think i've been hiding most of my life behind a strong amygdala, a problem with "depression," and an over-intellectualized viewpoint. i've begun to see patterns in the things around me--not necessarily patterns i want to be seeing, but patterns. every color, and more confusingly, every shape, every texture, seems to have something akin to a frequency like that of sound. sometimes this frequency-sense-thing is invasive; sometimes it isn't. i feel like i'm connecting to something deep...and WEIRD.

i also seem to be more in sympathy with the people around me. that is, if i think about it, which i often don't (being as always a selfish jerkatrice), explanations for what they're doing, what they're thinking within their actions, rise more easily to the surface than they used to, and sometimes i get a bead on the color of someone's aura that doesn't go away (though often it does, and often it has to do with the color of their eyes or the clothes they're wearing or the painting they look like). now, i know this makes me sound like a crazy person, or at the very least a self-deluding person, and i might very well be both.

the explanation i've come up with is that singing--concentrating on learning to sing so fully as i have been--has honed my instincts. the process of learning to fill yourself with a sound that you can depend on, can make over, can repair, is like filling yourself with the tree that sunshine fills herself with in robin mckinley's sunshine. (oh my god, what a book. i cried on BART. it was embarrassing. and incredible. mckinley and kirkegaard are actually turning out to be a great pair, because kirkegaard talks about pain as a poet, from without, and mckinley demonstrates pain as a singer, from within [that might be a false dichotomy]). the attempt to devote yourself to the moment, to work within yourself within the moment, is like her description of magic in a lot of ways--and that's what i feel like, like taking myself to this place of honed momentality, forcing myself to step back and fix and go on all in the moment, forcing myself to embody the process as opposed to the result, is making me magic. this seeing-the-patterns-of-stuff is a result of forcing my brain to understand my singing.

i don't understand it, though, obviously. i have a serious amount of road to travel to even get myself to passable. and i am worried that this whole thing is just the signal of advanced pituitary shutdown or something. but...holy smokes it's weird weird weird, and about half the time it's also beyond distressing--i get phobic about touching these things that have these patterns; especially after i've done something stupid interpersonally, i take it out on myself by freaking out over the patterns.

and that's why i'm thinking about trying to become a wiccan! because i want to be in better balance, and don't think that drugs will do anything healthy for my mind...which i need...if it's not already lost.

p.s. i might be totally wrong about hegel assuming that a is a. but attempting to make "does a equal a" a question is, in the sense i'm talking about, turning it into a noun--the question of a equalling a is instead a movement, a mechanism, in an aesthetic method, and as such can be more properly (for me, who likes, as i've said before, to know stuff rather than to learn it) looked at and become (hegelian, eh?).

po tee wheet

i'm not ready to give up. this might be the only claim to strength i deserve. i was downstairs, about to turn out the light, and saw the way that said light shone through the second doorway into the darkness of the kitchen, removed from me, and thought that that second light, which was a product of the first, was a good metaphor for something. don't yet know what the second light was a good metaphor for, but something, right? i'm still too close to this particular bout of "suffering" to make anything of it...i can't make poetry out of it, that's for damn sure, but of course whether i'm able to make poetry out of anything i experience is open for debate. i can't draw down any particular truth from it. i can do little more than hate it for what it does to me, what it implies within me--loneliness, sure, and crappiness, but above all weakness.

the best part is that i don't know if it's actual weakness that i really object to, or more just the appearance of weakness. i hate to broadcast what's done to me by depression, and probably the concern with appearances is the only thing that keeps me even close to doing something other than shutting down fully. i have proof, to some degree, that what happens in my unhappiness is real, is solid, is more than rrreputation as niska from firefly would have it: yesterday i slept for fourteen hours; this morning the colors of the world did that thing where they merge together into something like a single percieved frequency, which either turns into or implies a cacaphonous, quasi-physical loss of perspective in my head, which can be seen as a metaphor turned physical, or a physical condition turned metaphorical. i used to drink when things got like this; i don't do that anymore, which is probably good.

at least in winter it gets the chance to take on this rhythm; in summer the world drives itself blindly when its colors go uni-frequency on me; my heart gets lost in the light.

i apologize for these words. i should keep them private.

i read something this morning about schumann going through a period in his youth when he published things he'd just barely written. later on he learned to revise, but there was incaution in his earlier years...that's good to know. it's a little bit like reading what of emily dickinson i've read and noticing how her formal instincts both go toward and move away from an unmediated poetic moment. sometimes you feel like she's telling the truth straight out of the frying pan, and at other times she's attempting to master her words completely, not letting her own face even slightly peer out of the window she's dressing. people seem to respond to both types of composition, which, again, is good to know--just that there's a range possible, not that i can come close enough to emily dickinson to have her example have any real bearing on my compositional style. i know which type i personally prefer--when dickinson masks herself, she sounds to me like beethoven, who thus far i've never felt anywhere in his compositions, including the late ones, and when she writes straight from the hip she sounds like a version of stevens in ideas of order (as far as i remember), as if ideas of order had pressed its face into a piece of cloth and veronicized itself (chronologically, physically, and metaphysically impossible). but if there's one thing that w.c. williams and olson prove, it's that sometimes you have to write to the style as opposed to from the heart if you want to become anything that you currently aren't.

i hope it's more than clear that these statements come out of the wild and half-acknowledged sheaf gatherings of inner turbulence as opposed to any more clear-sighted process of analysis. at this point (close on age 27), i trust my instincts, possibly, as always, fallaciously, when it comes to anything that might approximate process. i know that what comes out of turbulence sharpens my senses and improves my directional knowledge--i know that it's the hand of inner turbulence that forces my head down into a mass of understanding impossible to breathe within, and that it's up to me to swallow whatever will, not save me, but make me, when i can breathe again, a person with a larger, deeper, or broader range of intra-subjective movement. i'd never deign to put down anything in here that wasn't completely personal--and my personal insights are of the nature of bright shapes seen from a shadow. they can't be proven; they can just be described, because to stand in the light, in their actual presence, would be to change the nature of how they can be seen, of what they look like and are.

this is to some extent why i don't really care about philosophy. the questions that philosophers ask and answer are simple, because in the end they're nouns. hegel makes something fancy out of the idea of ground. fichte says we needn't see anything beyond the insides of our own faces. aristotle--or was it plato?--tells us about some horse in the sky. these are all fine ideas, but they get treated like they're not false postulates--they all assume that a does equal a like it's no big deal. hence to discuss ground with hegel has plenty of bearing on a world that looks kind of like this one--with certain limitations. aesthetics deals with movements, with verbs--sees the space between the shadow and the bright shape as an action, which is what it is, or can be seen as. if space equals time, noun equals verb (this is what billy pilgrim was all about, right?)--but the crux of the matter lies in the fact that "verb" is a noun--and that therefore the action itself is what takes place between the twist of noun and verb (and adverb, and participle, and adjective)--if, as i dimly remember from that one intro to astronomy class i didn't over-frequently attend, gravity is supposed to be something like the physical manifestation of space gathering time (there was an explanation for this or something like it), then aesthetics is the gravity of conditionality.

because of the vonnegut reference, i'm dedicating this one to kevin murphy. two syllables for him: luck-ee!

witch hunt bad

i'm guilt-logged, laden, bowed down with guilt. and do i feel sorry for myself? unfortunately the answer to that question is HELL YES.

why do i always feel like i've KILLED someone after doing something moderately discourteous? and how do i manage to acknowledge that i'm totally in the wrong and yet feel sorry for myself at the same time? i'm a miracle of modern science. i'm utterly and totally impressed with myself right now. "utterly" is pretty redundant in the context of "totally." i'm impressed with myself for being able to make that non-distinction. i'm an all-around impressive sort of person.

i made a roast beef sandwich and put some fresh basil on it--it was really good.

after finishing adorno's book on the subject of mahler, i'm still not sure precisely what was said. it was a really good translation of some really good writing, and hence almost entirely enjoyable as long as i was able to hold onto the thread--for dear life, like that dude in the labyrinth. i think seriously passionate criticism is awesome. you don't have to agree with the writer, you just have to fall in love with him or her. and adorno wasn't faking it. either that, or his adaptation of an ingenuous critical stance fitted the form of his argument to the point of nullifying the gap between the world of the word and that of its writer (i'm trying to ape his style and totally crappng it up). i mean, it was aesthetic writing. which is a category of writing i'm trying to get into, because i find it less illogical than logic and less irritating than full-on philosophy. i've been reading alice waters' chez panisse cookbook; that falls into the category.

reading in aesthetic terms also gives you a little leeway. were i to read adorno's book as a book of criticism, i'm not sure i could find too much to love in it--he seemed to be involved in the project of extending marxist ideals into the aesthetic forum, which may be doable but i haven't ever seen it happen convincingly (it's more of a graft-versus-host situation, like that on tobias' head, where terms like "late capitalist" get thrown in here and there and all a person really understands from them is a feeling of the unbearable judgmentalness of being a marxist critic [it's not that i don't believe in marxist ideals necessarily; it's just that for me and therefore, i assume, naturally, for everyone ever, they stand outside the flow of language--they have this flavor of absolutism; either something is or isn't, say, late capitalist, and you can discuss whether it is or isn't, but it's like calling it orange, or calling it bad--most people seem happy just to have applied the term more or less correctly, and more than happy to then leave the whole word-object standing around in the bed of some spring rivulet that has drained itself in seconds...until the language of marxist ideals has to some extent transcended itself, it's kind of hard to take it seriously, though marxism itself isn't hard to take seriously {though it'd be easier to do so if the language was more seriously engaged in itself, what with function to some extent following form and all that}]). as always, NOT THAT I KNOW WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT.

adorno really gets into the practical side of things not being what they seem, or being what they seem only too much, of vernaculars pointing to what they aren't, and stuff like that, and i really liked it--the details are convinved, passionately so. he's taken the time, done the work, fallen in love...or he's a tremendously successful actor. either way it's an awesome book.

and reading that kind of thing makes you get further into your own "work," because it's not to do with judgment, but with experience. adorno's writing, in part, on the experience of seeing mahler in mahler's work, which is, in some small part, not not a smokescreen for seeing himself in mahler's work, and therefore is a detailing of the process of an aesthetic understanding as manifested in a piece of art. the fact that the perspective's so torturous is only helpful in applying it to poetry, because, as far as i seem to be able to understand, the closer you attempt to look at what the hell you're doing in poetry the further what the hell you're doing in poetry recedes, therefore adorno discussing mahler on mahler is probably the best sort of window that i could choose through which to look at my own "process" of "composition." letters to a young poet? i have to ignore that shit. rilke's probably right all over--he's probably righter than the whole shadow-shoe closet of a person with two left feet--he's probably righter than a texan with a gun and a back-tax problem. but what are you going to get out of discussing poetry itself? as a Meatist poet (why not indulge myself in aligning with a poetry movement i've renamed and possibly does not exist?), i try to keep things simple, and what i know is that charles olson was right, and when you're discussing poetry in the simplest manner possible you sound batshit insane. if you don't sound batshit insane, you are making it up. you are lying. that's all there is to it. (again, i have no idea how rilke sounded in letters to a young poet because i've never read them. conventional wisdom says one should, ergo fuck it if i will. it's like rexroth learning "oriental languages" so he could get closer to teachings that he thought would make his spewings about sex more interesting, and then shutting down ginsberg, who was a little punk, and whose spewings about sex actually WERE interesting. a great deal of the previous sentence was extremely unnecessarily harsh.)

i'm not on the side of youth. wallace stevens always seemed to be writing like he was a thousand years old, and i like him better than w.c. williams. i'm just on the side of people doing what they have to, as opposed to what they want to, and if it makes me a puritain i'm kind of okay with that too. because puritainism is, i think, after reading jane eyre however many sixties of times, not about denying pleasure. it's about finding pleasure in what's within you--not sweet, friendly pleasure, but the earth-shattering kind. to say that pleasure's always either good or nice is wrong. to find the velvet thrill in a depression so blank that it nauseates--that's deep red velvet. so puritainism is a connection with everything on a sensual level. to know the color of a tone--to feel sight. and to kill some witches. okay so i don't at all condone that part.

myoosings

that's it on those; that's my rhyme, as that one butthole surfers song says. i mean, they'll change, but that's their trajectory.

my head's a mess right now. something's been happening with music (which is my "other life" [way to throw in super-irritating quotation marks]) that defies description but sure doesn't want to... it's like things are shaking loose, resettling, stirring up again--i'm not in a place (i hate the description of psychic states as "places" [and again with the quotation marks]) where i can afford to fake humility. all i can say is that i realize that it's probably pretty atrociously problematic to relate such crap to the real dichterliebe, but i don't care--not because i don't want to care, but because i can't afford to do so right now. i'd like to have the psychic energy to make an elaborate apology, but i just don't.

in short, these poems are born of a pretty creepy idea mixed with exhaustion. that might be a pretty elaborate apology after all.

in heine's poems, i thought it was interesting that what the poet seemed to be dealing with, as opposed to a sonneteer such as petrarch, was the ramifications of physical contact--which, belonging to the New Meat school of philosophical and aesthetic thought, was interesting to me (Meat-ists is what i'd term the aesthetic successors of Francis Bacon [the painter]--when i'm in a mood like this, at least, in which i get to say what i want and act as cocky as i wish). i mean, laura (or was it beatrice? i always get those two confused) lived on in perpetuum for petrarch the poet as a constantly unrealized thing, whereas the dude in dichterliebe actually gets some sugar, and then has to deal with it getting taken away from him. dream replaces flesh--actual flesh--and the poet eventually recovers, because the scar is physical, but not before spending some time dealing with the ramifications of being in the flesh alone, if you see what i'm getting at. petrarch may have touched his chica, but it has little bearing on his words (as far as i remember--among the host of things i'm not, i'm also not a petrarch scholar). things are probably not this black and white.

it shouldn't matter what the program of a poem is, i think--to say that i intended this dichterliebe experiment to be an imagining of the poet dealing with the ramifications of a touch never fully realized because of the limits of a consciousness that can never be truly engaged outside of itself does moderate violence to the poems even as they stand, which isn't much of anywhere. i don't think they should be more than themselves (which is maybe what nabokov meant by continually protesting against freudian readings, though one does suspect him of slightly more ignoble motives, possibly on purpose on his part).

i've been feeling more like a monster than usual.

dichterliebe 12

meditations of the beast

beautiful scraps like

the fleeting repetition of a smell:

the sable arc of your long fur--

the scarlet of

your curved tongue--

the waft of your breath

as if it still carried

on some honey breeze

into these depths

as if you still

meant

something

inimical--

as if your image

still drifted

on the mirroring shimmer

above this cracked red lake:

skin, or reflection

of heat.

but it's quiet.

my hide in tatters;

this does not matter.

suspended

as if in water,

i wait, patient

in pale state,

for the next scent

to bring back

what i never

had.

dichterliebe 11

quietus

my heart like

a split end.

trim it away

with the fat of memory.

throw it

and watch that arc

as if of your hair.

it wasn't you,

lover, that crawled out

into day.

white skin pimpled with shock

beneath a blue sky.

as if i stripped you even of skin

and wore you,

huddled

within.

in the sanity of moonlight

moonlight dripping with memory.

i draw a zinc-white thumb

across a lip

and wait for the night

to dry.

dichterliebe 10

milton

i dreamed that

you told me to stop

wiggling my tongue like a snake

in a garden.

and i dreamed that there

were five steps to heaven.

all of them were made from you.

i dreamed a streak of blue flourescence

across your forehead--as if i'd marked it

there with a light-laden thumb--

i dreamed only your eyes and mouth

and then dreamed only your sides

and heart.

my limbs twisted

like sounds.

i wondered why

i was the only screaming thing

in a river of fire

that shimmered silent

as a mirror.

dichterliebe 9

i wept in a dream

to think

that

at one sparking moment

in the stream

of the past

i put my mouth

against your shadow

and

that at

one white point

in the night sky of the past

my face rested

against

a wind

that had curved itself

against you.

lover, i hold out my hands

and nothing comes into them.

lover, i hold out my hands and

nothing

comes into them.

dichterliebe 8

zinc metaphor

the equation is simple:

you never existed.

i never

touched your lips.

and i never fit

against your side.

and i never breathed

in

the scent

of your hair.

crawl in, something else,

and strip off this thick sick zinc

whiteness. sounds

choke in the mouth

the light burns

in the throat.

i hate this thing

with its veins like the nile delta.

its thin scalp and

the roots of its hair.

the way it flickers

in the mirror

and i see you there.

dichterliebe 7

veronica

this strange curling building

rhythm, sinuous and

cracked, racked as

a misspelled word, like

syne, lover, or

cosyne.

as if the limbs

of the word

were twisting

around themselves.

asleep in the red caverns

of your heart

was a jewel

the size of a fist.

it was my love

but it was cancer.

red and ravenous

with jaws like door hinges.

my love,

i wipe my face

on your empty shirt.

dichterliebe 6

ich grolle nicht

you know there's nothing to blame,

my dearest. nothing to

it's just that there's so little left of me

if i were a god i could write in tongues of flame

and i would say in letters a mile wide that it wasn't

it wasn't what i thought.

the taste

of a shadow is

something vile.

as if you were vile,

lover.

as if in the depths of your eyes lurked

white deformed things

that not even the sun of your face

could burn away.

white as zinc.

the flavor of a girl.

no longer to taste

the gravel

your steps

touched.

dichterliebe 5

resonance

the waves frequent westcliff drive,

the beaches there--a slow furl, seemingly,

of heavy, heavy water.

that curve mirrored

in the taut lines of roller coasters

at the boardwalk. the curve moves longingly,

heaving through air, shouldering itself.

i was shuddering at the top of that spinal

curve, and then plunging down

through air as if it were water.

and after i

got off,

i thought that

these paradoxical

movements

suspended in time

all were once

or would be

yours.

dichterliebe 4

roses

another word for red

necessitated

by the look

of your mouth.

redefinition of sensation,

my lover:

my eyes change color.

exquisite awkward words:

you understand them all,

doves, flowers,

other flowers,

thorns.

your lips displayed like fruit:

apples, pomegranates, plums.

ruby-red wine, blood,

breath, saliva,

teeth.

let me redefine

your mouth.

dichterliebe 3

dearest

as if i were

a self-planting furrow,

layers of deep earth

folding in over themselves:

in the warmth, i feel,

like your eyes,

rich as dirt.

one time i weeded on an aunt's farm:

the fineness of that soil

it got everywhere. and its moisture.

in the sun it looked deep and endless.

and when touched, it was warm

even in the deep places--

warmed only by the sun.

how much warmer i

under your regard?

dichterliebe 2

...the plan is to draft poems, with all the songs on dry in my ears, along the lines of heine's. do i read german? no. am i well associated with the schumann? again, no. have i listened to dry many times? guess what the answer to that question is. is this a project that could sink a thousand fredric jamesons into fair despair with its pastiche-ischness? why, yes. and what the hell is "along the lines" supposed to stand in for in this case? ah, the questionability.

raucous freshness

that hot concrete,

minute in detail, by turns sharp and smooth,

as if i crawled after your shadow.

i was glad to grovel

in the day's sun, gray almost

in your presence.

i had been hoveled within myself

always. but a hand reached out

of the depth.

it was shaken and pale

and it was mine.

i looked at it. it plunged into

the presence of you as if

into water.

look at the cracks in that road.

palpable almost to the eye

in your light, that blue shadow

edged so deep.

like my joy.

watch this hand shake

with those deep eyes, watch

what you can do

to me.

dichterliebe 1

new monster

zinc-white and subtle,

the drag of a blunt nail across a lower lip.

the purples and sables

of your dress; the sineal curve

of your hair tossed into the wind

that touched

your face.

i stood behind you and that same

wind blew

against me.

remembered perfumes, later,

bright in mind as colors.

lips pressed into a palm like milk.

lips lapping each other.

i said your name

and reached

inside.

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it's like this thing was devastating.

it's probably just that i've been alone, and thereby unguarded from my own ridiculous propensities, for three days now. but something about...engagement with making this series of poems into a chapbook is hurting. it's like, i look at it, and i'm proud of myself, and then at the same time it hurts, and i don't have room to feel anything else. it's like something's been ripped from me.

which sounds cliche beyond words, but it's true.

so weird. so weird.

und drang

agonia

how to describe what's in my head today in regards to you, sweetest veronica,
lodestar to the pull of words, muse to tidal blood
and its half-oxygenate longings, maker
of this my heaven and my earth?

loved one, and dearest, and mistress
of this lip trembling like
a breath of air passing through
a vocal fold. my mind does often
vision others, beauties rising
on their beds,

but as things stand
i am still very much
your metaphor, and hence either
they are all you or
you are me and i them.

bewail this inordinate flesh and its thousand passions!
sigh for me, o angels, and sigh for me, death,
and let this ship rock
in its unforgiving tide
and dream of love denied.

ARRGH.

citrus fruits, moon and blood:

i am rosy and overmastered

by thoughts of your passion.

laura, beatrice,

eurydice,

those traces they left

in the ground,

root-bound buds rising for air

from dirt that once

was red lips...

in similar yet non-literal fashion

veronica

remains on me.

i need no other lover

to write of.

autumn is time for cogitation

songs my mother taught me

no less beautiful now
than i ever was: this
may not be saying much

but it means something
untrammelled--

that thing within
that passes show,
green, still, on the vine,
or yet in bud, tight-furled,

but not static.
taut against every
slight ripple
of wind:

bent sometimes
even to ground

yet never
quite broken.

petrarch faked it too

autumn mouth

i unfurl.
and in so doing turn away from light.

darkness calls forth colors
unfamiliar
to a light-stressed day:
light pours down in day
and swells the seen things
with itself alone,

but at night,
like perfumes released by heat,
things radiate outward
in private display.
this is why it's stranger
and more filling to see
a racoon emerge from a dumpster
by the light of a sodium lamp
than the entire grand canyon
on a clear day.


the thing that never happened, that is, you,
i am able to mourn at night,
able to worship at night,
and to return to the stretch
of night-lit sidewalk, in memory,
where my mind broke its teeth
for love of you.

punch me in the face
o moon, o stars.
walk the corridor of my thousand doors
and allow them all to open on love.
let my essence
spill as if there,
the color, rustling, plural, near-tangible,
of devotion.

borges-style arch

stratification
from hart crane

side by side with a memory--
the scent and taste of rain,
the wetted sexual concrete and
the frictive proturbance of cloud against cloud
against cloud--

there lies that physical moment,
as if it were a body swathed in satin,
post-sepulchral, nearly present.

the hollow that i made myself,
the echoing flesh i fashioned of myself.
as if but a stroke of yours
could, belated, slacken, somehow, or tauten
my strings
to vibrate in strange patternings.

stand quite still and let
the wind blow its note in me.
the red blossom grows in me.
do what you will to me.

re-ravagement of the beast part 3: correctens majistatis

sonja was looking at me quite kindly when i finished my recital, which made me nervous. I reflected once again on that strange quality of her eyes--it was either emptiness, or just a profound animal slickness--and then, again, i thought of the fact that it's impossible to know what doesn't lurk within oneself. A profound animal slickness, i thought, finding the idea somewhat appealing with the quixotic perspectival fluidity of the inebriate.

"You told the story," she said, "but you told it wrong."

"Oh i did," i said, as if stung.

She smiled slightly--a feral twitch of her mouth, as if her upper lip raised in a slight play-growl. I didn't remember the lighting of a fire in the fireplace, but i saw now that her teeth sparked slightly in the firelight, that her whole face took on a rosy elemental glow, and the healthy liquidity of her eyes.

It is difficult to slay a Beast, she said quite directly. Requiring a profound mastery in the arts of death. You killed him by attrition.
Which can be done, but not simply: a Beast, with senses sharp as thorns and acute as knives, can live on glances and tastes, on scents and essences, for longer than most any other thing. But not forever.

But not forever. Body, furred like a hearthrug,
stretched comma-like out on the white tile.
The thing is done, you thought, and suddenly it was like the skin of your mouth tore, or as if you had a membrane over your mouth, intact, and seeing the Beast's slight-furled body tore it--

the words pouring from that slit across your mouth were new,
almost flesh, they were so new--almost no more than sounds.
you dragged across the cold tile to him and because there was nothing stopping you now, you wanted the Beast, you begged for him. you took the cold body between your knees and

when he came back to life
you were in too deep
to let him go.

re-ravagement of the beast part 2: energate cronkrun

It was a dream or wasn't--wasn't a dream--it's drunker, it's later, and Sophia is on the couch and according to her pictographic memory i am on the floor with my head in the carpet.

This is what i said:

I go to the bed. For it is late. It has been hours.
And where was i when he lay dying? where was i?
Away. i was away from his side.

i pulse with guilt. guilt thick in the mouth like a varnish, and pooled and shimmering in the variegated crevices of my skin.
as though i were an urn, cracked in the kiln.
skin stained with red.

The Beast lay in the bed, dark golden shape against moth-eaten sheets, the spray of rose petals across his chest--his chest still, massive, like a monolith, and the mouth open, and the eyes open and dull. It was terribler than I can express, because i was too late. And because it was my fault. He was innocent, you know, though his looked like the face of some primordial terror, because there's nothing intrinsically wrong in being a beast. Yes, the face of his desire was sometimes terrible, and yes he wished to devour me with animal fervor...but...

Could he help that? Could he help hurting for me? His desire had done no more to me than--than regard me, and his eyes had done nothing to condone that activity. If there were a million terrible beasts in the world, I had still killed the one good one, by straying away from his side.

I did not know how i ended up knelt by the bed, with my face pressed against his stone-still chest. When he said my name, I was suffocated with the enormity of his death, and for a moment i did not hear him, but then i scrambled backwards, a realization of the re-issue of his pulse run through me as if an electric shock. as if a string in me had suddenly sprung taut for plucking. His eyes were looking at me. after a moment he sat up. Petals drifted from his torso.

You were dead, I said.

I was dead, he agreed.

You died for me, I said, on half a sob. He smiled slightly and held out his hand. I took it, and came closer, and his eye sharpened on me.

Arc of the nostril flaring--he smelled it on me. No sense keen enough to hide from a beast.
his hand dropped as if in an arc. "Beauty" he said.

"I love you," I said and died in his eyes. After a moment i heard a strange sound as if fabric were tearing and i looked down--he had one claw with which he was engaged in ripping my shift open, slowly, carefully, so that it fell.

It hurt me to be the woman he wanted. but then that did not lessen my enjoyment of it. shining animal eyes reflecting a vision of myself, myself for once habitable. for one shabby half-hour, i endured it, loved to endure it, because i loved him, and when he turned back into a man in the middle i did not notice. abandoned to his arms, i enjoyed it, more--i enjoyed it, more, when he lost control, when his thorns made me suffer. joy in pain. like a lip bit to its splitting: bed dropped with gold.

because he was mine. because he loved me. because he was good, not bad. because i loved him.

because something was wrong, the whole damn time--it was something in me, not in him. and so i loved him. and so outflung.

long to have some chat with her

i always thought proetry (prose-poetry, that is) was kind of a load. i mean, not the proems themselves necessarily, but the idea that the proem exists in some new and wildly experimental space (wildly experimental i say), the space where theory crosses theory and everything can finally be crystallized into an explanation--exciting newnesses to caress with minds, except of course that proems that enter that crossey-crossey space without taking the time to be poems (or prose) first make me crazy.

the reason that i was so into proprieception when it crossed my landscape was that, a., try as i might, i could form no clear mental idea of what olson was talking about, and therefore the theory had to bypass thought and enter to some extent into my body, and b., it so obviously came after the fact. That kind of writing about aesthetics is actual aesthetic writing, for me. Sometimes theorizers manage to be much clearer than Olson ever seems to be; that's okay, as long as what they're going for isn't an end, but rather something like a trampoline, or a window... To apply the idea of the mutable foot to Williams' poetry, for example, is possibly a good exercise, as long as you understand that Williams came up with the mutable foot after writing in it for a while. Either that (I don't know the history, as always), or he came up with the phrase and thought "that sounds KICK-ASS; i should try that. mutable foot. yeeah."

cuz that's how we do it in america. i think there may be nations out there where you can think everything through to the last degree--where you can cushion yourself in theory, you can upholster an entire room in theory--and still be able to come up with something that isn't a crock, but america isn't one of those nations. for the most part. i feel like i can talk this way because theorizing about what it means to be an american poet is one of the time-honored traditions of american poetry...most of the people who've done it before me knew what the hell they were talking about, but i think i can imitate cheaply because it's late and i'm wired and this all has been festering ever since we went to the hess winery and saw the bacons.

francis bacon was a theorist i can get behind. he insisted, as far as i remember, that he wasn't painting representatively. everything he painted was so horrible that representation seems impossible to get away from. but the closer you look at his stuff--and due to the shifting styles of the painting, you have to look closer and closer; his pictures are constantly in motion--the more you see that his own theoretical framework was the only acceptable one. his paintings can be interpreted as nothing but themselves. the screaming pope isn't a picture that condemns popes to screaming; it's instead an image of a thing. it is itself. it doesn't depict; it can't. all words slip from it, because it's beautiful but it can't be beautiful, terrible but it can't be terrible...in a sense, bacon successfully painted that thing beyond language that derrida--and lovecraft--and st. augustine--talk about.


what does the above discussion have to do with ANYTHING? i guess what it is is i'm feeling the allure of the proem recently, and am wondering how far i ought to indulge my curiosity. pretty far, i think. but i don't want people looking at my proetry and saying, "man, see how it straddles the line between prose and poem! MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE??? (and the days flow by, and the water flowing...once in a lifetime, water flowing underground)". because once you've gone there, you've cut yourself off from man and beast. because what the hell can you say about a proem aside from the fact that it's both prose and poetry? i guess you can go into the ways in which it's both prose and poetry, but these ways, as anyone who has taken a modern poetry class can tell you, are woefully thin on the ground. "it rhymes yet is in paragraph form? what is this strange beast of a work? MY GOD, WHAT HAS SHE DONE???" hopefully you see what i'm getting at.

i shouldn't browbeat my father about the fact that i like doing homework now.

i'm pretty sure my name's no longer anywhere on this amalgam of blogs. pretty sure.

re-ravagement of the beast

(4 acts; at some point i'll stop writing scraps, but that point is not today)

1. epilogue

It hadn't been a dream. But here I was, forced back to the incongruous reality of corporeality, of being straightened back into a life. I desired a life. I was wanting in this life. That was to the good.

It had been a sideways twist, right, of a temporal-spatial mirror of some description? A dream, is I suppose the technical term. I watched Sophia drop a twist of lemon rind into a clear-filled glass, watched the lemon rind slip to the bottom of the glass and settle.

She smiled at me. I suppose I was looking more wide-eyed than usual. After serving the girl at the end of the bar she came over.

"Seen a ghost?" she asked. At which I wanted to laugh, but only made a grin. "What's up, Sleeping Beauty?" she asked, and that made me want to cry.

"Wrong fairy tale," I said.

"Well which one was it?" she asked. "This time," she added.

In answer I pointed to the scratch marks on the back of my wrist. She leaned over and I held out my arm for inspection. Unless I'm mistaken she smelled them, and smiled slightly. "The Beast," she said. "Yes?"

"Give the lady a prize," I intoned ironically, and scooped the bowl of peanuts over toward her. She grinned and popped one nut between off-white teeth, then spat out fragments of shell into her hand.

"Ever wonder why I made friends with you?" she asked. "When I had my pick," she added.

"No," I replied. "But this is because I am not a wonderer."

"Well what's the story."

It was a game, I realized, suddenly. The realization flashed, as if against the backs of my eyes, in a manner that somewhat took my breath away. The thing was that I'd never had someone to play it with before...these experiences, twisting like a ferris wheel in wind, had never seen the hand of day or the body of breath. They stayed, turning restlessly on the bed of my mind in the breathless heat of the night in my skull. I was choking a little, thinking suddenly about how her eyes looked like blanks and then thinking about how you can never know what's not within you and that therefore to see her eyes as blank would mean that I was really seeing my own eyes as blanks, but then she smiled at me, and I returned the smile, and felt like smelling my own wrist.

"You haven't known me forever," I said.

"Haven't I?" she interjected. "Cuz it's kind of felt that way."

"Ha ha. Back in the day, I was...kind of delicate. This is before I decided I was the All-Heroine."

"Right," Sophia said.

I smiled at her. "I'd been had by a beast."

"Oh, it's that story," she said.

"That one was a secret," I admonished. "Until now."

"Right. Sorry. So you'd been had by a beast."

"But I couldn't remember it."

"Mmh. The possible having."

"Precisely. I might have been had by a beast. Which had turned me delicate. Like one of those children in the stories who gets turned into a bird by a witch."

"God damn it, Heretica, which story are you telling?" Sophia asked without any rancor. She leaned on the bar so that I could see down her shirt a little and started wiping glasses like a bartender in a movie.

"The other one--it was a metaphor. For the turning that I did. From normal to abnormal. Due to the beast that had me."

"The possible beast."

"Right. Where was I?"

"You were delicate."

"Right."

"You know," she said, leaning further forward, "you should tell me this one later. At my place. My shift's over in 10 minutes."

"Can you give me a ride?" I asked, indicating the fact that I was drunk with a wave of a hand toward my corpus.

She nodded.

"Can you get me another Pabst?" I asked, and she grinned and nodded again.

stuff

rejection isn't just a part of life; it's also a bodily sensation, more than an emotion or a thought, and therefore is within the province of that which can be endured as a bodily sensation can be endured.

it's, as always, an arcane distinction. and as always i'm speaking personally. for me, thoughts are things that don't go away, and at the same time don't really build. they're somewhere in between static and peach fuzz, corporeally. static has the power to torture your ears, but it doesn't do much else aside from signify the absence of the desired sound; peach fuzz, if collected over a long period of time from many peaches, does have the capability of turning into an object of solidity, though not such a capability as, say, play-doh or tapioca pudding. so on the one hand, thoughts constantly bombard, and on the other, they don't stay--the bombardment is frustratingly within time, and as such, slips and slides into a semi-cohesive object all the more cohesive for being un-entangle-able. (this doesn't sound like original thought. i wish i could credit my sources.)

but rejection isn't like that. somehow, despite being just mental, it's got physical clout--and as such, it's just the thing itself. having a thought like "maybe i'm too intelligent to be understood" is a slow twist of pain--it's not itself; it's rather about a zillion things: it calls down upon itself, well, a., the feeling that it's nothing more than a reaction to being misunderstood, as well as an excitingly specific echo chamber of associations such as, b., the shame at having such a capability for hubris, and c., the despair (somewhat theatrical) at the idea that one's intelligence is immutable as a fixed star and therefore one will never understood, which then brings in d., the fact that one is being pretty irrational about the whole thing. knowing that you weren't selected for something that you tried for, on the other hand, is a short sharp shock. and it's acceptable as such.

if i were to say that the process of accepting rejection as physical were immediate, i'd be lying. but i got myself there. it's a really simple story, actually. i was sitting and thinking through the thing, attempting to ameliorate the shock with the mix of self-flattery and faux-practicality that i usually both make use of and despise, when suddenly i remembered a thing that i sometimes have trouble remembering--it's just pain.

and as such it became a thing to be enjoyed.

i wish i could say that freaked me out.

there's no "i" in teamocil, at least not where you'd think

i've recently been living a life of casual elegance--that is, as close as someone like me ever could come to casual elegance. this casual elegance imparts a sort of relaxed linguic ornateness, a leniency about the state i'm in when i have to say what's necessary--there's less need within my words, i think.

what it is, is something like: life isn't continuously as hard as i'd always thought. i'm a person who tends to beat at the edges of what i'm capable of, which has the potential to sound medium impressive but is actually pretty pathetic, considering that in so many ways i'm capable of so little. but something in me's relaxed, recently. i'm capable of more than just ecstasy and agony; i'm capable of something that approaches calm.

a person can be wildly alive and never say anything about it. this is why i understand emily dickinson to some extent. i've always been wildly alive, feeling everything and feeling nothing and nothing ever happening to me. but this calm thing...it's weird. but i can accept it. because it's new--a new experience. i feel competent, i guess, which is definitely new...and seems like, maybe, a basis from which something can happen.

i'm not saying i'm not still stunted like a bonsai in many familiar ways, still, but, yeah. revolve, circumstances, revolve. i'm not sure what i want to happen--some of the things i've always wanted, i guess. something in me says it's better to have a few more gradations between up and down.

that's what it is: having these gradations will make things that are like the things i want more accessible to me. all i can do about achieving the things that i want is to ask for them, and hope that cosmic forces are listening. the things that are like the things that i want, on the other hand, i can be on the watch for. and the things that are nothing are gradually becoming more apparent.

the thing is that i have to act toward everything with the same conduct, or i'll end up in trouble--that's caution talking. but within that parameter, there's a well-mawed world opening. this doesn't make any sense; i appreciate that to an amazing degree.

courts below, part somewhere between 1 and 6 or something

courts below (an excerpt--i'm writing it for the first time, but will assume it's excerpt-y)

I don't think Lily wanted to be friends with me. I liked her, though; I liked her hair, which kind of had the air of spun moonbeams, I liked her dark eyebrows... I liked the fact that she looked like the last Unicorn, basically. She was nice, too, and intelligent, and extremely mysterious, but genuinely so, not like a lady in a Dashiell Hammet novel, but like someone desperately attempting to fly under the radar so as not to be noticed and questioned.

I noticed; I questioned. I asked where she was going. She hadn't the skills to lie to me. I ended up accompanying her to 2969, for happy hour--2969 was both the street address and the name of the bar. It was a dive, but kind of a hot dive: a good two thirds of the clientele were young and impoverished as opposed to old and impoverished. if the kitschy oaken paneling and the jukebox filled with smiths hits hadn't indicated this, the $1 cans of Pabst sweating in most of the patrons' hands would have.

it was curiously lightless inside, and I realized we'd stepped into some sort of cosplaying-optional joint when a girl in combat boots brushed her post-halloween costume fairy wings against my face in leaning on the bar. She ordered a Pabst, and went back to her group, all of whom, I noticed, now that I'd been alerted to it, were wearing combination bondage gear and wing-type things.

"What's the theme?" I asked Lily, who I'd been sitting next to pretty quietly, for me, anyway, for a whole five minutes. She'd seemed to want it that way, and she looked around with something akin to nervousness when she answered me.

"The Courts Below," she said, giving me a sussing-out sort of glance.

I know now that she'd suspected me of knowing way more than I did, and was at this moment experiencing the pretty horrible revelation of the possibility that I was in fact the clueless dumbass I looked, and hadn't struck up a conversation with a girl I barely knew on the bus as a method of subtly hinting at the fact that I was who she was waiting for. But at the time I wasn't overly phased by her gaze. "Like tennis or something?" I asked.

She blinked about six times, immobilized, looking slightly up at me from behind her glasses. "No," she said in a still voice. "You're not the Guardian?" she asked carefully.

"Of, um, what?" I asked, fairly cheerfully. I was digging my $1 Pabst, and enjoying the process of making a new friend. Like the idiot that I am. "The tennis balls? Are we to play a match on the court of France?" I saw her horrified glance, and said, "I really never get that quote right."

"No," she said, the horror covered up. "Not a problem." She was cool as starlight--I know now that that's her default setting when dealing with the un-deal-with-able. At the time I accepted her sangfroid.

"What're the Courts Below?" I asked...and noticed another wingspan brushing me, this time on the back of my neck.

"The Courts Below?" I turned at the voice, and looked up. It was a man this time; the costume wings were black, and feathered. He didn't have on any makeup or anything, but he was buckled into a black pleater vest, and his hair, like Horace Tabor's, shone dark as a raven's wing.

"Yeah," I said.

He smiled slightly. "Like on her t-shirt," he said, and I realized--well, I wouldn't go so far as to say realized, but I noticed, in the back of my mind, which is where I always notice the things I later kick myself for ignoring--that his teeth were more tooth-like than actual tooth-shaped. If that makes any sense. It was more the impression of teeth than teeth themselves--more the impression of a face than a face itself. That is, there was a definite face there. But behind it I had the sense--the ignored-as-entirely-improbable sense--of a Francis Bacon-esque blur (Bacon the painter, not that other dude who might have been Shakespeare if you're a prick). "That's funny, the shirt," he added, to Lily. She maintained her silence, and I laughed slightly, internally, at how shy she was.

"She said an ex made up the language," I responded with insouciance.

This was a dumb, DUMB thing to say. The man in black merely laughed, however--and I didn't notice the way his laugh made his mouth stretch uncomfortably wide. Or not really. "Did she?" he asked, eyes dancing at her, and then switching their laughing focus to me.

"So you know what the Courts Below are?" I asked.

"I do," he said amiably, and sat down. He smelled good--there was a bit of a scent of amber about him, buried within the predominant notes of oak and fire, but I've always been partial to anything sweet, even on a guy. "Do you like Lovecraft?" he asked, looking into my eyes with his smiling gaze.

"Oh yeah," I said. "Crazed gods at the gate and half-monsters melting and inbred New Englanders, what's not to like?"

"Have you noticed how, almost always in Lovecraft's stories about chaos and madness, nothing ever happens?" he asked, eyes smiling harder.

I cast my mind back, thinking over the slender Dell paperback I'd picked up in a library booksale. Individuals went mad in the Lovecraft I'd read, sure, but civilization was never so much at risk that a passel of librarians couldn't rescue it. "Hunh," I said.

"Disaster's always averted," he said. "The door always closes. Not full stop, but it closes."

"I see what you mean," I said. "Is that what the Courts Below thing is? Sort of a post-Lovecraftian apocalypse cosplay?"

"No," he said. "Oh no." And he smiled wider. His eyes were faintly repulsive; I've never been one to be able to resist what I was repulsed by, and looked into his face more closely. I was unafraid. I'm too stupid to be afraid, usually. I have no sense of consequences. Things that phase people with common sense don't phase me. But the thing that pulsed behind his face withdrew slightly from my sharpening gaze; I was conscious first of a faint sense of disappointment, and then of a faint disbelief that one watery-ass Pabst had gotten me buzzed enough to see visions of Hell in a stranger's eye. "That which is without order is ordered as well, if you see what I'm getting at," he said.

"No," I said.

"Disorder is ordered around order," he explained kindly. "Disorder has to revolve around order as much as order revolves around disorder."

"Okay," I said, visualizing.

"So the gate stays closed in a Lovecraft story not just due to the intervention of a handful of librarians," he said, grinning while quoting me to myself. "A laughing idiot god may be a laughing idiot god, but even a laughing idiot god knows he has to continue laughing idiotically in order to maintain his principle of self."

At this point my preconscious became aware that he was addressing his remarks to Lily. My conscious mind did not catch on to this, and I listened in utter engagement to what he was saying. "Lovecraft says that the laughing idiot gods have no principles of self," I said. "That's what makes them laughing idiots."

"It's a conundrum," he said. "Possibly," he added. "But the world of the Courts Below believes that it's the gate that is the active principle, rather than either the side of chaos or the side of order. In the Courts Below," and here his smile widened to truly uncomfortable proportions, "we seek to know the Threshold."

"Like in Hellraiser?" I asked, after what was nearly as dramatic a moment as can be expected considering that we were in a dive bar serving $1 Pabst with a number for a name in the middle afternoon, and that Ask, which, I found out later, was the guy's name, had eschewed his actual wings in order to don his semi-hokey Courts Below cosplay.

He laughed. "Sure, why not," he said. "Lily," he added, looking at her for what to me seemed to be only the second time. "How's it going? Nice shirt from your ex."

"We have to go," Lily said in a smooth voice.

"Mmh?" I asked, looking around at her. She was breathing shallowly, and I put down my can of beer and left with her.

"See you soon." The man's voice followed us to the door. It wasn't a strange voice--later, though, I'd remember how it seemed hollowed, like Robert Duncan's knock, drifting. Later too I'd remember that I hadn't said the thing about the librarians he'd quoted at me, but only thought it. At that moment, on the street, though, I was mostly just worried about Lily.

calling a series of private activities a "secret life" makes it sound so...i don't know, interesting, i guess. a secret life isn't necessarily interesting. it's just a life you don't tell other people about. maybe you're ashamed of it, but maybe it's just something you don't speak of. maybe it's something you're a little ashamed of but mostly just don't speak of.



on other (or similar) fronts, i kind of want to die. i don't know how cherubino did it. i hurt all over. i can now understand that the power of fiction is, not necessarily to transcend, but just to take us out of these sorts of moments, sometimes by putting us further into them. i've experienced longing, but not like this...hopelessness, but not like this. in some ways it isn't even that bad--i know everything's for the best, and it's not like i've run out of hope, and it's not like i had firm expectations that are now being dashed. it's just a different variety of longing and hopelessness. and when looked at from that angle, it's kind of interesting, even--it gains a certain sort of savor, if you see what i mean. i'm like, "hunh, experience!"



and meanwhile everything even slightly below the skin is pulsing with something akin to pain, and the skin itself feels new to the touch.



why would anyone want to get involved with me? look at how i look at things. look how bizarre and clinical i am, and how i tell unnecessary details about myself as if the world were a cave and my body and i the sole dwellers in it. look at how i see everything as splitting apart and coming back together nothing more than a mess--a beautiful mess usually, when one looks closely enough, but still a freaking mess.



look at these eyes, and the way i see out of them, and the way they latch on to someone as if he or she is a star that can look back at me... who wants to be a star? it's a stupid and terrible thing to ask of anyone. i'm sure laura didn't want to be laura, and beatrice had no desire to be beatrice. i don' t want to be anyone else's star; why do i make others mine? god, i'm sorry, for feeling this way. really. it's an imposition, and it's wrong, and--



i wish

you would look back at me.

i apologize for this wish.

mizuch ado about nothizzle

i'm sorry i'm expounding instead of writing in this thing currently. yes, o nonexistent reader, to you i plead for forgiveness. yea verily i say unto you, um, well, i guess two things:

1. writing stuff you know something about but not writing it as you know it--or, writing something you don't know anything about and learning it through writing. this, i think, could be an outline to "poetic" "process," provided that the two strands are understood as two aspects (possibly two functions) of the same thing. both "poetic" and "process" are in quotes above because i don't know crap about anything, especially not poetry (as may be more than evident). you have to give me a break, though. those "poems" below are first drafts. why put first drafts online? i think it's something about the exposure, actually--honesty in anonymity isn't very high risk, but that means that i can be more and more honest in an effort to rise to the challenge of being unknown. the answers to these questions are flowing very easily tonight, and should probably not be over-trusted.

2. i shouldn't be believing what i seem to be believing. i think about things that may or may not have happened earlier, and i melt--my hands start shaking at the wrists, and it's like the reversal of a volcano, the feeling, a swoop, like a bird landing on its prey or a vacuum sucking up the cieling. but of course said things may not have happened, and i'll just end up making myself a turban out of my brain again if i believe in them (sorry, that wasn't racist, or at least wasn't meant to be--what i mean is that the sensation of believing in these things, when i know i ought to know i'm wrong, feels like what i imagine it would feel like to wrap one's own brain into a turban). i've imagined wrongly before. i have. i did so as early as the beginning of this week. why won't my stupid self listen to itself??

yeah, there's an easy answer to that one: because it feels too good to believe. sometimes i dream about things that i hope will happen; sometimes i dream about things because i don't dare to hope they'll happen. these things i can't stop myself believing in are from that second category of dreams.

i'm pitiful, but i don't want pity.

another symptom of things i shouldn't be believing in but am for now (only for now, only for tonight): i don't remember anything about what my feet were doing. it's flat-out bizarre. i assume they were on the ground. calculations of most available probabilities would seem to point in that direction. of course i don't know crap about probability calculation, except that if you do enough logarithms you can make a fern, just like thomasina thought before she burned down.

ah, the metaphor is apt.

unfortunately i don't think it counts as a metaphor...nor, now that i think about it, is it really all that apt. what the hell's "apt," anyway? this may end very very poorly.

the best part is, that tomorrow i won't feel this way. in the grand tradition of making hell week a little more hellacious for myself, i've contracted a crush on someone who may or may not know i'm alive as such. "why am i such an idiot," and "who do i think i'm kidding," are two very good questions to come out of the situation as it now stands in my head, but i think the question that's most to the point is "how the heck do i keep a lid on things?"

i have a feeling of blank and somewhat terrifying inevitability about this one, like it's speeding toward a...well, beginning. this feeling too will probably be gone tomorrow, but right now, always provided he knows i exist, it's a sense that something is closer to happening than something's been before for me (way to construct a sentence there). it's probably not. but just for the moment, you know, let me dream... yes, in my branched velvet gown, i play with my--with some rich jewel. ahem. ANYWAY.

and of course i have to write this down, because whenever anything happens i write it down.

my sense that whatever happens shouldn't have any reference to whether i want it to or not is, i think, not unjustified. i mean, i have so much. getting what i want would be the extremity of overkill. i think that makes sense. also it's a bad idea to want stuff, i think. that's not so much the voice of chronic disappointment as it is the voice of eternal possibility: wanting gets one caught up in the simulacrum, when the actual thing is more painful, sweeter, just plain more interesting. what it is is that when you expect nothing, you have an opportunity to expect everything. which is pretty exciting. i mean, the possibility, however slight, that various godzilla flicks are truthful depictions of actual monsters is like that well in the desert in the little prince, if you see what i mean, the well in the desert, or the laugh in the stars...the rose in the cosmos...the lamb in a box (1. i put my lamb in a box. 2. i open the box. i don't know how the rest of that goes)...the taming of the fox... an actual jointure of theory and feeling, always exciting. anyway.

anyway. i'm not going to go toward it--him, taming, roses, laughs, godzilla, lambs--but i'm going to do my best not to run away, either. i should give blank inevitability a chance. kind of like peace, in the song, but significantly different in other ways.

acrostic II

sometimes i look up into the night

and get dizzy.

thinking of where you may be.

that smile i don't know.

drop,

words,

is this what

you mean?

do you continue

gambling

on meaning?

seismic shifts felt

like the line

of alpine ridge

of teeth

of fireblasted hills:

words i love you.

make my heart your own.

call it across the inanimate water and

call it again.  name each pulse,

that behind the ear 

that at the ankle.

tell me my body

part by part and

thus remake me

in your mouth.

take even my fingers

from me.

take even the curve

of my neck.

take away 

even the shadow

of my blood

in its vein.

i broke down in east saint louis

for tom waits

we discover strength in pain.

for in the heart that bleeds is found the blood that gives us best.

in every bloom is the flesh of the dead thing that made up the ground.

this is what it means to dig.

this is what it means to take shovel and break the earth.

that the seed may foster its loveliness, the breathless press of its promise.

taste the air: it is sepulchral with love.

for in every breath we find our heart mimicks itself as if linear, as if parallel, as if married within itself, secretly.

but instead it twists like a knot, rising against itself.

like hands, for no reason.

or like eyes, tying themselves in together.

together like pulse we are and always shall be each other.

and if our devotions frighten it is because they are flesh.

this is why i am strong.

i am a double knot.  with love.  

fingers, rub raw, and wrists, take impress will or no:

i am love itself.

emulata

second day:

wash off 

the accustomed black cake

and find red mouth

underneath,

translucent like

gills, and

pink shape.

for if we are fish

we recreate the 

water.

and when we are

werewolves

our lycanthropy

revolves 

the moon

and as leaves we

turn

momentous red.

to trade sex

for pain is

to remake teeth

new and

retongue prophets,

to make paper

tongue stone

as promised.  the dart of an eye

like

fish

silvered

in a pond:

the teeth a crack.

like water to water

love to love runs back.

shrinktage: horror movie part 7 "rusted scopophile and prom princess"

for my consideration: saffron deluge for the skirt and the bodice made out of locust-colored velvet, velvet in excess of color.  she tastes her teeth with the tip of pinked

tongue.  in the mirror she smiles like constellation.

and here i am for her i love.

i am here to sniff for what she leaves.

collecting hairs off the floor when she is gone:

the smell of aquanet

presses against back-eyelids

like empurpled devotion, rich almost to poison--

i see her in

the strands of

the hilton carpet,

as if 

she 

a veronica

formed

from out

her very presence.  hhhhhh

heliotropic patterning against inward eyelid and tinly shingle pattern on the eardrum slur, arpeggiate, 

alpine collation of breaths, rough-edged against the ground and i hit and hit the floor i hit the floor there is a music to it.

there is a music

to it, oh god.  taste that sweet music

like blood in the irrigate mouth.

le bateau ivre

for foucault, for whatever reason

this time i slogged through muddy waters and my trousers clung almost up to my thighs.

disembarkation my reputation is built on.  ambiguating myself between left and right thigh.  like the chafe of pantaloons.

the dawn is still dark.  there are birds.  the water eddies thickly.  of course not cold, never cold but my god.  the water is to whence my boat returns when i find the shore.  but in this lightless hinterland there is

nothing but

the rock

of my own body.

against which

i hurl.

but the boat

is gone

anyway.

sine: the ballet, movement 2

bear the traces 

not too eagerly--

snort not, and blow not

like a stretch-nostrilled horse

ridden over a dry plain.

like underwater,

let all movements be 

secret in their strength. 

fluid and mock-ingenuous

though cracking,

crying

for lack of water.

the root searches deep.

let every bloom lack

nothing.

touch up

the painted broom,

and to each sunrise

add a waxen sheen.

ten thousand girls

on their backs, undulant:

nails dig sheets down

dry.

dry.

dry.

cosine: megaballet

the jointed bamboo stiff like still fingers in front of

the moon, grooved joints darker-pooled

ink shadow than the rest.

once again i hove to shore myself.  i had 

been out on a boat all the sunset.  washing

my face like a concerned parent with a blood

soaked cloth.  seeping into the lake too so that

i floated in red.  the sweet lilies daubed creamy 

pink like raw tuna.

the moon now like a raw pearl.  i tasted ash

on the air and looked to from whence it might

have come.

the leaves rustle.  the shafts of the plants

are tight-celled, smooth, cool.  i rest my hide

against them as once was done,

and my flesh

shivers.

meanwhile 

the boat is

gone again,

though the water's

still.

something in the way it moves

sine

sweet lucy

your lips black as bing cherry

spine sinuous sweet

as sweet black earth-curves

diamonds

inexcavate

bright red with

heat.

sweet lucy, lucy,

sweetest lucy.

half-nape,

total clavicle,

all

fluid

all

deep impact.

cosine

i find you move

at the edge of mind

like finger: quiet cellular nail.

half-moon. excavate.

teach me for that

the sine. teach me that

quite, quite sine.

but i was blank like the yellow moon, blank

like teeth in a sale window, blank on display

and inside worked so carefully your finger,

your nail like half-moon, your diatribe of hair

and your square tooth.

you soft me, whole me, you cover me in your lead

and your belly-smelting of furs and naked petals.

bruise like magnolia. and your jaw so firm.

you sluice me: pour yourself through cracks in skin and bone, and you harden, and i break. i break so hard and far, break cosmically, time wrapped about space like hair about a cunt. slush and fluids, splinter of light--light sharp, under nail, slammed to the bedpost.

i remember stones.

tasting of heat and shoe.

the smell of day.

i remember the dry academic feel

of the crinkling moss-tops:

rhizome like a sweater

i enjoyed--a comforting appeal.

i remember your high white tops.

the spark of sand against teeth, the feeling

of eating box.

there were no mistaken words,

no speaking fracas. splinters and the taste

of wood in sun: warm, soft

pricking against a tongue

roseate as dawn.

stentory

visionary taste

as of peas.

crack of dark stint

alpine smell--blue white cut

into blue sky

the smell of vision.

deep purpled oyster and the crank stem

of the greased machine: silver

sated taste of saltines,

bright cheddar:

cypresses bend in absent wind,

bent to silence and misery.

they hold their bending

like a trophy.

i,

replete as emptied,

personally.

quietus

i should have figured you in five long ago. the bright version of your presence and the dark surge of my blood to the base of the skin and out like red surging statue. sparks freed as if from twain gears charging each other sides on sides. i am distinctly attenuated as if to sound. beat being more than sound. it is magnet as if pulse. it keeps us in two or more. and it is physical because it pulls along heart through teeth and against skin. all art being body words therefore those to which i subject myself like i would subject sharpnesses to me.

carve in the blossom. carve in the hard bloom. winter shines out and flowers come into the earth.

meanwhile the wind rises, as if about itself, as if about itself.

a drip through the shutters. solo: droplet and working mouth, lip opening and closing like your moth--as if, as if, as if (beat, beat). tongue tonguing itself.

i am watchful for

every sound. things bleed

through the wall

and i

cannot stop them:

rifts sifting out, seeming smoothed

like milky time

and then

noise. listening is to have bled:

body weeping red.

shapeshifter

sweet rust-colored honey.

the softness of a plum in a hand
that you gave to my mouth.

later i wrapped myself
in your pelt.

as if a girl in a tree,
leaving half myself behind
when coming to you--

glistening like a newborn, or
skin rubbed free of a scab--

landscape metaphor

later, abandoned to some tide i knew nothing of,
waters under my hull incompliant as a greased pig,
i washed ashore. the sun, folding into the ocean,
cast out light with the thin freshness of blood,
the tall trees dyed roseate pink, rich, and smoke blue,
the light catching on certain vertiginous edges of the things i saw
as though they were strange sacral objects
scattered with glass beads.
there were hot winds beteeming me like breaths,
curving like the pink inflesh of shells;
the trees danced, ruching against themselves
like a bespangled curtain
in a deep-colored illustration
leapt from its page,

leapt like flames, snapping,
tensile, in on fine red air.

i crawled into the sand,
my hand
tasted it. retained heat
rolled
up to me, damp warmth,
and my breath met its
fine
exhalation.

no-one around--
no-one to seemy exhaustless
devotions.
my ship rolled
away into night
on the rickety
water
and i lay
reverencing the shore.

crap balls

sometimes, for no particular reason, my feelings go dark.  it's been happening recently; i'm not entirely sure what to do.  i can list my bad qualities for days on end--i'm defective, i'm ugly, stupid, ridiculous, i'm lazy, i'm weak (seriously, i'm so weak), i don't know how to take care of myself, but i don't know how to let other people take care of me, either; i lie about things i shouldn't...i tell the truth about things i shouldn't...i don't know how to protect the people i love because i don't know how to protect myself--but these aren't the things that are making me feel this way; they're just side-notes, addendae (is that a word?).

i'm lonely, unfortunately.

soul-shatteringly so.

it makes me feel more than pathetic to admit to something so ridiculous.

i can never say anything that i feel.  i feel like people depend on me to be well--depend on me to be happy--i feel like my emotions are waaay too messy for public exposure...i feel like this makes me undependable as a person and as a friend--i feel like i'm so selfish that i'm completely unable to provide people with the support that they need, that i'm so hidden that i can't be there for the people i love the best.  i feel like the things that i do with emotions when they're evinced to me are unhealthy and unhelpful for the people carrying them--i feel like i can't do enough, and so i don't do anything.

i'm afraid all the time.  i don't know how to stop being afraid.  sometimes i think that there is no way to stop being afraid--in general i think it's healthy to be afraid sometimes, because it means that you have things you don't want to lose...but i'm afraid too much--or it feels like i'm afraid too much.  i know everything possible about protecting myself from danger--i know how to laugh when i want to cry, and how to judge what someone thinks of me from looking at them; i know how to grin at physical pain and how to hold up my head through embarrassment...but these aren't strengths, they're just means of coping, just means of pretending, ways to make other people feel comfortable so that i will be left alone, unexposed, invulnerable...

this way i know that it's me that's tearing me up; that's a good thing, at least, that i don't have anyone else to blame, because nobody gets close enough to hurt me, except people i know how to forgive.  kind of.  i can't even do that.  always.

maybe i just have to commit to being better--maybe i'm all tied up with what i can and can't say, and there are other options, things i can do...i might just be better at doing things than i am at saying things, and maybe that's okay...maybe i just have to start listening harder...

dumbass

okay, so i put too many pages in the book. do i do the whole thing over, or write another poem?

sigh. being me...

song

there was a girl went underground
(went underground, went underground).
under hill and under down
(under down, under down).

the ones who loved her sought her round
(sought her round, sought her round).
they sought her up and sought her down
(sought her down, sought her down).

they turned up earth, they dug the ground
(dug the ground, dug the ground).
they found her in the earth deep down
(earth deep down, earth deep down).

her eyes were glass, her hair was down
(hair was down, hair was down).
her hands were red, her hair unbound
(hair unbound, hair unbound).

they took her up out of the ground
(out of the ground, out of the ground).
they took her back to hearth and town
(hearth and town, hearth and town).

in her narrow bed they laid her down
(laid her down, laid her down).
they went, came back, and found her gone
(found her gone, found her gone).

and in her narrow bed they found
(bed they found, bed they found)
a rose full-blown, a rose
full-blown, a rose
full-blown.

malfeasance

i'm sorry to anyone who may exist and reads anything on this blog maybe that these posts are getting prosey.  i'm just thinking about things, and they have to be thought about in immediacy, and poetic thought is, for me, about immediacy (to, i'm sure, the detriment of my poetry).    i mean, that's what all my "i don't know how"-ing boils down to: i'm not sure what i'm doing with the type of moment i'm dealing with, or the feeling that's started to stir behind every moment.  aka i'm in a silent and intrapersonal ferment.

and it's amazing.  my imagination stretches like something that stretches less gracefully than a cat but isn't inorganic...either something with legs, like a rabbit, or something without 'em, like a worm.  worms are blind and therefore appropriate; rabbits are disjointed and therefore also quasi-appropriate--i think too much.  the point is that if i think about the quiet revolution in my circumstances in, not abstract, but poetic terms, i come up with something that feels very new.  from an early age, i thought i knew it all, but this...whatever it is, upwelling of green in me, is like an invitation to find out something.  in quite-oblique opposition to that dylan thomas poem: open the doors and open all the windows, as long as early spring is lying green and silver on the wet cars banked in the bart lot.  it's not the season that's the metaphor, but rather the colors of the season.

the feeling localizes in me comprehending the fact that my eyes are green.  not always, that is, but i think the grey they sometimes are is something like a mask.  identifying the grey as a mask doesn't make it less to the point...sometimes a mask tells more truth than the truth can, right?  but sometimes the truth tells the truth more than a mask: they're intervalent, the mask and the truth and/or the grey and the green.  

being hidden doesn't make me secret and being secret doesn't make me hidden; this is something i should learn more about.

maybe i see the revolution of circumstances in me as localized in this eye color thing because...well, maybe i see it that way because i'm kind of a douche, but barring that as-always available explanation, maybe i comprehend the change as finding habitation in eye color acknowledgment because it has to do with what i am, as opposed to what i deny myself the saying of.  i always saw things as to do with how i could express them, how i could define them, because that made it easier to interact with them.  and then i wouldn't say them as i'd found them, because of my fundamental belief that when it came to self-expression, words were somewhat on the useless side.  which left me with nothing except words i wouldn't say.

but now i have eye color.  the green and silver season.  and a drawer full of underwear.  except not literally, because i need to do laundry.

HATE...MEEEE.

why must the dang restrictions loosen just when their tightening could be considered a good thing? why can i protect myself better than twinkies to the next-to-last degree and then when it counts let everything go for the sake of self-explosion? i see wrong. i do bad. i'm too weird. yes. when it comes down to it, i see things that are only a little bit there because i'm weird. and apparently i don't know how to look or what to see. i know nothing about what i'm looking at.

it'd be good to shake the foundations to their marrow (foundations with marrow...apparently it's a creepy mammalian building), but i don't know how. all i know is that i suck, and that i'm blind because i've made assumptions that aren't valid. from the bottom up. like the sweet sweet inevitability of jenga, but without the inevitability. i mean, i could retain this structure for years. if i don't know how to poke the holes or where to poke them, i could continue to live in this ridiculous head for years.

it's better to shake, i know that--it's just that this kind of shaking is unfamiliar. usually i shake with knowledge, but now i shake with feeling, not just red and black but the deep green. the red and black shake incised like a shard of that stained glass that the flying goat guy replaced in that one church after world war II. the green shake is different (more odwalla-y...that was a joke): it goes through ground, but instead of spearing from ground up, it spreads and covers, like grass, but like a lichen. the whole idea of shaking is that you don't know how to shake--but i wish i did; i wish i could encourage it in myself. because as things stand now i only shake sometimes and i'm afraid it won't be enough.

i've had the hard bloom; i'll have it again. is there such a thing as a fissure at peace? knowing that my own eyes are mostly green and that my hair is black, and that i can feel anything, can be anything, but choose to feel and be this select variety of things because i have judged them approximately truer to my form? is this a dynamic sort of peace, or am i just more desolate, and breaking apart farther and farther? i guess it doesn't matter--i guess what matters is that it's movement.

yesterday i was getting out of the car and i had this moment of realization that i'm wonderful. i always thought looks didn't matter too much, but i never could figure out why i felt that way... yesterday i knew why. but i can't say the reason, because i don't know it know it.