no no, this was MY time, I had his full attention
but now we’re walking. He’s no longer standing
in front of me, soaking me all in. He was finding me
so amazing, I had him right there on the rails
and the night was coming and it was so beautiful
and now we’re walking,
his mind’s all over the place, not just me anymore.
His eyes are on the street, the sidewalk, the people,
the stores, the cars, the signs, all over you, walking, listening,
somewhere else and everywhere. And you’re asking him,
over and over “what’s wrong?” and his smile is all so strange
and calm and so far removed and I wanted to slap you:
he was MY puzzle, I ran down the block to stop him
from leaving, from physically leaving and I saw it FIRST:
I first saw that he was gone. And I stood there rambling like an idiot,
the sound of my voice holding him like my hands never could,
I could touch him, he was THAT close, but I could not
touch him and talk, I could not bear the idea
of simply touching him,
something about the way he stood told me
I could, but it might break this, it might let him move
and I had wanted him so still, so earnestly still he was..
but now we’re walking and he’s left
even though he’s right beside us. He’s not here,
he’s too spread out, he’s everywhere and still he smiles
but it’s so much wider now: It’s not just for me anymore.
Monthly Archives: October 1995
under the right conditions
not a word
a word in my skull my skull rattling on
and on sideways against the floorboards: I mourn
for a world that I will never know and only know
in forgetting, or is that in passing? the passing lights before my eyes
the flash before my eyes tells me something tells me that I am
late for my own wedding I am late for my own funeral
that I am late (again, again, and again)
with the word of the moment that the word and myself haven’t arrived
and look who’s attended, look who’s here.
I am building a thing
I?m writing to not say anything. I haven?t much
of a choice: it all falls rather over and over.
I?m writing to forget
that I do nothing by writing, that there is nothing further than this
pushing
and its entrails.
fingerstalks of knowing and a trace, just the barest trace that it can be added up to seem
that if looked at the right angle, it would appear to be
solid, that it would solidify under the conditions.
there is no one condition, no living condition to which to all to apply:
just a plurality of conditions, party favors, and old torn magazine ads.
and this pushing implodes: it has yet to bloom, explode, carry itself
instead of being pushed, pushing
this struggle to grasp anything in my head. there?s nothing. it all goes. I can not say
surely that I know one thing. not even my name: it?s been passed around. Wherewhat am I? wherewhat when I thought it all boiled
down to ?who..??
psyche of logic, reason of the soul: a word for the mind, but
after all the exegesis and theorization beyond the neuro-scape and pre-wiring, one thing:
I move through a world I can not and do not see for what it is
I feel a world that can not and does not belong outside
that the world is a figment of the systems within me, the imagination of the wiring and never ever really there.
The realization is this: there are no words
for the discomfort, no association to link myself up to, no memory to call all my own:
I forget much more often. I?m not forgetting
more, as in ?more?, but rather, ?more quickly vast timely amounts.?
in other words:
everything is a surface
with no tensile strength, no weight: every word is as it appears.
I?ve been talking more
and more out
loud rather than writing just to feel my voice leaving.
It was the promise of language that held me together.
although offered a line of flight, never the props of wings: offered chance to redemption
effaced
as often I have seen. sometimes I feel
as if my fingers have a mind of their own often times making such typographical errors (leaps of syntactical structure, word forgetting)
such beautiful errors that I am
forced to take credit: are they mistakes or a jump in logic, a short circuit
of copper-less wires that has given breath to light?
I?ve just read the phrase ?the appropriate dna samples? and felt immediately a pull to write, to tie them down, to ?appropriate?(verb) the phrase. I read about a yawning of the mind that the skin loses itself in its own consumption, obsession with form: I?ve read and read and realized that I?ve learned nothing. what can I recall, what can I put into words for you? What representations of dna strands can I mangle in representation for your pleasure? What sense of right or wrong can I bring forth to the page with a level of honestly having been there?
what can I say to you but of all things that I can not say?
I?ve lied. I cannot and will not build a thing (to wordlessness): I want this to lean
towards meaning, to the facilitation of words
again. I want to start from the ground and word myself up from the soil like Adam:
I want to roll the dust in my mouth
and make work.
I want to make words real and I don?t know how. Did I ever? How could I have ever. But how did I then? If I knew
from the elemental truth then how did I ever get here?
You were young
and now? Now why here, why come this far?
even if I could ever truly feel the distance crossed across the base of my heel and the palms
of hands, if my mind could crawl
the ground for me, how could I ever know of the distance crossed? Has there ever been any?
Have I come this far only by a sense of proprioception?
(there is something in its meaning, in this word, of all things -a word-, once known, that makes this word above all others ring with a truth, ring with grit stuck between this thought and the tooth. it gnarls itself into my thoughts and continues the push, to push, this push. Is it/it is this word I have lived for and continue to write for, even now, even in this age of cybernetics, of regulation and line/s of flight/s)?
this word, proprioception, means: an internal knowing, an internal sense, of place, of where, of distance;
an alignment of the bowels with the motion of the earth.
how grand, how wonderful to be able to find place
again, to know where you are and where to begin. I read recently
(reading, reading, and only scraps, romanticizations of writing, stick)
somewhere,
?…as feminists writer were figuring the relationship between the body and writing…?
and I thought to myself, yes of course there, it has always been there:
writing as a body
and working of the body and the body as a writing of work
and the fractalizations, the impli-multiplications of thought-strands
became blurry and lost to me but the singular strand remained: ?the relationship between…?
somewhere else, I heard, I remember, a proposition:
?..that the mind-state is actually one of anxiousness, of anxiety, and that we construct ?causes? for this state of being post hoc, post mortem, and we cannot reconcile ourselves precisely with our ?selves?. We cannot bear to…?
I am still and always will be lost and frazzled and confused: I will always be unsure of my place.
even when sleeping in your arms
of all the things I could have said with this
I am brought to tears
that I did not.
surface area
One dreams
of the im/possible then, figuratively, lives it
as if it had been always
the corners of (their) fingers
all along.
You whisper
words (of love) that are not ‘love’ per se,
but everything that squeezes in between each letter unsaid.
as if I had been dancing
on rock-salt poinsettas
and the curb of my stomach
one foot extended beyond measure, a leap frozen, cracked,
ice-shingled,
and draped over my forehead,
a crown biting and bitten
by teeth and stalls,
strewn across speechlessness.
I found my senses walking
a dog the other day.
He did not recognize me
but said,
‘you seem to have lost
all your marbles’
you put me into ‘you’
wrapping me into kisses
I was quite the package
a bundle of lips that you could tie
with just your nuances
and an odd sigh or two.
Unraveling into leaves
the birch of my thigh up
against throes of skins
there’s only so much
that this body can do.
I think you said,
‘you’re an angel’
(I wanted to add quickly,
‘only yours, yours only’
but the dazzling scenery
of your breathing compelled me
to open my eyes instead.)
A tortoise shells unfolds
in, to the palm of my hand,
without a sound and smooth,
‘What startingly symmetry’
I laugh, out of a room
looking at a window, without sleep
but with the distinct impression
of your torso on my chest
(I lean over the rail with a pain
in my gut of rust)
today was the last day.
Especially the wrinkle above
your lip
I think I fell into it
when you said something
or the other,
you must’ve been smiling
at the time
or I was delirious, either way
I can’t see, or it,
or the way our bodies held
onto a figure on the bed
with a mind of its own.
your skin, your eyes, your smile
(every turn deserves another, one rotation
around the spindles and you at its heels)
I relive each moment before
‘another moment trespasses
the first’
between pauses,
your nail pulling the shade across my back, tracing my nose
where you gently bent
and kissed me.
You are the everythingthread
around me keeping warm.
I had but one path to follow,
the one from your navel
to your sternum, and back down
and around again (and again)
until your skin glistened
with one intention between us:
to break through this scalding
blue distance into petals
and toss our selves to the wind,
floating and free.
there is no other taste
other than the one of your mouth
that you place on top of mine
as i held you
in one place, in one time,
in one area of surface skin
where neither one of us had
a beginning
or an end.
funeral
I’m a pallbearer at her funeral. They told me not to do it. They told me that it wasn’t the best thing. I came close to hitting one of them. He didn’t mean any harm, I know that now. But when he put his arm around my shoulders and tried to explain it all to me, I think he knew. He stepped back and talked slower. You can tell. You can tell when they know that they don’t have a chance. If you really wanted to. I might not be as sharp as they are, with their visiting dignitaries and New York Times, but he stopped talking. “Maybe I’m wrong..” he had said.
I knew the priest, said my name and nodded his head, but didn’t say anything to me. Or maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention. They had her casket open and when I went to pay the last respects I whispered to her: c’mon, stop this, wake up, your mother’s crying. I said more and they wouldn’t even look in my direction when I walked off. Her father looked embarrassed, as always when I was around. Her mother though, cried a bit heavier. She was the one that didn’t really mind me, I guess for the sake of keeping some sort of contact with her daughter. “I was young too..”, she’d say about us. One time she let me listen in on a conversation with her father. “I want you to know everyone is full of shit” she had said and that time he was saying, “You’re doing this to embarrass us, aren’t you..” It wasn’t like a question, more like an accusation. She’d say, “Fuck you dad” and laugh and not hang up the phone. Like I’d expect her to and he’d just sigh and say something like, “Very well..”
You should see some of them, so well dressed and grim. It’s not real. Only that coffin and the dead thing. That used to be her. That has me convinced that it’s still her even though she’s not breathing anymore. In that slow way that had me wonder sometimes at night how someone could breathe like that, so still. Then I see Seline come up to the coffin and I wish I didn’t have to hold back. Seline was the one that always insisted on cooking the stuff up. Always wanted a taste of everybody else’s even though she was the one that could afford it the most. Crying and almost falling onto the coffin. They had to help Seline back to the pews. Right in front of me, wailing. “I’m sick of it” she had said when I found her that night when the animal in front of me wouldn’t come with us to the hospital. She was sitting out on the balcony and throwing up over the rail. Her face was old and puffy, “I’m jus fuckin sick of this shit.” And Seline didn’t want to be bothered, the end of a hose between her teeth. “Ffug off muhn, cheesus kraheesst.”