let’s say it was something blue
let’s say it was something blue and saying it now does
let’s say simply blue and something to it like putting a spin on a bottle
in a circle of children a bottle spinning
spinning the bottle beer brown in a corner where saying blue meant bringing something
into saying
into something with something other than blue coming out of the mouth in two parts
one part being clatter or clutter
part clutter clatter being children in one green corner of the world
chatter clatter of the one green corner of the world spinning around children
spinning blowing round round clutter chatter of children spinning one beer brown bottle
battle for attention
let’s say attention
let’s say something about being at attention
at a tension
of strings
blue strings cording through shipyard bundles against the seashore sand shore against the reefs
or bottles bundles of bottles
bottled bundles of joy clattering over the seaside sand shore floor in all colors in one corner
or one color of all colors blue
again blue again
let’s say it with some grace
let’s say blue again and something other than the saying it again
like the measurement between teeth or tooth or tooth and nail
nailing it
a plate to a yellow wall
yellow walls big and small all around and inside green corners of green fields of corn
corning this close to meaning a flat matte finish against the left breast
or the right breast
either without shame save for the saying and appropriate saving of such like saving orange curls
of rinds
against shipwrecked bottle brown beers spinning in the corners of children carrying chattering on
in yellow four walled rooms
saying something

well not really, i thought i had an idea, but it was the idea of a thought that was the idea in itself, but when i tried to push it further it wouldn’t go anywhere other than “i’ve got an idea..” and well, since i already started on this idea of writing you a letter about an idea i thought i had, or rather, the idea of a thought of an idea, i might as well go through with it until the bitter end (“bitter ends with rhinestones and lemon twists”, now that might be an idea, but i’m not quite sure, just one of those things i suppose, but it’s still not an idea so i better give it up) as i’m doing so, now. of course one might say that this is a letter full of ideas but they’d be absolutely wrong, i mean, you mean something when you got an idea, not meaning that you mean something at that particular moment, whether you, yourself have meaning or not, but that when you have an idea, and you start talking about it, it’s got to go somewhere, and i’m getting nowhere with this, so i’d best leave you alone about it, i won’t bring it up again, so just ignore this message. i forgot why i started it already, it might have been an idea.

what you live for what you love for forever for one moment longer than all the rest for the pain to end to uncoil to uncoil yourself from yourself to be free of yourself and all that you see I see the edges become clearer I don’t think you can understand this edging this clearing that happens you can feel time move you suddenly feel time upon you on you moving away and back again another wave but a wave that has no ending
I told you it was the mortality in me the pressing of blood thick walls on your ears you can’t hear it can you the sound of this reality to hear this to see and hear what you are seeing and hearing two times two times sharper suddenly aware and awake in the middle of a nightmare and here we go the feeling that it’s all there every inch of it laid out before you and you’re not exactly seeing it isn’t the object of your attention but rather you are of it pressing itself on you at all angles at all edges
to come out of it to step away from it don’t let go of me love I don’t know what will become of me of us of me hold my head together I feel it fly apart at the thinking hush don’t talk about it please don’t say anything of our life ahead of us I don’t want to think of it in the dark not in the dark of this city in the middle of this nowhere where we all have lost sight of our senses of making sense of it

(Here you are, speaking) here I am with nothing but words, moving my mouth to mouth sounds.
(Here you are moving across sounds) sounds, to you. Sounds to you like jabbering in the back of the head, the skull, the skull head, like charcoal crumbling.
(In the midst of a fist against my temple) here I am crumbling before you trying to say something to you, in words, with words.
(Here you are crumbling away with words, in words) like words trying to push their way out of my mouth, my flesh mouth, in one piece and I can not help but chew them out to all the wrongs sounds, like flayed syllables.
(You can not help but be chewed mouth flesh syllables)here before you and after you, left with somewhat an image of you, of what I meant to say, of dust, of you and blue dust clinging to the walls.
(Of my blue self dusting against the words you have said) sure of how much has been lost, in the saying, in the speaking of this here before you. Of you not budging from this chair, out to, towards these words, torn and lost the minute I move away, to the minute, to time.
(Being lost in minutes of time trapped in words) I can’t speak but before you, and after you, as if you were moving across this stage, into and out of the words before you, after you, from me, from my mouth into the darkness of listening, to this crumbling.
(To this crumbling of you speaking I find myself) as if I was speaking, and the movement across the wood of this stage being this, of you as my words, to the stage. That the stage being trampled on was the movement of our voice and feet upon it, our meaning upon, the speaker in relation to our words and movement. Here I am speaking.
(Here we are speaking as nothing but a dead blue corpse being held) togther by a string of attention, of tensions, being your tension to these words that are leaving me, unraveling me, me unraveling these words as I speak them to you, because I speak.
(Unraveling before me) here I am, speaking, of all things. Of all the things to do, to have between us. To be left. To be left between us, like bones, like a field of blue chalk, crumbling corpses, trampled syllables and flayed stages. Of all the things to have.

When she had left him, he decided to remove every inch of his skin that she had ever kissed, touched, or licked. The pain was bearable, especially after he had removed his left eyelid (gently, gently, she had pressed the edges of her lips against it one night when he had awakened from a nightmare), the membrane was too thin to merely slice the uppermost layer. Having one eye remaining open for always was a sensation that overcame any other possible mutilation. In fact, he was surprised that carving off his nipples, excruciating as he thought it might have been (each with a swift twisting stroke, one following the other, almost with the same deftness of the flick of her tongue as she had moved from one to the next), was nothing compared to the raw quality that the left eye had continued to see for a number of days, until it dried up, becoming useless.
The majority of the work he had done himself after having his scrotum removed and the testicles placed back into the abdomen. He had to go practically to the other side of the world to have the procedure done (a friend, who had gone to the airport to pick him up on his return, had noticed something in his step that made the friend uncomfortable and ill, but this friend would be unable as to explain why). From then on, he, himself, held a scalpel in either hand, without any sort of anesthesia, but with the help of his memories, meticulously went about what he had set out to do. He started with his face, the eye first, then the lips, which came off quite easily (when he had pulled the bottom one in particular, for the blade to slide across more fluidly, he recalled, and could actually still feel, her teeth playfully biting it). In front of his bathroom mirror, propped on a stool to give him as full of a body view as possible, he had worked his way down (his legs bearing the longest scars eventually, her having entwined her own about them), five or six towels underneath the steel supports. It was not a quick process, the face itself (where her fingers so often lingered on his cheeks and neck as she slept) took a full day and several hours after dinner. Never did he perceive the peeling tissue as his skin, equating it instead with uncooked pork, whose texture was similar. He was merely removing dead meat from his face, meat that had no purpose, not even fit for consumption, diseased.
In the middle of the night, he would awake, startled and sweating, the more recent of the wounds stinging (her voice in his ear, fresh, warm, close), having suddenly remembered, through his dreaming of her, a specific spot he had missed. He had tried to remain on, and skim from, one area of his body at a time, in an organized and orderly manner. The most difficult in getting to, nothing to do with a degree of sensitivity but with the mechanics of his shoulders, was the plane of his back, its indentation at the center. To solve this problem he had gotten fresh towels, arranging them by the door of the bathroom, opening it inward, placing the handle of the scalpel into the space between the frame and the door so that it would jut out. With his right-hand pulling the door firmly closed, his body practically sideways, he moved onto the blade until he felt the desired spot (her fingers would sprawl themselves wide, nails etching, digging at times, just below the shoulder blades, where her forearms were tight against the back of his ribs), piercing around it, and shift himself accordingly, in a semicircle, switching angles to close the loop. When he had done so, he used a sterilized fork to peel off the skin, a piece sometimes falling off the prongs of the utensil onto the red blotched towels.
It would only be after each successful operation, never during, he would keep his mind sharp and concentrated then, that waves of nausea and dizziness washed over him, and he would bite down on his tongue to bring himself back into focus (despite the fact that it was the tongue that she had most contact with, he could not bring himself to the point of severing it, he was sure he could not live without speaking). Afterwards, having given himself enough time for the brunt of the pain to be smothered by drugs prescribed from the operation abroad, he would carefully climb into bed, fresh gauze wrapped about himself, onto seven or eight layers of bed sheets. Each morning, numb but clear headed, he would change the bandages, checking each laceration for infection, applying creams, iodine, washing off the previous night’s applications. He had saved the hair for last, the body done (she used to scratch his head as they watched T.V., or tug gently tufts of it before she would climax, his head between her thighs). With a pair of shearing scissors, he cut as close as possible to the scalp. Because the sink was more or less always moist from the week’s constant rinsing off of blood, clumps of hair had clung together, resembling fur.
He finally recognized himself again. Until then, he had seen himself as something other than a person, more as material, a meat sculpture for an artist motivated by both an objective application of technique and a deep-rooted blind creative passion (mimicking the same recklessness with which she had taken off his clothes). Now, however, his name returned to him, a sense of ownership for the body before him: a sculptor recognizing himself in his work, the marking of his hand on the work itself, and the effect on him of the work being finished.
It was on that night, as he lay in bed, he felt that she was very near, almost atop him, not merely in his thoughts. He could not explain this knowing in his mind of her presence but he got out of bed, walked down the dark hallway, approached the front door, and slowly put his hand on the knob. Inexplicably, he then thought of the number of phone calls that were on his answering machine from his friends and his employer. They were, at first, concerned, then distressed, wondering, if he was still alive, why had he disappeared off the face of the planet? None were from her. While working, he had not answered the phone or the door when someone rang, keeping most of the lights off (as how often it had been with her here, dark and silent).
Turning the knob and pulling, he realized that what he had done to himself was not solely because of her. Opening the door, he stood there, the night clear, the air hugging him, cold and fresh, the street empty, seeing no one.

without ANY sort of provocation ,this woman
all tits and curls, eyes all glittery
with some sort of sparkle under her eyebrows,
this woman comes out of NOWHERE
and slaps unto my chest a hand full of shit,
smilin’, winkin’ an eye like she don’t know
how bad the stink is,
NO REASON WHATSOEVER,
i don’t know her from a hole in the wall
and she says to me,
righteous, like she was preachin’, she says,
smearing this semi-still-wet brown shit all over my chest
she says,
“..what goes around, comes around asshole”
like i’m supposed to know what the FUCK she meant
like i DID something, waitin’ in the subway,
waitin’ for the fuckin’ A train
with SHIT slidin’ down the front of my shirt
in the middle of rush hour.