In a room, watching the sunset, you are breathing.
You turn from the window, opening the desk drawer. From the drawer you take out cleaner and oil and set it on the left hand corner of the desk. You close the drawer and remove the gun from the holster. In thirty seconds the gun is neatly set out before you in pieces, it takes a half hour to clean and oil each piece thoroughly.
There is little light left on the horizon.
You reassemble this gun, put in its proper place.
You disassemble another gun, doing the same to it as the previous. This is this gun, not that gun, the one before, but a gun all the same, that needs to be cleaned and oiled, in the same manner that any gun must be, to work properly, to function.
You repeat this until you are done with all the guns that you have and you are ready to work.
Babykill
Alfonse was a nice guy overall. He worked hard, payed his bills early, helped neighbors with their yards, kept an eye on the block. Everyone knew the thin balding fellow with the receding dark hair and, especially, his quiet friendly manner.
Vicki, his wife, was very shy, smiling awkwardly, as if caught. More often than not, she wore sunglasses, even on cloudy days. During the winter, she was hardly seen at all.
Overall, they were good people, the kind you’d invite to a backyard barbeque to, which most of the neighbors did during the summer and fall.
His neighbors would be surprised if ever they visited Alfonse’s studio in Long Island City. The one that he and his friends went to unwind, with a couple of girls. Young girls. And little boys. So young and little that you couldn’t tell which was which, boy or girl, unless you took off their undies.
And that’s just what Alfonse did, have babies strip for the camera…
ring
there is only trespass that matters (as if you can,
could step
hold
of one moment, untangle it from the rest, as if you could ever remember
where you had drawn the line, as if you
could ever distinguish yourself from this
and that, from this
for
that, to chisel out yourself of this
from everything in
between
in between you and I
lies
a handful of grenades held by tin cans and bleeding
gums. Here could never have been
there
but we longed the distance between us
like a twine around glass stems, gentle gentle but for the pull (or was that when you had said
“tension holds my knees apart for you”
there drinking
drinking from the wire seat and
the craw bloody in circumflection, body raw on the insides
and something
in the firmament, something in the way
your lips stretched and warped in your smile (all a smile is really a rubbing,
an ache across bones, look at it, nothing there but fat being pulled over a grill.
the matters,
the weeping matters,
the matter of the task at hand,
the matter of your hands in mine,
“is something the matter?”
And I could not
shake
myself right out from under myself,
I could not put myself
aside
for a moment (for a moment
or two you can leave
yourself behind, you can be
behind if you liked, you can be yourself,
and not this, you can be that,
I promise you,
sign on the dotted line.
how much would you pay for this (do you know how much I paid for this?
the ring’s gone down the drain and I want to make a fight about it, say wonderful things like
you stupid forgetful bitch, you couldn’t wait to forget this could you? But instead
I wonder where I am
going when I look in the mirror and see myself
leaving.
I wonder where I run to in the light
of day and come back terrified in my bed (i had shot up and said fuck to make it go away
knowing
that it doesn’t just go away like that
it never goes away
like that’s just for show, that’s just rattling
the cage a bit, to introduce something new to it,
like a martini: stirring out of bed her hand on my shoulder
“what? What is it?”
nothing
nothing (but old fears dying hard of growing old and dying. I can see it,
this is how it will be: the night sky and it all shuts down, not goes out, but
shuts
down,
age old having traveled
millions of years now knowing that
they’re dead so far away
you can’t help but be terrified of the inevitability:
the stars have gone away and
you’re so far away getting further
and there’s not a thing you can do
with your hands,
there’s absolutely no
touching about it.
there’s no distinction from when
and what. Only a trespass
that comes before the hands, these hands,
none
from this or that. Gold metal, even my name is in question.
barely
“Writing…” she had said just as she had begun to enjoy him
fumbling with the buttons of her shirt, “you should be writing this all down”
and so it was all that he had imagined, if that were indeed possible, his imagining
the image stuck in his mind: he HAD imagined most of it, a nag at his ear: “you did,
you did it, didn’t you?”
she had told him in his sleeping that it wasn’t quite fair for him to have her
and he had told her, “shut up, shut up, don’t ruin this”
but she kept talking as he was kissing her, turning her head away,
saying how decent it was of him to not take her clothes off
as he was rutting against her thigh.
he thought of the safest way to prevent her and then, in dreaming, he remembered
the twisting slow motion of the knife tip as he stuck it into Arthur’s ribs,
and being terrified of it: the terrifying notion that he had been enjoying this
but Arthur suddenly respected him and that was what mattered.
“And what do you know about it?” he asked, biting into it. he wanted to tear himself
into her, to tear everything that had kept them, to remake her into something that tore
his clothes off and raked his skin and he would do anything to feel that again,
that velocity, that angle.
but he kept remembering and the remembering brought it centermost
and he was watching himself twist her arm when it had been Arthur’s and snapping it,
feeling so sad for himself and all the things he couldn’t tell anymore.
but that would bring up a whole host of complications.
“So much bullshit”, she said, “for a two minute event”
he knew he could satisfy some precaution of etiquette, just as soon as he could see
himself standing in the lobby, where she didn’t know who she was or why he had to drive her home.
it was later, at work, that the cook had told him
that she was now considering to be a lesbian.
he wanted to call her and patch things up, because of course now she was absolutely safe
and maybe that was what the dream was about: nothing to do with her
but about how he went out of his mind to murder someone he barely knew.
sprawl
your fingers across her back and you thought of this one time being a wall you held your hand to in this way across her back was it this or even had there ever been a place stapled
in your memory of her back your hand resting ever so
for once
the fingers uncurled curling at not moving you a rhythm of her didn’t you feel so your hand
there was no other than this one you can not remember as ever repeating even though
you can see each on your fingertips her back facing the fingers of your hand resting your body
at her back turned on you her turning across the distance of you leaving the fingers etched in
themselves the grain of her turning away
and you had been remembering where you had made it to your hand as a glance of her turning away to face your own but it had then to be leaving the traces of your fingers to her way
back to you
so that you could touch not her offering her back as if it had been to drench you across
curling uncurling bodies a rhythm of her away from your fingers to be farthest away from
where she was blocking you stopping your fingers from ever reaching the wall past
through her spine where you knew her fingers safely
nestled into the walls of your own
all the answers of a theoretician finally admitted to
who i thought had all the answers of a theoretician finally admitted to ignorance with ?i?m dropping this course..i don?t know what i?m doing, you know what you?re doing,? which was nice to see.
I pushed into recognizing who i was as we waited for the lynx and everyone else still comes of particularly dense or slow or much more normal than i ever hoped/feared to be: things are sure different in albany.
Other than a (deceitfully) breeze: just create mein Fraulein. Translate as big trouble: nothing (really) since ?from where you are?. Have had a bit of spatterings (?only this?, etc) and ongoing pieces with no direction (?you, interrupted? ?blue doors?).
My gosh it just strikes me that no one knows where to go with this thing but everyone has an issue to start from.
discovered (thru an email discourse of sorts) my ?issue?: what would be a world of meaningless relationships, or rather, a word with incorrect meanings: constant diverting of ?truth?, a bounce around your expectations and hurt you silly in the sense kind of thing?
That?s all folx.
after the second week and the juices are more or less
After the second week and the juices are more or less dripping from my mouth as if i�ve been infected with rabies:
here we stand.
there�s blanchot and the nothing (i feel as if i�m repeating myself from my other journals; constantly re-fracturing it, re-saying it, whatever it would be at the time until it sinks down out of my dreams as i think i dreamed about this last night, or have been overall of all my courses) of writing, the futility of saying what one means and meaning what one says, as if i do experience it (somewhat) in this way, but not exactly, or have lost it?
Then again the whole idea as writing as this path to hell is a bit romantic in itself.
Despite what deleuze and guattari (via joris) would like us to believe about kafka (one heck of a party guy) i find it hard to disavow the previous (conflicting) knowledge (if it can be called that at this point) of kafka teeter totting on the verge of madness (memorial note: elam listing off nietzsche as having infected himself with syphilis, amongst other mad writers).
Returning to blitz�s statement: �..how what one knows knowledge and what knowledge is. (somewhat)�
is this what he meant? Is there such a thing as a fully functional integrated body of knowledge that is coherent to itself? Or should i think of it as a relation, a parody of my own body, that the whole thing sits there (and farts around), with different textures and different kinds of limbs and extensions that sometimes seem to have a mind of their own?
This appears to me to run back to the saussurean idea of an overall (if now unseen) structure?
Also an interesting query: the removal of the personal (I) into the impersonal (he) as stated by blanchot and practiced by auster (as in the invention of solitude, how obvious now; and in the new york trilogy), is this what i�m doing in referring to myself as you (addressing myself, a reflective activity to verify that i am, and am at an end of this, no?)
But the idea presented by joris (via, supposedly, by deleuze and guattari, but i haven�t seen it yet) that we are an accumulation of everything in our writing and that�s ok for that to end up there (to paraphrase joris: �that it�s okay to use more than one language� language ranging anywhere from different tongues to dialects to other even mediums)
joris: what makes d&g so fascinating is that they leave behind, break the two major discourse, ways of approach to literature, the psychoanalytical (freud) and the socialistic (marx) and offer us something wholly different: the author, his work, his diaries, his letters, his life and the life around him: an intertexuality of his life, an interpretation that weaves and is based on the weaving, the texture of his life(/)work as a whole.
which in a sense, leaves us back to blanchot: the writer never realizes his work: he dies before the work is finished. is then criticism also a part of the work?
after don byrd’s crib crash
The persistence of memory as it crawls through my skin: re-invention I think I came off to them as being stuffy or witty or over exerting myself into their clutches: “so you’re not in the doctorate program?” I wanted to ask “how do you know?” but I was afraid the answer was going to be like “well, what you said before about being the new guy and re-inventing yourself came off as something a first year MA would say just to get the ball rolling, you know” and he would look at me and add, “someone who didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about when confronted with the big leagues.”
And he would be absolutely right. Oh god, how I miss the falling of writing, the sky dive head over heel freedom of going anywhere and not having a thing to really say. To let it just all hang. To stare at this keyboard and slowly mouth out the words out of my head and just follow them without having to prove anything: to breathe instead administrating CPR to my literary corpse of lung sorts. To re-introduce myself to language and let it all hang about the rafters until it congealed on its own.
That’s why you haven’t been writing old boy: you’ve waiting for bestsellers when you haven’t dug around in the garbage enough: what happened to the fun of it old boy? Y’know, the doing and writing for writing’s sake, when it was all you had and you hung onto it like a vein.
Yes. I now understand when the shit is ready to fall out of my ass and I have to stop.
Later. Welcome home.
rust
like gears wearing down
the pumps heat up
steam starts to blow
you tell me to shut up.
teeth start to grind
tension: a coiled spring
wheels come to a halt
hate to me you bring.
a scowl a giggle a shrug?
all I need is a hug
to say I’m forgiven
to get what I’ve given.
so little a thing
a loose screw a lip
pulled back sneering
curses on the tongue tip.
lashes of nails
rip ripping the machine
broken junkyard parts
promises thrown into the bin.
a scowl a giggle a shrug?
all I want is a hug
to say I’m forgiven
to get what I’ve given.
and every anger is a moment in hesitation
And every anger is a moment in hesitation: where do you stand on the verge of?
Why do you turn away (as my father did and still does in my mind, turning forever away, his shoulder forever turning into infinity, my father infinitely abandoning me), how could you commit this sin to me to us, shunting us into a corner of silence, the most unbearable silence, one of distinction, you had done it on purpose, you went out of your way to silence me to silence it: don’t give me this shit about not wanting to say something that you can never take back: you already thought it and the turning back was already gone from that moment on: when you already have closed your mind to any other point of view other than your own, when that is where your being ends and the other side of the world begins, if you end at you and there is no one else to consider, than you didn’t have to say anything at all. Then, on top of everything else: “if i lived on my own i wouldn’t have this: i wouldn’t have to answer to anyone.”
Wake the fuck up. Or better yet: do you know what you have done?