whisper it

they told me not to orgasm
but i did
and i did not die


that was the saddest letter i ever read/wrote

is what she told me before blowing the smoke in my eyes and ruining my morning coffee

a place that's scary, a place that's paved

Over steaming noodles i told the 12 year old poet what i mistakenly now call ‘the manifesto’. We do not write plays and poems and screenplays and scripts and short story feats for the same reasons. I also tried to explain this to the blond poet, the one who bubbles over with observations and images that bloom like developing photos.

There is something pre-existent in poetry.
There is something that existentially fails.
(maybe i heard that somewhere)

(light a cigarette)

let me try to explain what i want to mean
what i mean to mean
let me try to tell you what IT is.

a story shares with me. a play tells me something about myself. about the way i draw lines between motifs and metaphors and trains of thought. I am the reader. You are the writer. You know. Look how well you know. Look how well (i wanted to say good but i stopped myself. she would have been proud of me) look at how well you write. I know your characters I know why you want to tell me about them. About their idiosyncrasies, about what they ate for dinner, about the anchovies they spat out, about the way they tie their shoes, about the length of a breath, or the constellation of a smattering of freckles on their back. about the difficulty with which they see him again and feel their hearts beating against their small sunken make believe chests
buh buu
buh buu
buh buu
buh buu
bu…buh-buh-buuuuukhhjskka….

show me the way to your conclusion. that i might feel better about my ‘I’. that i might learn to understand why and when and how. that i might imagine myself a moral, a message, a lasting metaphor to fuse life, love, and all the things i try to justify. give birth into my arms. cover me with it. let me believe in love refound, in the symbolism of a pie, in the joy of birthday streamers. and i get one. and i do. like that! i get one. even if it is dialectical. even if it is confused. even if it is and is not. i know it is there. i feel it in every articulation of my body.

then the change, the flicker, the reason.

the poem offers you nothing. the poet gives you nothing. he writes because he must. he writes because he needs searches to come to terms with what? he does not know. always searching, yearning, aching for the perfect word, he never finds it. herein lies the birth of the anthology, the collected works, the life. none of his words ever come close to what he needs, what he seeks to find to eventually dissolve into peace. nothing satisfies him. each poem in its inadequacy burns him and he must try again, and again and again. and never will he find the word, the turn, or the taste of the vowel. he is stuck in the penultimate, the shirt with no collar. if he buttons it, he need only ever write One Poem, and in that wondrous collection of nouns and symbols, antithesis and prose, he would strike gold into the heart of truth, of the human experience, he would pierce us and we would fall. so clear and resonant would be those words (2, 4 ,6 , 8 ,10) that we could no longer live as we now understand it. we would all fall. we would all drop dead (except not dead) and remain there, perhaps half living, but never moving, paralyzed by the exactitude of the articulation of ourselves. with this in front of us, we could never complete another thing. the poet has written it all. it is the bible, it is the apocalypse, it is the big bang, it is birth and existence and finality, redemption and condemnation. he has killed the future, he has killed the past. and without them we cannot walk nor speak nor breath nor die nor live but rather stay and wait for his words to lose their accuracy. but they cannot by nature. thus, the perfect poem freezes us all, it penetrates us and describes us and re-appropriates us as part of its description, of its account. The poet too dies (but actually). peacefully, leaving behind what had provoked him to leave us with this legacy of temporal amputation. he has met his terms. in this glacial world, grammar itself disintegrates. the question mark dies, the colon dies, vocabulary breaks down. how many words in the English dictionary exist? they’ll ask. kill them all, except the (2, 4, 6, 8, 10) of The Poem. black holes, voids, comets, astronauts: pioneers of tomorrow all die. It is the moment of absolute present, of absolute certainty, of finality, of completeness, of understanding, and it kills in us any desire for art or creation or even life.

a poem could reshape the world
The Poem could reshape the world
and bring us to a place that’s scary
and bring us to a place that’s paved

there is only fxkinh

where you are meant to be to be to be to be to be learn to be learn to bloom learn to be learn to be what you said you would be exactly exactly where your supposed to be said you would be
just
there
just where learn to be where we learn to see
O
blossom
to be
to be
come for me and be where i want you where i put you where you are where you will be where we were being being then then and not then

be
be
be
be
be
be
be
just be something

sarah kane told me it was the witching hour. and then she hung herself.

at 448 i told him
i told him i could not love him
i told him i needed more
or was it less
of him
of myself
of us
of the dirty sheets and unmade table
of the broken shoes and rotten lilacs
of the way you keep me up at night
the way my arm falls asleep under your body
the way you tell me to make dinner
or do you ask me
i could never tell
or ask

at 449 he told me
he told me that he hated me
or did he cry?
would one cry
can you
cry
we cried once
and it troubled me for days
to watch you
a grown man (perhaps you are not grown)
to watch you
a man
cry to me
about how lost you feel
i cannot help you
i cannot hold your hand
i did not come to this cold city to be your mother
to tell you things will be ok

so at 450 i told him
i told him I was leaving
my suitcase was already packed
hidden under the bed
you’ve already packed haven’t you?
you asked me
he asked me
how did you know
how did you smell it on me
the nervous ticks?
the worn brown leather?
the smell of moth balls?
the black silk underwear you gave me for Christmas one year
balled up between my old suede boots
and that stupid woolen sweater with the reindeer
how could you have known
that i would have the foresight to pack my stuff


perhaps you know
perhaps you know how easily i am convinced
convinced to stay
perhaps you know a packed bag is
what
i
need

to know that I am really leaving
i am really leaving
i really am leaving

GOD tells me to GO-

the exposed brick wall came and blew away the william paper.
the bath, clawed, held two.
the sugary fig burnt, came to seed, pollinated
satisfied the maternal longing
it was the only summer i ever liked seared tuna
i used to cost you 600$ a time
vaccum packed, skin tight, the dryness of the ocular roll
we flew
made a scene
and made up
like we do
i wanted to tell you that I wasn’t worth that
i tried to tell you something about breathing
something about the bad poet who couldn’t be Odysseus and kill her
something about the soft center of Italian cheese

i wanted to tell you something about domesticity
and atlantic criss crossing
and screaming crispy duck

about how much i liked the creamy dessert
and the sound of your laugh
rolling through me

modernist experiments or what happens when you imagine becoming a wife

two characters

two of them fur in fur baby rising falling breathing bathing baby holding tight tight white tight fur white tight breasts squeee squeeze spurt gurgle gargle hold on

ivory slivers, slints of light, of white of danging participles dangling dangling hair matted bloodied hair ivory stained white light brilliant lights clutch nails blood bleed stain, metallic blood, ivory stains, matted fur

 

 

no more baby

no more milk

 

sticky fingers, sticky mouth

i am lonely

you tell me you have the cut-key for the ignition

the curved metal sprocket which halts the go

you tell me you own the keys to the castle

you liar

you are the gas

you are the verb in the motion forward

 

if i wrote more descriptively would you love me better?

would you swallow this (all encompassing ___) and stop hitting back?

if i could tell you in colour, in form, in texture, in feeling

might you stop

and start

and bring us back to the beginning like little kids with fallen pink ice cream cones

 

but if i could write better, then i couldn’t be your kid

she doesn't know that the ice cream cone is only the beginning 

of being left with a sticky mouth and sticky fingers