The Peel of Stillness

Everyone who visits my blog should visit this one!

2012-02-08T16:55:00.000-05:00

I mean it.

http://wutsang.blogspot.com/

Warrior

2012-01-19T10:22:00.002-05:00

Streetwetwarmcurlhomedrown

2012-01-18T10:09:00.000-05:00

For days no one speaks to me. Months go by no one touches my skin. Going out dancing illicit affairs. Glances handshakes the small of my back now territory for sex. Surface.

Go home and remember this. Beat yourself to make smiles happen. It is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is what it is. My date goes home with another woman and I relieved.

Street wet warm curl home drown.

Stripping (retrieval)

2012-01-16T16:23:00.000-05:00

Stripping (retrieval) from Renee Lauzon on Vimeo.

Oceans for Breakfast

2012-01-12T10:34:00.001-05:00

Like the Albatross, he crosses oceans for breakfast

and deigns to touch shore only when it involves sex.

Woman is an inconvenient necessity.

Regime of Signs

2012-01-08T11:44:00.002-05:00

In this fifth plateau, Deleuze and Guattari identify the varieties and complexities of semiotic systems and how they move, transform, and mix within each other, creating regimes or fixed systems that often privilege a certain type of coding of signs within language. In order to follow their investigation it is highly important to keep in mind that for them language is not simply a means to communicate the seen, felt, or expressed, for Deleuze and Guattari language is also a system of codes that organizes power within social structures. Therefore, it is possible to destablize or destroy organized power by deconstructing semiotic systems, to transform them, “destratify, open up to a new function” (134).

Deleuze and Guattari explain that in linguistics a sign is a sign of another sign and that sign follows another sign, ad infinitum, and so it follows that “the signifier is the sign in redundancy with the sign” (112). Also the words that we utter are connected to the things that we think. Expression is not limited to what we say; the movement of our bodies-- whether or not we make direct eye contact with someone, what we are thinking comes across on our faces even when we think we are hiding it, we wear our pain, joy, and frustration, or fatigue, our insides on our outsides--these expressions mean something. They orient consciousness and build identity, they mark status and power, they enunciate, and interpret what you are in relation to everything else that is different.

The most absolute of differences is the one or ones who do not fit within a semiotic system which are defined by Deleuze and Guattari as pre-signifying, signifying, counter-signifying, and post-signifying (135). Each of these systems bear a variety of characteristics as far as their ability to code, and build the form and content in which language operates. These systems are in contradiction to how regimes force out redundancies through the “perpetual referral from sign to sign,” (135) the consistencies, normalcies, and concretized organizations of power in language. Semiotic systems mix and transform into others or privilege themselves over others. For example, a signifying system, characterized by an “overcoding..fully effectuated by the signifier,” which could be the phallus (patriarchy), The Standard of power that all society pivots, The State, The Law, in this “there is uniformity of enunciation, unification of the substance of expression, and control over statements in a regime of circularity.” (135). These characteristics combined with a postsignifying system compounds The State and the subject into a configuration of identity, where consciousness and subjectification builds negative ideas regarding the relationship between The Law and the body. This organization could be seen in matters of marriage, an institution of law that impinges bodies to act in accordance with the law of interpersonal relationships and the hegemonic power dynamics between men and women.

For Deleuze and Guattari these systems become “stratified” in their types of deterritorializations and bear positive or negative outcomes (134). These outcomes are conformed, as people take on the systems that conform them. A condition of conformity is operating within “a dominant reality” (129). Subjectification is stratified within all semiotic systems as they follow the “characteristic traits of the subjective semiotic,” (129) unless the subject turns away from the dominant reality, for example, a woman turning away from her role as the ideal and her actions revolving around the male gaze. The construction of the feminine is made and is internalized by the subject, and externally acted out in modes of behavior and methods of speech. She becomes feminine.

The pre-signifying system, according to Deleuze and Guattari, still operates within a system of language that privileges (how can it not?) though it operates “diffusely: enunciation is collective, statements themselves are polyvocal, and substances of expression are mulitple...relative deterritorialization is determined by the confrontation between the territorialities and segmentary lineages that ward off the State apparatus” (135). The transformations the can occur within semiotic systems is where they can break down, shift and move, gain power, and where we can gain a sense of their points of origin, how they themselves function in society. These are “variables implicit to language, internal to statements” (139).

Deleuze and Guattari explain transformations of semiotic systems bring about these variables and that is where the study of Pragmatics becomes useful to understanding linguistic systems. Pragmatics looks at how these systems are related to the context in which they are created. In other words, Pragmatics is the study of the relationships between language systems and society. Language and political movements are inextricably linked.

Deleuze and Guattari are looking at language in the context of situations, content and form and its ability to presuppose meaning. This is what they call the “abstract machine” which for them is “far from being too abstract, [it] is not abstract enough because it is limited to the form of expression and to alleged universals that presuppose language..A true abstract machine has no way of making a distinction within itself between a plane of expression and a plane of content because it draws a single plane of consistency, which in turn formalizes contents and expressions according to strata and reterritorializations” (141). This is a complicated way of saying that the formalizations of content and expression, matter and substance, form and function, corporeal and non-corporeal, real and not real, the subject and the State, are not functioning separately from one another. Words bring ideas into reality, a becoming part of an assemblage. Expressions of the real can seem unreal, signs replace the thing it is referring, and “content constitutes bodies, things, or objects that enter physical systems, organisms, and organizations” (143). “Defined diagrammatically, an abstract machine is neither an infrastructure that is determining in the last instance nor a transcendental Idea that is determining in the supreme instance. Rather, it plays a piloting role. The diagrammatic or abstract machine does not function to represent, even something real, but rather constructs a real that is yet to come, a new type of reality” (142). This potentiality of language to affect bodies in the future, the real yet to come, makes one stagger against the force of the reality of words; it projection into the future, or line of flight, its deterritorializations and its unknown reterritorialization (where will my words land?) indeed shows how much language is performative and cannot be reduced to the definitions of syntactics, semantics, or the logical formulations and meanings of one subject or one group (147).

Deleuze and Guattari give the statements “I love you,” and “I am jealous,” as examples to the variations of meaning in different semiotic systems (147). Is it a collective love of pre-signification or a love of owns country and values and I will kill someone who takes that away? Is it a love that is a part of a condition of subjectification whose line of flight is contingent on the positioning of one’s identity and that of another or is it signifying a uniformity or conformity that merely represents a love from sign to sign. What does “I love you” propose? “All methods of the transcendentalization of language, all methods for endowing language with universals.. have fallen into the worst kind of abstraction, in the sense that they validate a level that is both too abstract and not abstract enough” (148). Our statements can mean too much or mean nothing at all.

Postulates of Linguistics

2012-01-08T11:43:00.002-05:00

In the fourth plateau titled, “Postulates of Linguistics,” Deleuze and Guattari address the performativity of language in relation to the science of linguistics. Language, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (76). For them language operates as a command and/or demand for someone to do something. To this end, language is used as a tool to order society, to keep people in obedience, which suggests perhaps quite deeply that the old adage is true: Language is power.

A command has the power to order. It is with this concern that Deleuze and Guattari state that words do not merely operate as communication or information exchanges, rather as words move from body to body they have the power to command, to order individuals, to get them to operate as they wish. Deleuze and Guattari claim that “it is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication of a sign as information” (77). The term “order-word” refers to how the structure of language links words in relation which draws out implicit meanings, which as Deleuze and Guattari points out, forces a presupposition upon the spoken and written word. “Language comes from itself” (76). The order-word “is the relation of every word or statement to implicit presuppositions, in other words, to speech acts that are and can only be, accomplished in a statement” (79). The word-order implies an act, a further obligation or continued display of the act as soon as the statement is uttered. The order-word exists both in immanence and in the future, forever (81). A vow, an oath, a promise is “brought into being by saying it” (78). The implied meaning in stating, “I do,” during a wedding ceremony leaps through meaning and time; in saying it one promises many things that could mean very many different things to different people, though the implied meaning is often contained in an understanding of societal norms. Word-order is a statement that implies and commands a certain set of acts.

Now what most of this essay is concerned with is showing that order-words have the power to order bodies. In that ordering we see identities coming into being though in a non-corporeal sense. A speech act can transform the orientation of subjectivity (or identity), as the act is impinged upon and attributed to a corporeal body (80). This transformation of subjectivity is an affective force moving in the immaterial but is no less fact. Attributions are categorical, constricting bodies within frameworks of social norms; they are order-words attributed to bodies that reduce complexities to simple constructions of identity (80). Going back to the example of vows spoken in a marriage ceremony, one can see how instantaneous two people’s lives, behaviors, and normative behaviors are transformed once the officiant orders them “husband and wife.” Their corporeal bodies have not been affected in that instant of speech act, “but the declaration….expresses a non-corporeal attribute on bodies” (80).

Deleuze and Guattari stress the social factor of utterances and their power to affect bodies. “The social character of enunciation is intrinsically founded only if one succeeds in demonstrating how enunciation in itself implies collective assemblage. It then becomes clear that the statement is individuated, and enunciation subjectified” (80). It is from here that Deleuze and Guattari begin to discuss the importance of what they call “‘free’ indirect discourse” which has no defined and closed structure of categories allowing discourse to continue to shift through many different voices all accounted for in the webs of social character (80).

In the second portion of this essay we find the authors discussing many theories of the natures of content and expression. Determined to both have form, content and expression act in relation to one another as speech acts or statements change through present and past tenses (85). These “intermingling of bodies” are from where Deleuze and Guattari take their discussion of the performativity of language in relation to linguistic structures in order to insist upon a different perspective of how language operates. With the collective assemblage Deleuze and Guattari are showing the movement or passage within an understanding of language outside the linguistic constants. They state: “An assemblage of enunciation does not speak ‘of’ things; it speaks on the same level as states of things and states of content” (87). In other words, one does not have primacy over the other; each are moving in a passage through de-terrorialization (that which carries away) and re-territorialization (that which redistributes), and one does not exist because of the other in a linear sense. Things and the expression of things are sets that form within the social framework as “corporeal modifications….and incorporeal transformations” (85) are adjusted as bodies move, speak and act, and affective forces intermingle. The collective assemblage seeks to subvert the constraints of linguistic science, a science that wants autonomy from politics and semiotics which are concerned with how the linguistic systematization of language effects the understanding of what language does, how it affects (85). “A language seems to be defined by the syntactical, semantic, phonological constants in its statements; the collective assemblage, on the contrary, concerns the usage of these constants in relation to variables internal to enunciation itself (variables of expression, immanent acts, or incorporeal transformations)” (85). The term “variables” is an important factor to keep in mind while reading Deleuze and Guattari, for they are seeking heterogeneousness against the homogeneousness of constants in language and categories that simplify identity, asserting a power on bodies. They define content and expression as independent and operating at various levels though the defining lines do not demarcate into separate categories when concerned with how they act. According to Deleuze and Guattari “expressions intervene or insert themselves into contents...not to represent them but to anticipate them or move them back, slow them down or speed them up, separate or combine them, delimit them in a different way” (86). Content and expression operate within each of their forms through the movement of deterritorialization or “lines of flight” (89). It is from this line the forms change and move, are altered across language, across time and history, across identities and societies’ defining laws, borders, norms of behavior, love, marriage, wealth, systems, and functions, only to be reterritorialized in all kinds of ways and all kinds of manners (89). It is helpful to envision a flock of birds moving through the sky, traversing land and sea and air, calling out in song, then being scooped up by a change in weather patterns that traveled hundreds of miles, a rhizome, a variant, and a bird is captured, transformed.

This is helpful to get a sense of the movement content and expressions within fields of social order; though Deleuze and Guattari are linking the systems of language and their affective force to order bodies and the power of ideological thought (89). Seen in isolation or operated in isolation these two imposing forces (language and ideology) have the power to sneak under the radar of discourse and investigation, though used in relation to the operations within the social character, it becomes apparent how “the interpenetration of language and the social field and political problems lies at the deepest level of the abstract machine, not at the surface” (91). The abstract machine refers to how used in isolation systems have the tendency to confine or refrain the affective forces that each possess; in isolation systems render themselves static and stable when in fact they are operating, forcing in very pervasive ways. “There is a constant tendency to seek reduction...but placing-in-variation allows us to avoid these dangers, because it builds a continuum or medium without beginning or end” (94). Variations in writing style, enunciation, dialects, ghetto languages, all of these types of variations in language help to build a continuum, a passage through language, rather than a stoppage, a unification, centralized and standardized; it builds a desire for difference, as Guattari puts it, rather than a desire for homogenization of society and self.

On the Refrain

2012-01-08T11:33:00.000-05:00

In the beginning of the eleventh essay in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari explain that an aspect of the refrain is a song hummed by a child to quell the night terrors that lurk in the darkness (311). This song is an expression sent out to grasp forces, to mark a line that bridges internal fears and external pressures, to break them or reorder them so they are less severe. The refrain also brings order to chaos or forces chaos out; it is a drawing of distance, and a flight from areas of uncertainty, ambiguity, or momentary loss. The refrain gathers, forces out, and lets in other forces from other territories. The refrain is how we meet, push against, and “join with the World” (311).

As Deleuze and Guattari go forth in their discussion of the refrain it is important to remember that sound is a part of the workings of the refrain, for they mark territories. “Sonorous or vocal components are very important: a wall of sound, or at least a wall with some sonic bricks in it,” (311) mark the lines of territories, spaces between territories, residual markings that essentially constitute ways of acting in, acting with, and acting against the world. A male bird of paradise displays his colors to attract a mate, his colors express virility and dominance, his song marks a territory to keep other males of the same species at a distance but also it attracts females. His expression “is primary in relation to the possessive; expressive qualities, or matters of expression [that] are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being” (316). In other words, matters of expressions are learned, cultivated, adapted, even imitated. These expressions state a possession of qualities that which relate to certain the territorialization of different modes of being; ways of acting (performing). The fact that these expressions of qualities have a more profound affect in regards to what is possessed places a primacy of having over being makes one pause at the result of knowing based on appearances. “The territory is in fact an act that affects milieus and rhythms, that territorializes them...the refrain is rhythm and melody that have been territorialized because they have become expressive--and they have become expressive because they are territorialized” (316-317).

According to Deleuze and Guattari milieus are coded by the context of styles, movements (social, political, artistic, and musical), -isms, and each “code is in a perpetual state of transcoding or transduction,” (313) meaning that each code has a way of moving into other milieus, producing milieus at the same time or collapsing milieus into each other: a rhythm to the chaos. Appropriation and repetition is a way to carry the milieu to another. Humans seem to “dip into” the past and catch and carry all manners of expressions and materials into the present and future. It is a state of becoming that factors into a territory or milieus moving into others becoming “counterpoints” or counter-culture, in the melodic expressions, its end of rhythm a movement into a new territory (317). These territories relay (325) information back and forth and speak to each other in a relationship of movement, sound, marks, expressions, and re-organized forces that affect the organization of people, of matter, animals, resulting in a “plentitude of a music that is indeed filled with so many strains, each of which is a being” (Proust “The Captive” cited by Deleuze and Guattari 319). This music and these strains are each a being because they act autonomously and are self-moving which isn’t to say that they are separate and lack relation; they are heterogenous elements that pass into each other: “from forces of chaos to forces of the earth. From milieus to territory. From functional rhythms to the becoming-expressive of rhythm. From phenomena of transcoding to phenomena of decoding. From milieu functions to territorialized function” (322).

Territorialized matters of expressions become the first markings of the relationship between human beings and material, of matters to be expressed, to say, “hey, that is mine,” even expressions can be owned, contracted and copyrighted expressions, music is a mark, art is a mark as well (316). A mark that moves to a territory, that moves to an assemblage of territories, that moves to milieus and motifs, the counterpoints is a dialogue of these, and mixed in one can find a relationship carrying the markings of an animal’s relationship to itself, its peers, its sameness and its difference, its world and cosmos. The Classicism concerned itself with creation, God in relation to the earth (chaos of forces, chaos of the earth, God orders the chaos so must the artist), the beginning (338). The Enlightenment was science and reason and the artist confronts this with Romanticism; science renders everything on the surface of things, formalization and hierarchies rule, “so the artist no longer confronts the chaos, but hell and the subterranean, the groundless,” (339) suddenly man stands alone in nature (Casper David Friedrich “The Monk By the Sea), and then man wishes to harness the forces of the earth, territorialize land and sea, and he makes machines; but Deleuze and Guattari continue to assert that this is not an evolution or a natural progression of things, rather it is a synthesis of matter, elements chaotic, territorialized, de-territorialized, and re-territorialized all the way up to the cosmos; from personal space drawn by style and gesture, to groups tending to certain parameters of actions, perceptions, and beliefs, until the entire place is surrounded; but things move and wiggle in and we let others in, the world comes flooding in and “a people [are] oscillators as so many forces of interaction” (345). Does this not bring forth a staggering realization and question of how matters of expression and the manners in which they are expressed has a resounding affect on bodies and effect that cascades and flattens it like or opens it up? Here I go for the negative but what seems to be at stake here, in this discussion of the refrain and its relation and distribution (organization) of affective forces on a people, on an earth, a body, a territory, is that ways of organizing people (military, political, social, mass media, scientific, molecular, and atomic, pop music) can be seen as leveling the surface of identity, a negation of difference, universal and uniformity slides in its margin, establishing powers. “People often have too much of a tendency to reterritorialize on the child, the mad, the noise (344)….The established power have occupied the earth,” (345) and to counteract, it seems, with the assertion of Deleuze and Guattari, would be to open up to the Cosmos. The artist can do this, the writer, and the musician and it seems to be less of property and possession, and a being more profound than having when the material is gathered, sonorous material deterritorialized, set off; not a signpost that sticks but a rhythm that “pilots” (347). This is not to be confused with transcendence, a flight from material, from body and time. What Deleuze and Guattari are saying here is an unfolding of temporal experience, a song, a refrain, duration, sonorous material deterritorialized, free from uniformity, conformity, free from signs that are detached from the referent.

The state of a people can be seen by the role its people play. As Deleuze and Guattari begin to conclude this discussion on the refrain they point out that the role of the artist in relation to a people has changed since the Modern age. “Our governments deal with the molecular and the cosmic, and our arts make them their affair also, with the same stakes, the people and the earth, and with unfortunately incomparable, but nevertheless competitive, means” (346). Perhaps to far distilled to simplicity the investigation into how the refrain works to contain, set free, make “fuzzy,” or lets in forces becomes a question of why some make bombs and some make art. These questions easily become fixed in dualities, become closed on themselves, becoming these black holes that Deleuze and Guattari refer to throughout this text. The sound of our actions carry. We try to sedate them while getting transfixed by the chaotic actions within the fray. We rally and subdue and we find it hard to let the melodies and rhythms go.

For Anne Carson and Eros

2012-01-07T09:07:00.000-05:00

Burned by ice water, sweet wounded ones, I speak to you. Every time is sweet then bitter like a winter not knowing how to be winter, heating up every few days, and raining tears, warming and destroying. Cold snaps and I am trying to hold ice and snow in my warm hands.

Stripping (retrieval)

2012-01-05T11:26:00.001-05:00

http://soundcloud.com/reneedlauzon/stripping-retrieval-final-mix

Barthes "A Lover’s Discourse," possession, and the uncertainty of signs

2012-01-02T12:32:00.004-05:00

Possession of the other, or the amorous subject; how it positions an identity and sets up pitfalls when change comes to wedge these identities apart, forcing the lover out of modes of being that are most comfortable; to be sent adrift into a world unknown and unexplained, yet discourse remains a sedentary mark, a point of reference, a lighthouse casting a sharp light into the dark sea. There, lies and uncertainty; and in the midst of jilted ruin and exaltations, the lover pitches forth staring deeply at the target of logos, the whys and hows, the structure of society, and the gnawed down bone where the multiplicities of self once constructed a whole human being. Or he turns away. How could it be that he does not want to take me with him? After all that was said? All that was expressed? After all the qualities I possess that satisfy him?

On New Years Day I crawl into bed after meeting friends and, finally, as if I have resisted this very moment from the start, I picked up the book P.T. bought me for Christmas. The book is about fragments and finding beauty in broken things. Fitting because I am broken-hearted and I can’t find an ounce of beauty in my desiccated chest. My fingertips stroke the cover as if to touch remnants of him on the pages. He touched this book and he touched me and this paper becomes a bridge in which our two bodies now meet, apart.

To be known, to be stripped of my language and experienced as a living being; that is all I hope for.

In the chapter, “The Uncertainty of Signs” Barthes states: “Whether he seeks to prove his love, or to discover if the other loves him, the amorous subject has no system of sure signs at his disposal.” A gesture signifies. A caress speaks. A lover’s distance tells all that he won’t speak in words. These signifying messages seem to say so much though in a fraction of a second the amorous subject can lose all faith in, all reference to these meanings. It feels like being a strand of sea weed on the ocean floor. Miles above are waves that beat. The affective force of signs act in a similar manner constructing messages and casting them away to hit, to rupture a territory mark of sound and message, and suddenly, nothing. You misinterpreted the sign. The wave goes. You remain. You don’t exist in his language anymore. They say so much and yet mean so little.

Does language not reduce our being to objects of desire? Is it like a boy who derives pleasure from his toy or the proximity of his mother yet he lacks the capacity to see past his language, to open and care for his “things?”

Interpretation of signs. Barthes again: “...assurance: I shall no longer believe in interpretation. I shall receive every word from my other as a sign of truth; and when I speak, I shall not doubt that he, too, receives what I say as the truth. Whence the importance of declarations; I want to keep wresting from the other the formula of his feeling, and I keep telling him, on my side, that I love him: nothing is left to suggestion, to divination; for a thing to be known, it must be spoken; but also, once it is spoken, even very provisionally, it is true.” Words are performative. They act upon us and act upon the world. They construct territories that surround us and we use them to let others into our spaces. They encourage obedience; “you said you loved me so act like it!” They bring things into being and they construct a reality, they are making true what we hope and wish and fear.

How do we manage to love without possessing, without expecting the other to act in accordance with love? Or making the other fit into parameters? He turned out to be something else than what I thought? He changed his behavior towards me and now doesn’t love me. Barthes claims there is a possession in non-possession. He abbreviates it N.W.P.; “a tactical notion...If I still (though secretly) wanted to conquer the other by feigning to renounce him? If I withdrew in order to possess him more certainly?” The opposite of an action can still produce the same affect? I can pretend to be distant, be aloof and cold but I still want my lover to be with me. This is playing war-games of commodities and territories. Inaction can be an action. Surrender, raising your white flag: “I know it’s not a game but it feels like losing when someone you love throws you away” (Ryan Adams, “Fix It”).

Possession in parts: taking only parts of someone that you want, like sex, comfort, tenderness, companionship, is worse than total possession.

“How is it that he can miss a woman whom he kept at a distance so he would not miss her. It was then that he realized that only wanting a part and not all of her had hurt them both” (Shopgirl).

“I want the kind of relationship where I can be emotionally and physically detached for any number of days or weeks, and have it be okay.” (P.T.)

Doesn't this mean that one does not want a relationship to things, to people, to life? To love is to know, to be known is to be named, to name is to possess knowledge of. Someone recently told me that to some the mystery of the other, the stranger, the unknown can be very alluring; it can be; but to keep the mystery alive by means of only getting to know your lover so much then moving on to the next, or withholding information to appear mysterious, withdrawing yourself emotionally and physically in order to have a space in the process of knowing and discovering, to protect yourself from being known and to know (there are many ways to maintain a certain level of anonymity and very many reasons to do it) doesn't seem to fit into what many would want: to learn from other people, other places, other ideas, even. When you first meet someone you are attracted to, it is true, you do not know them and they do not know you. The process of getting to know a person, learning about them, hearing their stories, their fears and hopes is something that can only happen over time, though knowing and understanding the person is also something that is projected into the future at many immanent moments that punctuate your relationship with them. You can learn about someone and hope that the relationship will sustain so as to keep learning about the other. This is why it is so hard to except when suddenly everything changes and you cannot understand why the one you love is leaving you or hurting you; you thought you knew them, you thought what they said was true. To be strange, to be unknown is exciting, but to be known and loved for what is known, again and again, over time is more potent, more extravagant, more brilliant than any stranger I've met on the street. In fact, when we do not know who we are letting into our lives, our hearts, our families, our beds, that is when the strange become less alluring and more terrifying, and more costly to the very love of ourselves.

Note: what you take apart, you break and it no longer functions as you desire, even people.

“I want to possess, fiercely, but I also know how to give, actively. Then who can manage this dialectic successfully? Who, if not the woman, the one who does not make for any object but only for...giving? So that if a lover manages to ‘love,’ it is precisely insofar as he feminizes himself, joins the class of Grandes Amoureuses, of Women Who Love Enough to Be Kind. Perhaps this is why it is Norbert who is delirious [with his new toy] and Zoe who loves” (126).

I am no longer an amorous subject, nor the other. I am broken with my system or what Barthes calls, Image-repertoire. He continues, “I must manage (by the determination of what obscure exhaustion?) to let myself drop somewhere outside of language, into the inert, and in a sense, quite simply, to sit down,” and let the signs die down and be happy to just sway like seaweed.

Highway

2011-12-26T21:47:00.001-05:00

No Ground

Inches feed

Choking Beacon

Homeless lights

Orchards aren’t ready

Laced candy

Evergreens

Tell sons

Tell daughters

Everything won’t

Green and red

Rest in dust fields

Across the oranges and quarters

Asleep in a chair

Laundry tumble dry

Prostitution is endless

Ghost of sister

Rising the air

Descend

Yellow ribbons

Go home shining smile

Retrieval

Stripping

Wound guts

Perform rituals

Piece-keeper

A wall hard cuts

And I only hold a handful

The road is to outrun

Back

With peace and feet

Rest

Will follow

Rest

Sorry

From Fragment to Text: One

2011-12-10T17:00:00.001-05:00

Stars. Send a
kit of chemicals and a digitized genome
across space. We'll create panspermia.

One lesson, a make-up test:
Life is a very simple process
performed by proteins.

Being able not only to catalyze biological
inevitability, consequence, reactions,
wondered speculating, but

Appearance, as well.

I Am Out

2011-10-19T19:25:00.000-04:00

If slender fist be wrapped in mine, be sure I must be holding my own,

For there is no one here but me,

To tempt the light out of its worse remains

And drink from sharp words,

And breath; I am out.

“I'm lost in it, my lord. But let him come;
It warms the very sickness in my heart,
That I shall live and tell him to his teeth,
'Thus diest thou.'” (Laertes)

And, “too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia,
And therefore I forbid my tears.” (Laertes)

So, for a thousand times the earth would crack,

While I am pitched forth on the crevice of its depths,

And burn on the heels of the last remaining crumbs,

In hopes of finding a small drop of water at the bottom,

To drink your songs and bear the violets

That only wither as a breath, a last word;

I am out.

“It is not, nor it cannot come to good;
But break my heart,—for I must hold my tongue.” (Hamlet)

And shutter through and

Supply no utterance for thought to grasp hold of me and

Send me reeling against the twist of rosemary.

“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember: and there is pansies. That's for thoughts. There's fennel for you, and columbines: there's rue for you; and here's some for me: we may call it herb-grace o' Sundays: O you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy: I would give you some violets, but they withered all…..” (Ophelia)

They wither all.

They wither.

Good Woman

2011-10-05T11:15:00.001-04:00

I am a good woman.

She. That little one over there. She. A very tiny wedge of wood. Why do the girls work on a wedge? Height advantage? Over-compensation? Invasion of red muscle space. Tying a bark with no bite. An insidious tiny thing worming ways into cracks and holes, wrapped in white flags yet doused with gasoline. Not an innocent asylum seeker, a terrorist to the wood. A manipulated affection slapped with a smile, nailed to a tree. Dear God, where’s my refrain?! I hum and hear a bird’s song. Cross the sky to re-territorialize. Yet, a million miles away, I am a humming bird heart.

A Place. I live in memory.

2011-09-07T23:01:00.001-04:00

For Jacques Roubaud

A place. I live in memory. It is my world. A site of entry into an inhabited space. I wish I could write about it like Jacques Roubaud but I haven’t witnessed a death like he has; but I know of memory and I sense it with my finger tips much like my hand can sense the relative space where I know the light switch dangles in my kitchen; the general spatial configuration and the remembered length of the necessary stretch, and I know, from past stretchings just how many times it takes for me to grasp the air, finding only that, until I finally whip my wrist in a gesture of hope, if my memory serves, the light does eventually turn on. But the “I,” the me in the present, the asserted present, reaches a pinnacle moment afterwards, a death, if you will (and I do), only for that moment I am not present at all. I am forward motion, collecting memories of standing in other kitchens, thinking about where the light was located in them all, until I am a being stretched outwards from an origin of remembrances, grasping at too many airs and too many switches, but then I still know, from past experiences? that the lights do eventually turn. I choose the site of memory like I choose my language and the origin of placement, the performativity of all the words to get the light to turn on. I could say, requesting, “please turn on,” or I could invoke forgetting, the merciful and troubling shed of past, of memory; a letting go of oneself in a place that is so wonderful, painful, sweet, and tender, where the hand that is now cold and unmoving reaches forth warm and loving to grasp your alone form out of its rhythm to hold you sweetly--a precious time let go of because it is gone, because she died, and with all your attachments to recollections you are still standing there in that room, with that same floor and bed, and sheets rumpled because making the bed seems like starting fresh-- letting these go would be a double-death, and now I understand why it is so hard to kiss the cold, dead cheek of memory and launch oneself alone into the future, which is really another memory at play with your potential present.

I See. I Say. I Seem to Say. I Seem to See.

2011-09-06T21:09:00.000-04:00

Which words are from me? Let me see the mark. It’s on me like death, a mark. Which one? This one….oh. I see.

The kitchen’s table is down the river now. A fit template for the way to float. To saturate. To become full of it and sink to the bottom. To ruminate.

No, it isn’t like that at all…..okay, but it feels that way, the way of the river, on me like a mark, winding down and becoming a place.

Impossible Anything (Homesick for 28, almost 29 years)

2011-08-29T23:21:00.001-04:00

Impossible. Nothing. Everything. I am grasping, at times, substances of sounds, pretty erratic things

and I am counting notes to trace back meaning, resolute. truth. realization. I believe that holding your face in my hands is just something that makes sense.

I fish around for the ordinary language. Not superfluous or out of place

as if I could pull out the strands of heart that compile

a something. Anything. Nothing. Everything. All at once. fling it in circles until time freezes as a blanket around things for us for us for us and

and next I get stuck

I am stand up! when I should sleep and I am gnawed to white bones that are really just black and nothing because white sounds ordinary and better than a faulty dark memory to hold on to me us when ordinary just won’t do anymore

I don’t know what to say anymore which makes this exercise a ritual. homesick.

I Must Speak In Polemics

2011-07-30T07:18:00.000-04:00

I Must Speak In Polemics Or Coo In Your Ear. A man who knows how good he is at something is not a man. You like long brown hair and women with dark skin. Another other to your Other. I bet we can get her to 3,000 miles. It’s a car and a roadmap. It went from, “I like your tattoos, you’re such a nerd! that’s my girl,” to “I want nothing to do with you, I want to simplify my life.” You’re in the way. They never admit lack of love, they only feign devotion until the devoted become deviated. I make them terrible people. I show them something they don’t like? They see me as an atom bomb on their summer morning? The night terrors in their souls? The women are worse. They compete for these sick men. Play their roles, smile kindly, bat their eyelashes and practice their own feigned indifference. So afraid of meaning. Then you say you’re not into blondes. What you miss is that you are not into anybody. You’re out and any attempt to get in should be halted. There is a difference between the one you want, the one you can get, and the one that will love you back. And then, folding laundry, I find your shirt. My conviction breaks, my anger leaves me. I am left a shaking body and I admit, quietly, I miss you. Sick fools. I must speak in polemics or coo in your ear.

Responsibility, Love, and the Ever Elusive 'No'

2011-07-21T15:33:00.003-04:00

I have to stop looking for you. You’re not there. You. Are. Not. There. There is no there to get to, no where to go from, no window to crawl into on the side, no front door to bust through, no within, no where from which to go, with no time to set back to, no work left to be done. As my lips invade the universal problematic, the bad-tempered everything fails in his becoming….these speaking subjects rustle in the leaves, they sound like twelve year olds on fire who have been given and given water at private schools, brats in uniforms trying to make it on their own under our center, de-center, be better. A man. Good God. Hardly. We don’t mean to be divisive, though demarcation lines define a sharp fall between the people living and the people sucking off someone else...…...I see that your hands are tied. I see that your hands are tied to your ankles. I see that you are bent over the barrel once again. I see the noose, I see the whiskey, I see the self-centered. I see the pot pipe. I see the father. I see the ex-boyfriend. I see. I see. I see. Though I can’t speak of any of it. You see there is one side here and one side there. Stay there. Don’t move it, boy. Yes, you move it all the time. The ever-moving, ever-shifting, ever-severe, ever-not-important dizzying explication for more and more meaning, with less and less, loss and loss. You are exhausting….....the world swirls around you, and on purpose, you choose to pour the concrete around your feet.

July

2011-07-21T09:48:00.001-04:00

We cannot act as though we can paint the world pink and everything will be okay. Today we are facing a new reality that we must be aware of, bearing in mind that these are accusations and not verdicts. That’s the precondition for the normalization of bilateral relationships.

There is a land, miles and miles of thick forests and fertile jungles, where the trees drip with vines and branches bend earthward, heavy with fruit. They say the word is out: it is no longer necessary to give birth, though anyone who lives here is expected to have children. I was going to have a boy and somebody switch him for a dead daughter. Out of her hip, which my mother keeps, wrapped in white paper, whimpers filter.

The closer to home, the worse it gets. Villages are empty, fields unplowed. At the faintest buzz of a plane, people scatter into the bush, in a panic.

I don’t like this place. Nobody does. And yet thousands of people live like this, and one of the hard parts of leaving is you just don’t know.

If the world falls asleep, I will keep my guard up, my weapon in my hand, day and night awake. Anything you try to lift off, the pressure is put on the bodies. These tasks fall upon me.

If they only touch you when you’re at the end of a chain, then they can’t see you as anything but a dog. Now I can’t see my face in the mirror. I’ve lost my skin. I can’t feel my mind. But the skin--in this luminous way--covers without changing. We hear a haunting tape where she says that she was shot. She’s covered in blood and she is pleading for help for her son. We cried, she cried, and she held me. Let me die. I feel sick. All of this is an attack on the heart. And I am in big pain.

In the long term, you fall apart. These are maturity problems. As a child grows and grows teeth, he gets a fever; when his bones grow he feels pain. These are all signs of maturity. We should not worry about it. Sometimes his first taste of doing the grown-up thing turns out to be his last. It’s not our fault. When is a child ready to go it alone, anyway?

June

2011-06-30T13:24:00.001-04:00

I will be a bomb likely to linger long after the last. We have guns. The ingredients for an

explosion are all present. Men’s fingers are cut off, and the wounded are piled on top of each

other. Children’s shoes, diapers, a woman’s dress and kitchen tools lay amid the wreckage, as

people forthrightly present their own views. My hand is gone by the bombardment and gunfire,

the witnesses said. I don’t think it will go away. It will only harden this divide. The void’s

symbolism, it seems, was apparently too much for the authorities so I’d rather go to war than

wait another 20 years. Pulling out fingernails, burning genitals, hyperextending the spine,

bending the body around the frame of a wheel while whipping the victim and so on. It happened

all right beside me. And I am worried. It wakes up the trauma we have, the trauma inside us.

I had a dream. Everyone was screaming and crying, and everyone was covered in blood.

Everything was happening automatically, and there was nothing new to learn. The warm bath of

the hearing began. We’re passing through an intractable period before the crisis, so punish us! I

woke up sobbing, and I’ve never done that. I didn’t want to wake up. I wanted to stay in that

space. But I thought instead, “I love you, Dad.”

Perhaps more jarring were the words that followed.They are afraid of the word change. We can

hear the sickness in their breath. They do not learn the lessons of history. Instead they make us

look at this dead yellow earth. Why does this beautiful landscape have to suffer under a sight like

this? The trees are gone now, having fallen during a storm in August, but their memory lives on--

not in the diary but in the nasty dispute over all that remains. We’ve had horrible smoke, and we

dug ditches in the ground and hid the children. We’re now looking at how you hide in plain sight.

By the end of day, burning fields. They rise toward the surface and their upturned eyes scan the

sky, until at last they spy the mangrove canopy, and they start swimming home. The rainfall

starts with just a drop.

There are no differences between us. They’re just waiting for all of us to die.

Wicked Good Moon

2011-06-22T19:04:00.003-04:00

After you left me, I sat and waited a while. I wondered if you would come back, and if I wanted you to. So far there has been nothing except a rerun of old shows that no one laughs at anymore, not even me. I am stagnant as water left after a rain in a wheel barrel outside. We talked about that I think. I don’t know, my memory is getting worse as past, present, and future all ram up the side of me like a toy car on a couch arm. There is a time to everything, a made-up time, where all doubts and fears fit nicely between the crevices in a wooden floor. A wood floor now flooded, rotting, sinking under the weight of tears, heavy sobs, and four palms making prayer hands with the wood below.

In my skin, within my organs, my hair and teeth, the lungs and heart that can’t beat or breathe, I am not here, I am not well. I am tired and lonely, you see. And I can’t sit still either. I run around town sketching our footsteps, the ghost is me, walking along the route to the ice-cream place down by the water, where we fucked up that guy’s car, and ran like children. To the grass where we read books, the street that held us in its hands, to the market, the bookstore, the shoes you bought like mine, the rock, the clock that doesn’t move that I mentioned and you seemed amused at my attention, the dinners, the corners, the kissing, our jokes, us fags. You tell me that you have my back. Yes, you have it. You latch on to it like a crab, there it goes under my skin making commas and parentheses with its claws dragging to the depths of every sentence I never wanted to fear in you out into the rotten sun the heat the wind and the snow and the ice under our feet as we danced in the desolate February snow. Then you let go.

I watch for you, the first time, to see you, my love, my friend, how cold it is in here now, the first time, the first words, as your ghost. I will knock over your bedside lamp to get even. Can you tell that I am broken? Should I not go there, should I wait outside the cafe window, waving my hands, beating the glass until it shatters with me, and the cuts appear, as I set my feet on the dock, as the ice is melting and hedge a bet that I will most certainly fall in and drown. These memories become my psychosis. My feet make the steps to my room but I am not there. You have transposed yourself into your idea of things, and I am not there. You speak for fear of a future time and I am not there. The wind moves this “wonderful woman” and I am not there.

Time continues without a notion of its horrid silence and I write to stay alive, to address that which will never be stitched inside your satchel, the kids that we were before we knew our bodies hitched like they did.

Though somehow I must continue to step, to build, for I have a being-dead notion in my head. It flutters its fingers at me like a finch on a dinner table. It waves goodbye to me across this wicked good moon, shining on the water, lapping at my waves.

I know this. This is familiar.

I kiss what is left of you and say goodnight.

One For Me

2011-06-22T10:56:00.000-04:00

Here in the grass that smells like gasoline, the ground looks empty. It’s a forfeit, stranded, give up, shocking, silly girl, tragic fool, see her folly, the one who flirts with silence and shadows; it is us, playing outside among terror, it is me and you playing house.

I am at once the situation and the cause, the break after the suture. I stand for it, and by the lines sides of ribs split open cheering me on.

Go! God damn it, just go!

Maybe I’m just living here for the last little sound?

May

2011-06-06T15:41:00.000-04:00

More people were becoming bodies by the passing hours without any boundary relations, no time or specific objective to be achieved. I need to hide you in the kitchen. You were on your own for too long, even America can’t save you.

Perhaps it’s time for a reckoning, a mission acquiring ephemera, ligature marks on your ankles like in the Valley of the Wolves, for clotheslines of paper butterflies catch them around snow caked paws, and the snares hemmed and hawed, the pups dragged their feet for three days.

It’s miserable here, frankly, unlike in a normal society, we would like it, rather than feel sad, because if you bring a dead body and bury it, you would be given another bowl of food.

I am so glad you are alive. Women’s vulnerability are legion, and it’s still Sunday.

We hear word of a young prisoner who electrocuted himself with wires from a hot plate after being raped by soldiers. They say some have destroyed our lands and houses, dishonored our wives and families. Some may find solace, or glee, in their notions of vengeance, but we, in this disaster, we lost many precious things.

This is heaven: a culture of quiet respect and keep away dogs.

Mindful of the passage of time compounded by a history of slights and misunderstandings, emotion, embarrassment, epitaph, oddity, Neodymium, Samarium--it’s a blunt contrast to the given narrative-- but give the devil his awful due. Well, what would you draw in its place? 20,000 torture victims? Meanwhile, two women were killed.

On a moonless night, I can’t tell you how I feel because there is no feeling for that. The hidden meaning of the hidden meaning.

I have some bad news for you. We are home.

April

2011-05-18T15:12:00.003-04:00

To a growing chorus of “I” and “me,” and an ever-angry refrain,

we are a very lonely people, even when the border between us is very porous….

For years there has been talk, thinly veiled invitations pained and panicked, the words wrapped over fragile skin, suffering metal fatigue, grave qualms tasting like heaven but smelling like hell-- it is a merciless kind of assault--just keep saying it: a porous point of entry, a porous point of entry, a porous point.

What hurts us most are the children. The final stretch silences the voice; it once came with the Man of Sorrows, the voice came forward from his chest free. At night, it is kind of scary, especially after the garbled voices come as fatherhood comes. The voice rattles off our temples, “feed and bleed, feed and bleed, feed and…..”

After receiving the blows, we struggle to bounce back.

When it is all over, they treat her like she is a white male senator from Texas. You too can string a man with a gun and pearls. Afterwords, she sometimes thinks that the ground is shaking, she sees a tree swaying in the wind. Her memories are short, relationships flicker. “I know my work will not last forever,” she says, “though it does sound like an expression.” A porous point of entry, a porous point.

March

2011-05-04T14:39:00.000-04:00

On pain of death, repeat metamorphoses lasting, (ten days prior), and remain chaotic, until the fifth day. Does transcendence only come in halves? You turn south and ask me if it is hard to feel good with a largely symbolic gesture. You force me to form the answer not with words but with my hands stretched over a rolling swollen river, as your metaphysics reply that our revolution now needs talent, not loyalty. I am a serious split between.

Since no one knows whom to deal with, or a way to describe not running but wanting, or the weight of morning desperation, with warnings of people living, a temperate shifting. Monday’s weather: a high chance for something.

Our tea comes from the Arab desert. The sand service set umbrella rattled by the bombs that drop ‘round, we richly uncover people who do not want the truth. We can’t speak it so discourse settled. This is the human incident, as they’re measuring their words by the rate of waiting for a far bleaker appraisal to be placed upon the rising table. Clearly we are all doing a lousy job, day after day, yet cardboard tablets hit with one-liners, loaded and weightless, slap a protest to the living air. Setting out poetry for pious order to end the wars can make one feel good for about an hour. Here between the lines, the tablets speak, “I am not concerned. Life is natural.”

I turn west to feel your heart bleeding into mine and form with my mouth, “This is the moment. React or cripple. Yes, it’s hard to feel good. Yes, they’ve won. No, there was no lark.”

Highly Focused American View

2011-03-17T11:35:00.002-04:00

My daughters sit next to me in plastic chairs, the color of mint but less sweet, coloring books and crayons handled like baseball bats. The four of us fidget in our seats, thrones for girls, my great loves, sisters spilling it, and collectively we are losing it, our breath; but the timing of matters breaches the contract. I did this before you so quite frankly it doesn’t count.

Insignificant Things

2011-03-09T10:51:00.001-05:00

I stood at the window for several long seconds trying to make out the shapes moving towards my house in what appeared to be slow motion. I had no idea that I could slow down time just by looking through glass from the second floor apartment I had just rented and moved into. I was also previously unaware, as I stared out at the blue sky, winter slipping its hand up spring’s skirt, that I would become the quiet voyeur of two young people falling in love. For the briefest moment the faces didn’t register in my mind bank, the reserve of all the people that I have encountered in my young life, full of glimpses, pieced together over disparate lengths of time, until I feel like everyone I see is someone I have laid eyes on before. It was not seeing the man’s face that triggered the recognition. It was rather small, insignificant things that caught my attention and drove the memory out of its shelter, sliding down my rib cage, laying flat and limp at my bare feet. It was a series of gestures, the gait of the man, the tiny steps of the girl, her long braids meant nothing until one was tossed over a shoulder and the movement snared the man’s excited attention, his hands jammed tightly in the pockets of his pants, the black boots, brown hat, and then his blue eyes. As my mind raced over landscapes and hillsides of time, my body froze, and my heart pummeled in my chest, and before I could scream, he lifted her up by the waist and tossed her like a ragdoll into the snow. And as he leaned over her to lift her back to her small feet, their eyes met closer than I was comfortable with, their smiling faces moving with time and their bodies, as mine realized time had continued without my conscious knowing, and everything hastened until it was night, dark and delicious. The two young lovers had moved on as I moved towards the front door, raced down the stairs. Outside was cold and brilliant, hushed by winter’s ill-timed attempt to screw spring. Before I realized my bare feet in the snow, before I realized the ice forming droplets on my face, I stood over the compressed shape tracing the two bodies that fell hours before. The insight hit me square in the jaw: places where our bodies fall always leaves a spot of grass hampered by the weight of us. And though I often want to be the one to fall, I stood there in front of the remnants of a fallen girl until dawn. I had to tell myself to be thankful that, this time, it wasn’t me laying and freezing in the snow bank, waiting for spring, waiting to grow.

To Anne, My Lover, Must I Let You Go?

2011-03-06T15:57:00.002-05:00

My Dearest Anne,

I met someone on the lake’s edge under the wind and snow, over sheets of ice and what I can only image are schools of zombie fish. How can they live in water this cold for so many months? The stars, too, looked unnatural that night because they swirled in fits until the sky turned a remote shade of grey, with a dot on the horizon. All was stirred by the lapping of tongues. We were kittens and a dish of milk, sweetened honey milk, like your skin, and I was with you then, on a hot July day, golden everything, the metal row boat we stole and our wooden oars pushing the water apart. You were always delicious the way you spread us apart.

Now it’s a Saturday, the day we don our muck boots, park our ’69 Falcon on the road side, stumble half-drunk into the stinking cove, haunches bent at the hinges. Dig, yes, my darling dig for your supper. I chant these words, my daily mantra. I hate you for it. I hate the motion of your body like an oil rig drilling deeply. You distract me from what I came here to do. I am hungry and I came here to dig for food but I am all desire and I glare towards your hips pitching, your hamstrings tense as your right arm raises, and of course that one bra strap, being as stubborn as I can be, because all I want to do is slip over the edge of your shoulder into the bare sweetness of death. I count the seconds until it slips, sinking in the muck. One. Two. Three. It, me, and we always take three seconds and then a slip.

And now I can see that my life is nothing but a series of timely slips; but here, in this moment, away from you, my ghost, the one that was always just out of reach; I am dancing with someone else on the edge of ice, the edge of perfect desolation, where the soles of my winter boots connect to water caught somewhere between the delicate and hushed shifting of air, I slip, once, and a hand reaches from nowhere, catching my shoulder.

For The Love of Anne S.

2011-02-20T10:19:00.001-05:00

With all this watercolor not worth staying for and wiping down, one would begin to wonder and rethink possible ratios of mountains to rivers. Your keen eye cocks a perplexed gesture with the windows rolled down. I am tempted to reframe my own sense of nonsense yet in justice what is the difference? You agree wholeheartedly, again with the windows rolling cigarettes through your hair. I ask for a light. “I am done being polite,” you said.

As we moved along congruently, I rechecked my box with presupposed precision. I am entirely yours when it comes to the crayons, fisting crayons like the manual transmission we rode out forty miles or so until you said, “yes, here, my love, I am almost happy.”

But what if you are born a watercolor? What if it comes down to defect biology?

“Thank you for that enlightening moment just then. Thank you for shipping the great news priority express, fastened pony-saddled like an old boyfriend on highway fifty-one, riding high until the sun went grazing like the cows against the cud.”

I calm us both and retreat back into my leather seat, fidgeting with the sundials until time turned so I could ask my mother when I am ten years old, the question that I am now at twenty-eight afraid to utter.

Dearest Anne

2011-02-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

Dearest Anne,

All these men are situated. It’s an attack of the swagger. And I am a base hit. I walk around with you in my palms and old men stare at me, licking their lips. God, what are they thinking? Maybe its the tattoos? I sick up on the sidewalk and taste your pages, crumpled, always on the outside looking in. We are like mannequins. We can’t help it. Automatic automatons stretched out in ancient automobiles as if we were the leather wrapped over the cushion. Parted mouth, eyes gently shut, waiting, waiting…. now I think of my first kiss and get sick again. It ruined the dress you gave me, the one with the lace. The one where my trembling fingers fell through the spaces. I fidget forcing a nipple after pulling a cigarette. I was fifteen and his mouth tasted like chocolate, but not the good kind.

With love,

Anne

A Story

2011-02-06T11:04:00.000-05:00

It’s another late night and I am sitting here alone and crying. When does this end? Things are lost and the keys to happiness seem so far away now that I am alone, rejected, jilted still from my lover leaving me. I don’t know who to call, I don’t know who to write. It’s that day I came home early from work, got drunk and cried in a tent. It was over so long ago before it was ever declared to be over. And I don’t know how to move on. Each day is an exercise in faking it. I manage to find little slices of heaven in this lonely life, I try to be grateful but I lost something important to me. I miss the feeling of being loved by him, I miss sleeping next to him. Will I love him for the rest of my life? Will it continue to tear a hole inside me? This might kill me and I’m angry! Angry for how much I loved him and how much he ripped me apart. How much I allowed!

The streets are quiet except for the sound of the river. They are dark except for the lights that keep on all night to remind of shadows. A house sits so carefully; a tiny a-frame with a white picket fence. So idyllic in its gesture to be quiet and lovely. I wonder who lives there. I wonder if there is someone that loves them. Someone who would cry if they left. Someone who would fight if the other wanted to leave. Scared of losing love instead of love itself. I stare at the empty streets waiting for me to be lovely and you to come and declare, to decide to keep me.

This Floor Is Me

2011-02-02T10:59:00.000-05:00

I was compelled to write to you. To be honest I want you to feel my pain. I know this is selfish; to divest what is mine to bear, what is not yours;

but if you could take a little bit,

I’d feel less flat, less like the floor you are standing on.

The Girl You Made

2011-01-24T21:39:00.001-05:00

Snow heavy mountains cradle the valley and hush the road to stop what would rush if it weren’t for the cold. Instead we move from water, settling into the crevice; to ice we expand and crack a cavern and the footfalls of Man slip in the dark place.

Bloodless giving foresaw the dark place in a dream where fears are taken lightly. Feather-blades are still weapons, cardboard cutouts stand in for men while we women scream and draw in the wood. Transcendence and revelation through mixed materiality. My boyfriend once told me that this is bullshit.

And yet the deer crawl home among the mice and spiders, beating them with the slow and steady; reflections change without your reverence; children find laughter without your approval; the sun rises over morning hills all by itself with the ease of breathing; not all of our feet touch the ground; but all of our oars are rowing the same boat; oceans swell sweetly meeting the sand, and the footfalls of Man slip in the dark place finding a picture of the girl you made.

She. Me. We. Sketched from memory, tangled hair making a mockery of a white lace dress and satin shoes. She wears too much on her sleeve, she wears too much on you. She looks upon, she fits up, she eases the weight of many snow heavy mountains and cradles the valley. The stand-ins see a tornado in her representation. Their structures are in danger where they hide limitations for fear of being discovered rowing the same boat. The girl you made is the visual equivalent to your fear of commonality. I told my friend once that this is bullshit.

Modern Day Narcissus: A “Love” Story

2011-01-14T16:41:00.002-05:00

You are like a politician selling a brand of man to the masses, and the lonely girls binge eat and suck like babies with earnestness; they are made into fools, and left still begging for their folly. The other weak men see your monumental image covering your shivering lack, throw up candles to golden idols and beg to have your image, such a “doer,” a “man’s man,” so “potent” with the female sex.

“You’ve got yourself a good man here,” runs their mantra. Ladies in the room shake their heads in agreement. “He sure looks good,” they say, “and if the men believe it, it must be true.”

Yet, all facades crumble under pressure, under the weight you push the being-hearts away, who thrum so ferocious, when passed they force the forest down on to its knees, where the root of all cause, searched and plucked, having what you may not have, to pluck, to “man it over,” when you should have been being with it.

Like any good politico, having is poured out of pockets to maintain and secure the image, to satiate the insecure with grandiose affairs, big promises of change, flash a smile, click the shudder, numb them with your false affection and compliments, make them feel like they matter. Then, you’ve got them right where you want them.

Once the ballot box is stuffed, hearts are captured like rare birds, and the devotion is laid across the bed, a bed laid with the invisible wreckage of all the other girls who now, left in your wake, resemble a Hans Bellmer; but girls can not see the bones of their own kind until they themselves are stripped to the bone, so she surrenders to her desire to be desired with the hope that the desire will become love;

Ridiculous, incapacitating, consuming love, yet like a deer caught in a snare for which the deer itself has strategically placed, she hasn’t felt love, yet she is captured. She has never “stood in love” or “walked in love,” (thanks E. Fromm). The love she thought was a facade, it was possession, it was even hate on several occasions…. it was an image caught in an image, and as we all know, Narcissus was buggered for eternity for not seeing that one coming. Actually, he was turned into a flower. A fucking flower! As for Echo, she died of a broken heart.

She only wanted Narcissus to see her, to really see her, to care for her with tenderness and to “stand in” love’s deep water, companions to the surf, family to the waves, lovers to the sand, until the next day’s sun rises over the Mediterranean, as they drink coffee, smile at each other, and share a stack of delicious banana pancakes.

Life

2011-01-12T18:38:00.004-05:00

Snow dust covered every impermanent shape, swaddled my infant heart with green woolen blankets, tip to toes, sheathed and simple.

Deer, alert with wide doe eyes, waves of road winding away and letting down my love in the same fashion as flesh to pavement. Pain. Shocking pain. Endless, infinite sensations, the feeling of pain. It was my last call. I answered brightly.

Tip to toes, sheathed and simple, away we go.

II.

Snow dust covered icy sheets on the long black river. Fallen as a roller-coaster dive without the fantastic upswing. Fallen between the sheets and drank long dark breaths of the long black river. Sank with pebble and doe eyes shined from above.

“I am concerned,” they said.

“You’re not the only one,” I replied.

III.

Accept the tall dark trees umbrella safe. Accept the long black river rage. Wrap my arms around its cold surface as if the surface cold and rigid were the shoulder bones and muscle tissues of my lover’s neck. Swallow swollen belly gulps of water, ice, and snow dust cover over every impermanent shape.

Tip to toes, sheathed and simple, away we go.

I Only Want A Part of You

2011-01-04T18:01:00.000-05:00

I only want a part of you
The pretty part
The lust part
The part that is alive
And makes me alive in you.
The part that shines like marigolds
With petals and stamen
And comely rapture in the evening sun.

I don't want the sad parts
The hurt parts
The time parting the ocean
With patterns on damp blankets
Needing a wash
A cleanse
Security
An embrace.

I don't want the not-beauty
The aging
The hag
The mother
The child in need of nursing.

I don't want the fragile parts
The parts I've given
Unannounced
Abandoned
The parts left by others
Nor the wishing parts.

I only want parts of you
The parts that make me a man
Cold
Distant
The man who rises without cause
to live and love the other parts
That reside inside of you.

I only want a part of you.
I only want a part.

The Leaping End

2011-01-03T10:51:00.002-05:00

As with any ending, the leaping end bridges the gap between known and stranger, then breaks it, so as to leave stranded on one side.

Naked and rigid we step out to test gravity's illusion, feeling the tired air with our tendril lead appendages.

With one foot the world after seems light, a horizon gleaming, known, apparent. With two, a descent into darkness so quick the passing air feels like an impenetrable wall.

In the end, the leaping end; stranger still, I'd leap again.

Dear One

2010-12-30T11:20:00.000-05:00

Five A.M.

I am not well. My heart aches and it pounds and it teeters like a tree on the edge of a cliff. The wind its end; one more gust and it will fall.

“Dear one, I know you are suffering, that is why I am here for you.”

I smile at my heart.

“Dear one, I know that you are there, and I am glad for it.”

I cry with my heart.

My Ribs of Eve

2010-12-28T21:13:00.000-05:00

My love, my soul it’s black in here

Tired and brittle crackling like dust in fire

With only a borrowed belt

To tie

And pinch

To cinch in

The years of, well, shit.

Are you real? Do you live?

Do you love? Is that what you

Tell the others that find you

In charm, in smile, in eyes wild

With quick wit and small grace?

Over the snow planes, mountains to the west

And ocean raging more hell than we knew to

The east, bitter fucking east, with pines

And trees and seeds building

A tempting tree

For the next stupid, co-dependent woman;

An irritating bitch that vies for it.

My love, my home it’s black in here

I hold out my tongue tasting

Trying it out.

I hate it. I want my love back.

To tie

And pinch

To cinch in

My ribs of Eve

Torn open by

Adam (read Bastard).

Inside Out

2010-12-22T11:58:00.003-05:00

Today my eyes became fixed, watching the snow intently and with great study. I felt reverence for the way the multitude of small flakes fell with the air.

They made violins and cellos in the wind, vacillating, then finally, in a long rush of breath, met the ground to bear the weight and disappear among the millions of other crowded faces.

The moment passed quickly and romantic like a suicide jumping from a high-rise and yet in its brevity,

the impact

bore with it all the truth in the world, distilled and patient, singing forgiveness, cultivated necessity and purpose, related to me, calmed me, built me a snow castle to hide my body inside and out.

Je Veux

2010-11-15T09:11:00.000-05:00

On Keeping Secrets With Bitter Revelations:

I make pie. It tastes like cut apples and cinnamon, of being small and loved by men and children and hands warmed by the sun. The pie is always watchful, mourning the wishes disavowed even before it stands on the edge of two pink cliffs. Press so we keep the truths that hide out behind tight teeth.

I want.

Tempting to tell the secrets in a foreign tongue: décés, amour, enfants.

How long have you had this affliction?

Je veux. Je veux. Je veux.

Is that all you can say to me?

I want. What else can I say?

I check the locks because I am not safe and I tell the secrets to keep the far off places at bay. Here, I am most exposed. There.

I am most exposed.

Rumination of Difficulties

2010-09-21T10:57:00.000-04:00

There is a place where brief concrete hillsides throw lashings for free. Here I am, less invested-- holding all my pennies close. This is a road to starvation, marked with sign posts. I walked it with my sister on a dare to see how close we could get to all the ghosts before chickening out. We did and left to resume ordinary children’s play. I would walk it again in a second just to see how grown up I’ve become, how mutilated and forgetful, and fearless to silent trees, looming in the rumination.

II.

To the sun I wear shades. I have changed. Aged. Stiffened to the revelation. And I know with a quiet certainty that she is not me. I am not the same. Now I take pride in how much I allow. A need is only required after you acknowledge it, like a ghost. It is not there. It is not there. It is not there…..

III.

Hunt it down from outside to the basement. It’s time you drove my honey somewhere as it hardens, before it won’t go any further, as it chickens out. Who could tell the easy love? Who would want it? The hard love, it is not honey, it doesn’t run smooth, nor does it arc through time, and soften life like old cotton. It runs like a field on fire, it is a desire to return, like a ghost, hillside lashings. It is not there. It is not there. It is not there.

In Your Absence

2010-09-15T11:51:00.003-04:00

In rough waters I find where to stand. It only takes a little practice. You hold out your arms until you don’t feel inside your head. In your absence, there you are. I was in the space between. I stood there for too long and now my legs burn as I carry iron in one hand and feather in another. It feels like locking in a tipping edge. Power and land remind me, so I continue to go.

II.

Here in my life, I don’t erase anything. Stacked in piles, I stand on a pyre of configuration. My heart pounds when I time travel; vision blurs when power lines converge with a pulse quickened to attack stage. Mark the pace where hands remind pressed temples to unravel continuation. I can’t keep pulling at my chest to get out. But I must pull at something; there is no other way in which to connect to all those lives I so ardently love and all those flowers I wish to make grow; to be lovely and possessed by someone. To be swallowed up by oceans, I go spreading the beaches, leaving remnants of myself to rid and shed, to be a part of something, to dissolve and tear at the space between until I am not here.

III.

There is a story in everything, a formation of bodies rich in skin, felt tentative and replenished when mouths rip its memory with motion and spit. When it matters the clouds hang among us. Nothing is the same since they erected. We keep it to ourselves inside the steady hum hushed with index and curled between two dabs of light. They keep pulling at my chest to get out; there is no other way to connect with a story, to discontinue the timeless, to feel a memory, to live with those I so ardently love, whose skin is a temple to shiver and climb, to make grow, and spread out like the oceans, so I can stand like I am not here at all.

Letters to Anne

2010-09-08T22:08:00.001-04:00

Dearest Anne,

There is an indeterminate amount of emphasis with you and I. It bent as I stared and waited for a profound feeling. The dream folded and wrapped us like paper. Later you will say it was nothing. I won’t admit it. I forgot. I am not a loved one. I repeat. I am not.

It is stuck in my unkempt hair and paint-stained jeans. Again with that old-familiar. Our conversation passed in time like counting drops of water in an ocean, like pressing our feet to the breakwater, as it worked us up, worked us over, looked with love and spat us out. We won’t admit it. I will forget. I am not. I repeat. I am not.

An indefinite sound travels through the vast space where we once sat next to the sea. Just a quiet exchange between two silent souls. Keep speaking to me over the crashing waves. It will forever be our place of destruction. Our place of near death. Our intervention.

Here without you I must climb to reach calamity. To stand on the tip of danger where a single misstep would result in our meeting. Away from the open water, away from your grace, your linen, your terrifying clarity. From the cliff I will slip back and spread like a branch. Together as one tree reaching out to sand jetties. We keep the secret. I won’t admit it. I won’t forget. I am not. I repeat. I am not.

The Peel of Stillness

2010-09-05T15:30:00.000-04:00

Some have asked me what the Peel of Stillness is. I have thought about it and decided it is something like this:

The Peel Stills while potential love walks out the door, calms amongst tornadoes, and watches the dust settle. Disinterested in what the wind picks up but covets it all the same, it eliminates absolute meaning and distills it in a tilling of gardens where footsteps keep trampling down the rosiest of roses. It is all these things and nothing.

What Is Fair?

2010-08-31T16:24:00.001-04:00

Dearest,

These power lines draw our shoulders inward and dark roads set the fog just right. I compete a line to fit the sentence, shown to the moon golden and tipped the top mountain under a beacon of light.

I fight to resume power over my shoulders and dig in like a razor until it surges and wears down the branches to matchsticks that distribute flame.

I spoke to you again after I vowed I would never. A relapse skillfully planned and executed. Self-sabotage--an affliction. Cold wearing a peacoat isn’t as funny as one might think. It is a disaster, absurd, a repeat of four years ago.

Write a memoir. It’s easier than explaining to your future children what a prick you were to the women who loved you, who sat up for you in bed, brought you your slippers clutched between teeth, pussy and tail wagging obnoxiously.

Find My Love: The Avett Bros.

2010-08-30T22:39:00.000-04:00

http://www.sendspace.com/file/8fdtxt

A Hundred Thousand Remarkable Nothings

2010-08-26T23:42:00.002-04:00

I.
Each time I lift my head I think of dead things and the way they linger among the flowers, outstretched as the wind takes my wrists to give up. Unknown branches eat with tight mouths in the corner of my room. And I remember too vivid with glass eyes through a slow lens as I get used to remindings and the endlings, all these loves are gone somewhere under an orange sky.

II.
There is a house next to a river and inside the contents of a drawer lies openly. My iron fist in a velvet glove once inhabited this space, next to love letters and wedding rings. I always knew I’d ruin the water and place it in the bath. It took everything to lift my limbs. My legs tell me to ache, for what does it mean to be a woman without? Just like a tailored made suit, it’s too perfect. It needs to be ravaged and ripped, a hand-me-down for centuries to be worthy of you.

III.

Somewhere else in another remains the wreckage; dead things eat the edges of memories, cradled, waking up, settling in the cracks. And like a bird's nest made from each thread that fell with a button, and a tiny thistle cast in the wind, collected with precision; all of the things I still remember are a hundred thousand remarkable nothings that make up something worthy of myself.

The One Who Doesn't Know

2010-08-22T18:02:00.001-04:00

You’re as lovely as a diving bell when water turns your blue eyes to the hesitation. It breaks the ice. What once was a mirror to the look of love is now a standard motion of invention. I must prepare. You regret everything you said, you forget my lungs, and, I put me in the green, and, as I said, for what it’s worth, you are, a sliver. And silken is the thread that binds.

II.

I cut my hair and sculpt out the strands to form the woman I will be. She is the old one in gray and sunburned skin. She never lives indoors but sits on the fog and performs with repetition, and stuffs it in small, green vials. Such is her daily practice of becoming and becoming, untying the silken thread, only to be it again.

III.

The mountains outside feel like another planet entirely. They burst in fits and weep at bus-stop terminals for the one that got away. You can stare at their beauty and wait for them to move but they just stand and take it. They have the rain ready for absorption before the rain is ready to be absorbed. The mountains are the dividing line between you and I. Fitfully so.

IV.

As usual, I’ve said too much.

I'm So Lonely

2010-08-17T23:17:00.000-04:00

She is so perfect for you. So absolute. A marble staircase to your broken heel. And I can’t escape this. My hands become my mother’s. They have the same creases and the reluctant way of coming at it, spindle on the wheel. I am writing you a letter now. I am drunk and the words spin out like reels. Haven’t caught anything good lately, haven’t been the peel or the steel. Desperate. I close my eyes just in case. It’s like a note forgot to give, a passing time through a sieve. A sentence that I regret to spell. This is crazy. The way a wrist stands to mean anything. A circumference laced with haze for a pinnacle moment of magic that will never be. Light hits a note like a prize fighter. Thought that I was done. Down and out in exact sense. One fifty a fortune teller’s fee. I figure my hands like spiders. I’m so lonely.

The Last Letter to Joshua

2010-08-14T19:27:00.000-04:00

Dearest,

It was a warm night after a light rain when satellites moved with a quick breath. As if surging lungs planned and mapped their trajectory towards the sounds sent out like morse code to a loved one. These dots dashed in the black velvet sky with more grace than I bargained for. I am so clumsy, you hate it. And I can’t tell you in words how this moment feels.

It is becoming hope, lodged in regret, blossoming with the end of summer flowers in a quiet walk in the garden. I must confess the despair has lifted a little, like a curtain, silently taking the shape of a vessel in which to comfort the lonely stars underneath a wine dark sea. But I need my compass. I need so much to be alone, and to taste my body with the tip of my lips, to form sentences as a practice, and pace on the earth.

This is my last correspondence. I don’t think I need to explain. But I will. You have taken too much of this beautiful universe, more than you deserve. And even with your tears wrapped in a paper cup, and my first stranger’s kiss, and a perfect reflection of the window in which I wish to jump, in haste, in joy, in grey skies, I still bite the scar on the inside of my lips, hoping to feel it, hoping I dreamt it, hoping just to have hope.

For the last time,

The Letters to Anne

2010-08-13T00:40:00.000-04:00

Dearest Anne,

I am you. I wander around holding my temples and spinning out of control. I am a message in a bottle but in the unromantic sense. It is a tragic plea. A want so entirely dreadful that I count it in numbers. In twenty-nine years we will miss each other. We are in graves, fisting the earth, watching the gold rush for wedding bells, because when we breathe we go a bit rigid and tell ourselves we are better off.

You and I have better things to do. Writing. Smoking. And singing to the mountains because we couldn't bear to see the temptation, for fear we would pull it off; drive the car over a bridge, drown with the fish, wink to our reflections in the water.

My Anne. My beloved. I envision you in linen, your long legs and curly hair reacting to the coast line as if your body was the breakwater. Your arms are two lines that say grace and the movement all around you is death intervention.

Death intervention: what are the odds? Ten to one says all the Virginia's, all the Idols, the Chrysanthemums and Calypso's are not standing around a table mixing love potions, and blessing the sunlight. Something tells me we are the losers to the goddess divine, who partake in daily consumption, outright absurdity, with a healthy dose of self-deprecation just to teeter on the rim of metaphysical conviction. Something tells me we could return to the temptation again and again, in our best clothes, suck at the tit, ingest the world, carry our unrequited torches, lit by acid, and still bleed without the slightest bit of convention.

Something tells me that I too am watercolor. I too wash off. I too am mesmerized by the monuments of women that solid men climb, returning with regard, while we tear asunder days and days of pounding brutality to our self-righteous claims, as we stretch our skin like raw hide, part our lips like storm clouds, bow our heads like the faithful, give blow-jobs like repentant, reach for comfort under a mattress, straighten our backs like the old elms, chins cocked, hands steady, desperate grave walls caving in.

Eternally Yours,

Anne

The Letters to Joshua: 31 July 2010

2010-07-31T12:48:00.003-04:00

Dearest,

I miss you. I thought to fake my own death, rise and walk in disguise and come to you in the night, like a ghost. I read your letters. I present them as evidence. See. This is what you said. They are so few and you don’t write anymore. Not like you used to. Used to is all there is left. Used to love. Used to talk. Used to be. Used to touch. Getting used to anything is where the dead really lay. That’s the strange thing with death of love. It dies but it doesn’t actually kill you and the world doesn’t end. But now it feels wasted. I returned in two-dimensions, a silhouette because after death the world shifts its perspective and you see it like an old movie-- nostalgic, an after thought, a “wasn’t that nice.” Love isn’t supposed to make you feel bad. It’s supposed to be like that willow tree, we walked under that day at the orchard, as we picked and ate green and red apples, held hands, you said you love how things intrigue me, after I got lost in the way the willow whispered. I looked at you and thought how strange it was that you could see me. And now I stand sideways, obscuring my own view of days gone by. It means nothing. And pretty soon I will forget what you look like. I will forget the sound of your voice. And the dead weight will rise. And someday my pain will approach you and you will feel it.

Warmly,
R

The Letters to Joshua: 27 July 2010

2010-07-27T23:19:00.003-04:00

Dearest,

My body forgave me. I had left it stranded, over there, by that road we walked on. It is so unlike me but like me so much, all at the same time. Now I stack the pages and listen to songs that tell our story. And like in a bad dream where I scream and no one can hear me, I wave and wave, two arms, flags beating the air, and they tire. Can it be calm now? My arms hang like laundry now. When I punish myself in the tiniest ways, I search. I speak often to deaf ears. I type to the blind. I found your pictures and studied their expression. I break them and weep until they tell this little masochist to fold her shelved self into the corner where you can’t see me. I crawl the corners of everywhere picking up the crumbs of us, because we were bread and butter. My Buddhist friend tells me to keep breathing, keep going, “down seven, up eight, but the reality is I am fine.” The outside seems bigger now, filled with a breeze of absence far greater than I could have ever conceived. The leaves clap like maracas in the wind and I am reminded of how much I have changed, before when I was taking pictures and making plans, taking care, and breathing regularly, and then I jumped a train named Derailment without a careful thought of who I was riding with. Of who you were. And you don’t know, do you? You can’t tell, can you? It tastes bitter, doesn’t it? You left me stranded, over there, by the river where we once kissed. And now my body forgives you, so goodbye.

Forever,
R

The Letters to Joshua: 25 July 2010

2010-07-25T22:19:00.001-04:00

Dearest,

I wish I could be the brave one here. I don’t know how you do it actually. Maybe you could teach me sometime? I guess when you get something into your head you don’t let it go until it’s set. I want you to know that I am trying to get my life in order and take back some sort of semblance of a life after you obliterated ours; to find some peace but I am lost. I did it again, you know. I got myself into deep shit and I wasn’t properly rigged up with safety nets or suicidal poison, and I let a little of me get away. I lost myself in you. I was somewhere between your clavicle and throat until you dug me up like roots in the garden you once tended. I would let myself drown day in and day out, until one afternoon I sank down to the bottom alone and you never came with me. You wouldn’t join me. Instead you moved away, and cringed at my embrace. For what? To save us? Now I don’t even get to talk to you anymore and every minute is about dismantling and breaking, breathing until the very last fiber that once tethered us to be taller and better people is severed, burned, buried, dug up, crucified, spat at, diminished beyond any recognition of two lovers. You will go off and fade like a whisper and it will just be done. Apart of me died when you ended me, and I just sit here and bear the winter you bestowed upon me, your burden you wished to divest. So there it is. And now someone else is in your bed, holding you while you sleep, instead of me. My dearest, I’d like you to meet two of my closest friends. This is Insult. This is Injury.

Regards,

Bad Penny Girl

2010-07-24T22:11:00.000-04:00

Where are you these days? I sometimes think. I am sometimes somewhere and it was sudden. One time I thought I was somewhere and I was yours. Where do I lay these days when I think you must have disappeared? Perhaps I made you up entirely. My sweet imaginary friend. My lover I was forced to stop and grow out of pretending. There are real people out there and for love they are defending. The transition hurt. They all want to touch me and talk of their day and ask me how I am doing, these complete strangers, and so I came out of it, thick with bruises. I came out with all these damaged parts and dead things, sore like frost bite, but the wool they provided helped a little. When I try to place it all into context it looks a lot like hanging on to something that won’t stop moving. If I were faster, stronger, if I could shut my mouth I think you’d like me. If I were pretty and quiet, a movable piece of furniture, easy and portable, I think you could have loved me better. I find myself looking for you with anxious intentions. I don’t know my bearings and I work out my thoughts like little inventions, grown used to having, now just left with wanting. I am the bad penny girl. Turn me over. Find me.

Little Radio Heart

2010-07-22T18:09:00.001-04:00

Loving is messy business for the self-possessed. They brush it off like dirt after a clumsy fall, their head snapping up to make sure no one saw their lack of grace. No one noticed. No one wants to watch you. Sometimes dirt sticks to you, lingers like perfume, builds you up like a tower, and her like a monument, you tear down in an act of desperation. The self-possessed were the kinds of kids that broke things open, tiny parts eviscerated. Lack of function breeds boredom. On to the next thing. A delicate pattern to be repeated. Fantasy girls replicated. A muse manufactured because you refuse to dig your beautiful hands into the ether, the viscera of depth and meaning. Anything dirty? Not for these ones. Skimming the surface of the undone because the undone one is far easier than anything else ever built with compassion. Self-possessed one, you are little feel nothing, little hurt word, little wound spread open, little lies told. Little power, you’re a little mean when honesty in meaning is the only means to a happy ending. Little control instead of give in. Little step back instead of meet half-way. Before you know it self-possessed one rummages the barn for a tiny red tool box. Little tinker. Little adjustment. Little smash apart goes my little radio heart.

There’s little left.

Broken Things

2010-07-21T22:27:00.002-04:00

These wild rifts come in pains and pieces. One minute the forest is rebuilt the next it is destroying itself for no good reason. To be carried through the fray, placed unconscious and beaten to a pulp; to be cared for and kissed incessantly like drowning with all the tiny bubbles of oxygen that ever existed: these are the options.

I drink until I am numb from the waist down: a blessing. The last thing I want to feel is that, neglected part. I focus on the heart of it. I wake at three a.m. realizing my tastes have changed. An hour later, I find the tissue repairing itself with needles and thread from my mother’s cupboard. My rejected heart, one second you are on the mend the next tearing through another visceral death. It’s horrible what thoughts can do. They make you believe in things that aren’t there. They assure of things that were said when it’s clear you are just plain crazy. Time to give up the ghost you have trapped in a cup. It is time to stop wasting your heart on broken things.

You Should Have Called

2010-07-19T18:01:00.002-04:00

Last time you knew I was on the beach somewhere, face down in the sand. Dead. Or worse. Sad because I lost my compass. I lost my range of home. I had put energy into life. It came back with a carrion and a note that read: Sorry darling, but I love another. I slept with someone else while you lay dead. I lost your phone number so I couldn’t call. I can’t handle “this” so it is time to leave, my dear. Time to pack up your life and go away, to sleep through “this” and gather the remnants of your heart that I cast up the coast, all the way to Acadia, where we never got to see because it was unbearable. Gather them up like socks. Wipe your face. Try to look strong and pretty. This is the space in which you take too much.

Last time you knew I was on the beach and you didn’t call to make sure I was alive. I was dead but that doesn’t matter. You still should have called. I couldn’t pick up, but I love you. Doesn’t that count for anything these days?

Last time you knew I was on the beach, the sand and rocks played havoc with my heart, running it over the coals of the fire I made between my legs. It was all I could do to not run in the waves, but they were pushing me away, cringing at my touch, shrinking with the closeness I yearned to be apart. The water stung my eyes and I pushed back with all my might but I fell, headfirst, on a rock. I died. You still should have called.

Move When I Move

2010-07-18T15:47:00.000-04:00

I've been sleeping in a padded room, in the dark, for twenty-one days because your absence of love has made me crazy, just like the loons that would glide on the lake all those days ago. They are insane to want the water, when the water wants dry, as I am. And I noticed today that I don't bleed anymore. I keep waiting to wake up, belly swelling in motherhood, something nurturing, instead of vacant, but it just recedes, creating a valley between two points, two points that once met yours until sparks hit the ceiling and we exploded like dynamite, leaving a shattered terrain all over the bed. These are some things I remember in my padded room, my straight jacket, my four walls that, thankfully, don't move when I move, when I need to be steadfast and not speak, when I want to shout and sob over two useless hands that can't hold onto a dream that never existed.

The Waves Show Me How

2010-07-16T19:40:00.006-04:00

I can sit without blinking as the water laps with the turn of the moon, for what seems to be a lifetime. The waves, jealous of my inattention, hum a song I once wanted to dance to, with you, slow, with my cheek finding a home on your shoulder, hands setting camp on your back, heart clambering for a string to make an attachment to yours. The waves show me how I loved you, again and again, relentless, paced, forever. My hands fly to stop the clamber and I wonder how my shirt got so wet. Did the ocean finally get me? Will I drown in this? I blink once and agree.

This Is Reflection

2010-07-15T15:50:00.000-04:00

This is where I do it better with glass. This is reflection. This is how I love you and you can’t forgive a whole slew of unfortunate circumstances. This is you not making it better. This is how you are selfish and though you recognize it to others you can’t acknowledge it to me. This is how we stand; like enemies with guns pointed at temples that once touched in time with tenderness as you whispered, hot in my ear, “I love you, I love you, I love being inside you, I love everything about you, I love you.” This is how determined you get. This is the cold you offer as it deflects the cold as if the cold was warm and transparent. I hold onto it until my hand frozen in box under the bed so I can’t fuck myself when you won’t touch me. This is how hard it is for you to see. It looks a lot like kicking a dog. It feels a lot like being kicked. This is the loneliness. It has a mouth and it bites at my breasts like you used to do to get me off. This is the way out. This is the “I’m sorry” and what it sounds like. This is you turning on a dime, on a heel, catching my mouth in the slow, excruciating, broken, idiotic, swollen like an ocean of letting go, taken for granted, pushing away a loved one anti-practice. This is death and torture. This is our pain across my lips. Terrible to treat a lip so horribly. It swallowed you and kissed your stomach and the satisfaction came in torrents. This is your rejection and rejection after rejection after I love you and love you and love you. This is me dying and if I get to heaven my only redemption is turning pain into something profound, something to change stark reality into fluidity of form, with lines blurred and dreamy, abstract and foggy, and of course hold out my heart, hold out my hands, hold out my love hold it my dear and find your legs attached to a little earthquake. This is my heart broken. This is your indifference. This is you not wanting to make amends, make friends, make dinner, make nice. This is where I plead to get a second chance when I didn’t do anything wrong. That is your joke. This is my open book. This is you offering the starving a crumb. This is me hoping to be deaf so I can’t hear you say, “I don’t want anything to do with you, I don’t want to spend time with you.” This is my desirability washing down the drain. These are your beautiful hands. Those are tears, something that comes out when people are sad. Today you are holding onto being broken. This is where I do it with glass. This is the reflection.

Tell Me How

2010-07-06T17:54:00.000-04:00

Tell me more about how to hold onto the man who runs with trains. Tell me more how to make the days go by fast and as they speed, forget the station and run away, at least for now. Show me how the sand slips through bent fingers, and subdued love disappears with the changing winds. Tell me how to slow down my pace and sit still for a while, long enough to hear my own heart beating and the hunger in my belly. Tell me how the lovely hands traced over me the beads of blood through my lonely body whenever the waves rushed up to meet me. Tell me about the forest among the moss and canopy and the song birds, so they care for me, for a time. Tell me how to find the right words to bring back the man who runs like the trains.

Notations

2010-06-28T10:03:00.001-04:00

At night clouds hang like pictures nailed against blue wallpaper yet they change as soon as you get to know them, much like people. Their shape speak the words of their evolution, from UFO to ocean liner sailing past you, sure and slow, pausing for a moment just long enough to take a snap shot of how much they affect your life while you barely graze theirs. You look down at hands to take note only to see your heart flailing like a fish in oxygen as the noted description falls to the water like a weighted line cast out without proper education of syntax and multitude of the brief. With an upward glance the pictures dissipate making disillusion glaringly plausible more than the perception of what you just felt for the end of day; the future cries for it and your struck when pictures fall off the wall.

These Meters Matter

2010-06-03T08:54:00.000-04:00

These meters where I left

them. This matter my hands

where you muttered. I sat, measured.

You lined my fit, I referenced

the man. I appraised my captivation

with the calculation of a mathematician,

surveyed the coronary landscape with my

philosopher.

Reenactment

matter used to, to who? ---- the asset?

Ours is divided, drawn,

and quartered.

and yet we came up surprisingly

short.

Life In Perpetuity

2010-06-01T09:47:00.000-04:00

I'm famished, and all you're giving me is a crumb; but

I am so grateful for the inconsequential

substance, that for a time, I forget that

you are the

one

starving

me.

Fatalities Of The Heart

2010-05-31T10:46:00.001-04:00

I want my hair to grow long

so I get caught in branches,

green tendrils rich in tenderness.

I want my legs to thin and lengthen

so I leap to small comforts like opening my parent's fridge.

I have a wrinkle in my forehead from being a fatal speculative.

I want to be that black dog on the wood porch,

bathing the sun and the sum of all parts until

my lungs collapse like an asthma attack. I'd die happy

with good owners and the bicycle visitor

rubbing my belly as I lean in for a kiss.

I want to write a poem where everything turns out right

whether I want it to or not.

I want to rise like the old oaks, the ones you call beautiful

and feel the rush of summer winds brush my cheeks and

whisper, "everything is going to be all right."

I want to believe it but the wrinkle in my forehead

reminds me. I am a fatal speculative.

No Home

2010-05-06T20:24:00.000-04:00

We are no home to speak of, my love. No home hard finding no better.

And as the world shut off I lost a part and I grieved for it when the split came after adherence shed change; a shift from heading the stern presence with both hands on the helm, to hanging limp from your coat. I’m coming in last. Mars you’ve made sure of that.

What happened to you my dream woman? My perfect last forever, my, my long-lost, my birth and realization? You were a woman to hold me. Who witnessed my miscarriage, as mine flew forth, instant with beauty and speed. What happened? What changed?

I have no home. Just a teasing heart. A mono blind-sided prime meridian slapping a cold front onto my aching legs. An immigrant burden bounced between borders while you decide what exactly you’d like to do with me. What happened to my passion? My charm? My beauty? My amazing way?

Twenty-seven years and a dozen homes fostered like parents, broken like earth, past around like whores.

We are no home to speak of, my love. No home. No better.

Wise, Wise? So, So

2010-04-18T21:20:00.000-04:00

I got home with the light, so I wandered around without my head. How long do I stay under the droplets? I hovered over and held outside like a blanket, just tight enough to warm as if the rain made up something other than itself. I just stood there. Getting wet. I wondered if there was something internal going on; some kind of a joke or a distant memory perhaps of safety and needing. I felt like I was five or something nostalgic, my father tucked in my body, far from the monsters, grandmother humming.

But I need this old-familiar, at least I don’t quite remember wearing a badge. Me without my head and with bees rubbed against the walls of my eye sockets, (which, by the way, is how the rain is made) crawled to another.

I consulted with my roommate, the ghost of a child who liked to stick her head in the oven and play copy-cat as I stood underneath the torrents, getting wet. I remembered that speed takes a time out. Pretending drinks the full dark well, knowing full-well that its belly can’t take in an ocean; it can’t consume before it begins to resemble the very round body; it becomes less like love and safety and more like greed and safety in numbers.

Now I’m told to sit like a good girl; a girl occupies time like a good girl: Be patient. When wearing a dress, keep your legs and your heart crossed. Don’t chew with your mouth open. Don’t yell at things, inanimate or otherwise, wise men. And for God’s sake stop loving boys so, so much! This was my laundry list of chores to be finished before supper, with mouth and face washed, girlish behavior kept in check when the men come home. But what if it takes a whole army to raise a child and all we do is grow up fighting? And smug, hoping for something good to say? Or something to mend? Darling, I am really, really good at mending. But things melting? What if I am already wet?

"From Absence to Oceans"

2010-02-21T08:01:00.000-05:00

The debut collection from Maine poet and painter Renee Lauzon, From Absence to Oceans is unabashedly honest, often hard-edged, descriptive, and transformative. Written after the end of her marriage, the collection is part autobiographical, part fiction. With the force of the Atlantic, the poems gather the past and the present into a flowing narrative that broaches themes of identity, pain, loss, regret, and introspective transformation.

For sale on Amazon.com.

Better People

2010-02-15T11:47:00.001-05:00

perhaps the nightingale will dispel

the truth of us as we wither in sleep

and tether to be

longer and better people

our arms like soldiers

after the battle was lost; we rest in the morning gaze

speaking only of what will come of us

as the forms change like growing trees and children

and the sand turns to tides

swept away for comfort when ill at ease

perhaps this battle is a truce

and the slackened nature of our white flags

stop the bullets dead, and shatter like dandelion seeds

against the lightest of breath

hitched and let go until another time

because time is wasted elsewhere

when somewhere is not the here

in which we tend to be

stronger and better people

perhaps we are what we say we are---

and not soldiers at war

augmented by the presence of time and

each tender, trust, and comfort

we were good alone but still,

to each other

lovelier and better people

I, Like Mothers

2010-01-15T22:10:00.000-05:00

For a time I carried you like a mother, close to my chest

each beat encouraging each of the other

as fingers groped for a breast with boundless uncertainty,

and an eagerness not yet known or understood.

and while standing at the edge of a quiet mountain pool

hovering over the reflection of your self, splitting the silver moonlight

you will not fathom the contours that make up the outer edges

of the world that holds you; this unknowing cracks the visage perfectly cooed in your ear

once by your once supple mother, and you silently scream into the ripples of water,

wondering to yourself how you’ve managed to get it so wrong all these years.

and I, like mothers, made mountains out of mole hills

and stood under the bold summer sun, to shade you in my shadow so you didn’t burn.

and I, like mothers, scooped your ruined body from the darkness,

fled until my feet would fly, to quell the cries of pain

rivaling a tired flock of gulls, until the bleeding stopped and you loved me again.

but I, like myself, will reflect upon the damage done by these hands, they've

claimed so many missteps that pebbles are now breeding inside these palms

but I, like myself, alone, will sit in the morning, overcast by the hands that wrap around the stone that shades the planting of a seed of doubt into this empty womb.

On Things Gone Missing

2009-12-15T12:22:00.000-05:00

remember the looming knots

and the not letting go

I know you know what about separation

the wife-made beds with self-made men

more of the more and less of the when

when it was just enough

and we were the kids

with fists full of wonder

to cast upon the liquid, calling the cliffs

from an ever-widening horizon

(don’t take it personally

infinite isn’t to be had)

the knots are now chains

and the not letting us know

when we get older speaks betrayal

like trying to nail each other down

in the snow, we clipped the wings of crows

clamped them on and settled in

settled to the shifting

years shelving the selves

have gone missing

So You Think You Know The River

2009-11-30T20:39:00.000-05:00

current heart hitch up skirt

lay with ruin and river

time to sit like stone

breach liquid and listen

like the tongueless

The Fruit of Desperation, Otherwise Rotten

2009-11-11T20:43:00.000-05:00

tangled nets

wrapped in thread

crash in a cacophony

of murmured gestures

sucked on sheer cliffs

breaking against the rifts

each grasp sears the fingerprints

of those who long to touch the sky

points of light add insult to injury

to desperation

to paddle and kick

about the gravity of waves

succumb, my dear, it spoke in anthem

succumb and we will share our fruit

bitter and rotten, it grows

from snarls and furls

by the roots

it tastes of passion, quick and fervent

bursts with bites of euphoria

it comes and wraps and beats

pulsing once more as it goes

more abrupt than

exchanging glances or air in and out

of lungs

it goes and it’s over

what remains

are the pounding waves

the silent cliffs

and the kicking

the kicking

Grow With No Mouth, Love With No Mouth

2009-10-28T09:35:00.000-04:00

What lurks and lingers,

shadowed beneath the blue

and black tongues

lapping tidals and stealing the pink.

The old-familiar;

that cold day when the waves

ate your beloved

and you forgot to expand your lungs

and warm them up

or sing praise to having anything worth anything at all.

And as the moon shifts her lunar skirt

to pound your tidal waves

it cowers like a child lost in forests deep and blissful

and I forget the reasons to

come

home.

I forget home

and replace the heaving chests

that contain thimbles of chance

with certainty wrapped up in whatever has

washed upon the shores.

Feeble and necessary it is to scrounge for

what lurks and lingers beneath the blue,

stealing the pink.

Of Sea and Pleasing

2009-10-15T23:27:00.000-04:00

I am having it out
and having again.
Having and greedy
and giving up.

Of sea and pleasing
The land is pleading for one more round.
Falling out and falling up.

Speaking At Clouds, Shouting At Waves

2009-09-23T10:00:00.000-04:00

Clouds, they hang like telephones

that have outgrown their receiver.

Drenched and heavy with vapors of speech

they blow this way and that way

across the grey sky, the grey walls

scratching the paint

casting leaves up in the wind.

Fools disguise shouts for muted whispers.

Sweet cherub climb down the elm before you get a spell.

Indignant legs hitch like trains until branches burn,

and splinters arrows and bows and strikes out.

Yet, instead of arrows it throws waves at us, and we shout

and get wet and swallow

and our capes dance like children.

On Transition And Other Careful Things

2009-09-18T20:42:00.000-04:00

Why do we head south

and hang heavy

and split open?

You always say, “come at it full circle

or round-about-straight-forward.

But don’t let the door hit you

on your way out.”

Just a precaution.

Things aren’t good.

They aren’t bad either;

but like storing food for meager times

we press easy moments into woolen looms for warmth.

Unraveled and knotted up they come,

if they come

at all.

Winter

2009-09-03T20:14:00.001-04:00

Button up bare fingers

and

fall

to lace up make-believe,

with limbs that can’t write themselves.

A dream of trees scrapped against the spines of others,

tearing up the last stitch of sky. We stand while it splits. We stand like rocks.

We stand like visionaries, but we are not.

Hands hold the weight of imagination--

shaky they shiver out in air thinned by winter,

kissing the wind, then it leaves like all intangible things.

Trees wait. They shift.

Stillness hushed. They break,

with crunching footfalls. Retreat.

Still-land disquieted by groaning birch:

An effort to

keep up with Daphne?

Snow is coming soon

and jacket buttons falter and fall

deeper

drifts.

Follow them in just to see how

cold stitches can get.

Do not mention what winter hides inside these layers of comfort.

Not until Spring,

not until the tulips burst

and the crying spell is lifted.

For now a sore mouth bleeds out

and thistles speak.

When We Crash, Is It Soft?

2009-08-27T22:20:00.000-04:00

Will we converge across this rapturous sky,

through this

pre-Autumn rush of driving rain,

fooling the ending of

means

to become

something to admire?

Will we grow weary of the open air,

the air outside our lips

while our hands build tents made of cotton;

decaying traditions

of home

find

our own

version--

one to take with us?

Will our rip current pull celestial tides,

and provide a sailing vessel,

or a parachute to descend gently sinking beneath the

bed sheets of those

who have been

properly

loved?

When we crash,

soft?

On Love And Courage

2009-08-13T20:12:00.000-04:00

Breathe and breath transfuse

the still action

within a silent space

and a lung is at once drowned

and swaggered

that

braces

the

questions hiding

in our voices,

yet in trickery--

we choke them out.

Breath and breathe confuse;

hitch and gasp tender throats in

a subterfuge of

gray matter

and fall silent once more.

Moon says, “simply sleep.”

And so, as steady as a tide

slips over breaking waves

we rise and simply

fall.

Your Mouth Can't Carry

2009-08-11T10:26:00.000-04:00

Mouth needs ten more days of you
ten more days to sound out reason
to firm things up with circled motions
to cup the non-verbals
and spit them out
(they taste rotten and mistaken)

Sound out the reasons for being
lost in pain behind the failing walls
rummaging through borrowed time
wailing against someone’s loneliness
to beat a sea that complains these days
about thrashing stones into infinite particles
when sand is all it knows, all it wants
but bored of it, still, with wanting to want it

Your mouth can’t carry the words through your
borrowed line of courtship
your borrowed handbag of womanhood
this borrowed thrill for being in love.

We are takers taking what ever we can get.

If I Wanted To Get Out I Would But You Could So Leave

2009-08-11T10:22:00.000-04:00

This house screams,
testing the boundaries of speed like
whipping grass fields under metal wings.

Forcing my hand is like
shoving you off a cliff,
then you claim your wooden cross.
I am not your murderer,
your dog, nor
your worrying bone.
So lay off!

I may be the absence that makes the heart forgetful,
and a tad disloyal.
I could be the long lost cupboard that holds the remnant hearts.
You think I am a time traveler and a prophet;
but hours and scriptures never gave much comfort.

When it rains we huddle around our wet blankets,
wondering what ever happened to our drier climate.

The Fisherman's Wife

2009-08-11T10:21:00.002-04:00

With tangled hands like ginger roots
we formed the early morning
into patterns that broke our stride
upon the widow’s walk.

And the fog rolled in longer than it should
casting a fish net blanket onto our watery lips,
dripping down, again, over my shivered skin,
rolling past the deepest questions of the day.

We rigged our skin up tight,
and spread out like pearls shucked from clams
and then we took them for supper.
It was a sexy thing; you and me
tempted in red boots,
slick with my caviar and your caveat:
“Just this once and I am never yours,
blink once if you agree.”

But hammering waves, you need to be tempered;
slow your churn so I can get you to last.

You told me,
you preferred solace to the chains,
preferred this over one hundred tiny little deaths.
So I ate your pearls, I licked your boots,

and then I slackened thee,
chin cocked up.

For you were just a soft maybe,
finding your way out of a deep, heavy water.

Love Poem (a conversation with Cupid)

2009-08-11T10:21:00.001-04:00

The wind is closing doors and clothing opens like a
love poem.
My dear wished to be satisfied
in a house by the sea;

but my heart let go of loving,
like standing in the dark,
afraid of tasting the wind with split tongues,
trying to be brave.

Like a forgotten sunset,
I feel nothing Arrow!
Hit me again.

You, Me, And I

2009-08-11T10:20:00.001-04:00

You take me partially, like I am too old,
as if I’m forty-five pillows,
when all you need is the bed;
a pen and not a pencil,
on a page
raked with subtle mistakes.

You took me rootless, when you’re unseeded;
Forsythia’s brooding
now flower sweet when we need
something more
sturdy;
a steady break in fretless boughs.

I’m taking it reckless and cocky;
because I am better at it
when our potential is between my legs,
dripping down the deadbolts of another
broken doorstep.

I told it breathless
until bracken scratched our crooked spines,
and we found a better footing
inside this thorny grave.

I’m lugging myself around like a sad, old purse clutching
my deepest desire,
belied until I find you one better.

I Do Not Know You But I Do It Anyway

2009-08-11T10:19:00.000-04:00

At the doorstep,
I do not know the black widow,
nor my growing hands,
and I will not speak of the killing time,
an ill-tempered moment of tattered glass,
growing like acacia from my fertile hands; hanging like
roots from my bitter feet.

At the kitchen table,
I do not know scooping fragmented things
with shoveled hands.
I will not tell how to pull out bloodless springs,
clinking soundlessly through the night,
spiking out a call to arms
from my pressured nails.

In the bedroom,
I do not care of the pain in which you speak.
We cover ears while we eat bits of persimmon,
bodies stroking the last bit of silence
left inside our bubbled world.

In the driveway, I don’t bother to hurt me.
Collecting spiders and tracing sounds trapped inside boxing gloves,
was a futile attempt to punch holes at life,
or was it more like mirrors?

I do not know you,
but I do it anyway.

Laid

2009-08-11T10:18:00.000-04:00

I was laid last night
aside a darkened room,
lit up with a sure fire way

and we sat quietly,
calmly watching by the sideline
as she surged behind a wakened bed,

freed by a solitary middle,
terrified by our muffled syntax
and the dented beams of light cast down and up
like watery themes.

We dislodged silently,
betrayed by bent knees
slackened with hosiery
and filled with rain.

A pulse is quick to judge alone,
frightened by that muffled sound,
would-be betrayed mistress by
light of day, by mundane things.

Biting cotton slightly satisfies like lovers’ sputter;
like a moth, lost in a cold night,
only to find the last light on earth
in a blackout.

Eleven Ways to Grind Your Teeth

2009-08-11T10:17:00.002-04:00

I sang Truth eleven times since two thousand seven,
And a chunk of my heart went missing.
Wolves at my door, door at my feet
but halves of wholes tend to separate.

At four hours and one day,
I go by antediluvian time,
Stuck on shelves; a forgotten
misshapen doll, lacking feet.

Cohabitation is a delicate
march to a busted drum.

Ah, noise! I forgot how much I love thee.
The thrumming like teeth dragging behind a car.

Alive

2009-08-11T10:17:00.001-04:00

I am alive
Though to a degree out of speech
While Luxury writes the names of the ruined.
She says, “Give head or worse,
Give advice.”

Alive and so lovely
As some qualities and textures of our tighter universe,
I could kill them!
They touch my breasts when all I asked for was a cup of coffee.
Surely there are far too many to outrun, even with five legs,
A pencil, and colors.

Alive
Though to a degree of reason,
And while I have a hard time swallowing
These surreptitious pieces
I fall like a pro when I’m cut down to size.

So carve, my love;
There’s blood on the line
Participate;
Light up your eyes
Say it’s dawn,
Ten thousand times...

Crisis Averted

2009-08-11T10:16:00.001-04:00

Chew the meat inside my cheeks;
It is there to nourish you, my love.
Drain the holes and fish hook me,
Harpoon so I come along.

Is it the bad blood between us that
Glues us to our sheets?
Sticky skin special?
But only on Sundays.
Most notable and desirable delicatessen
So we die from and dive in a
Bloody crux: a sucking chest wound,
Where our bodies cut like arrows;
A wellspring slice around spring
Wires my teeth so we cannot speak.

A lunch box carries my larynx
It is all a part of the high-jinx,
A lark within a lark allows fiery.
We can change our minds;
Instead of burning at the stake,
We are the stake!
Luckily a hard rod sears off fingerprints.
Problem solved.
Crisis averted.

With Reverence

2009-08-11T10:15:00.002-04:00

There is no more South for this vagabond
North ruins and runs flesh,
Sets adrift.
Our comfortable thought is over;
So save it.
Paper icebergs form the gentle, repetitive
Discourse but not in proper order.

For the Moon loathes the sun on its cell
So quiet, like a heartbeat
Terrorizing like rotten love.

So leave the horrors behind
Bind the body in three,
With reverence.
We shall see.

Man's Dirty Laundry

2009-08-11T10:15:00.001-04:00

While rain raked the wanderer
And tears dripped on the hillock,
Lilacs fell under the weight of salinity.

I hedged a bet on love
and boys held the edges of the Earth by thumb and finger
Like coin-op-instant-gratification-dirty-laundry

Legacy traded sisters with me,
Peace and Certainty bend briars into question marks.

Wet clothes and defects;
They linger like old jewelry
Dash against the reeling tides
Sing with the wanderer’s song.

Wed the Oceans

2009-08-11T10:14:00.000-04:00

Spoke aloud as hope and thieves took their arms
Beaches beat the sea into gray matter
Tired and battered against a thrashing moon.
Fists fly with swan’s white grace into sinning hands.

Sleep tired and restless moon.
The kingdom of animals ripped out their throats
And tied their shoes to power lines
The snake charmer lives in gang land now
Nothing is needed of you.

Spoke quiet as faith and vigilantes took their place
In this never ending battle between birth and race
Teeth chattered, chomped on the bit
As half children buried thistles and left.

Sleep now tired and restless earth
Wind and snow will bury the burden
Under ancient eyes and wed the oceans
With makeshift promise rings.

Absence

2009-08-11T10:11:00.000-04:00

Absence of the tall shade trees
spark with ice and fire,
Spitting to offset.
Retreat thriving forest!

Ambush the spines to crack
the blue and green flames
With every intention cast down
And broke free of wanton thoughts

Inherent to breathing,
birch bark sheds what little seasons
are remembered;

Invert young leaves
hold the flames within.
Clamber out of oneself to
breed another.