Monday, December 22, 2014

of and for Anne Waldman and Reed Bye

Like a marionette forgotten between performances

I wondered if any of the others had wooden planks for parts so fractioned and dull as brushwood that it became nearly sexual when finally their posture straightened and they hobbled the vacant stage


Sunday, July 20, 2014

Somewhere deep inside himself a frightened child creeps into the early morning warmth of its parents’ bed while
I stand out in the open again in the substratum of all light and sound inaccessible to most—I am confident that all is well that the poem does not lie to us and that I’ll never come back from the strained face of mawkish love without which there is nothing


Monday, November 25, 2013

Body as the Integral
In j/j hastain’s poetic exhilaration myrrh to re all myth, hastain has realized a cosmic endeavor.  The introductory image and text deploy the sexual processes of the jellyfish, how it “…replicates itself with infinite capacity/rendering the jellyfish organically immortal” and in that we are introduced, amniotic, the dark, visceral cataclysm of beginning.  But the beginning doesn’t end there in blind awakening; we are posed the question: “what are the places you’ve never been touched?” which immediately brings this reader to the once-virgin wanderings of my own fingertips, the groping closets of adolescence, the writhing, uninhibited thrust of confident underpinnings, and then at once to maturity.  In maturity, we may find that our fingers have not wandered as deeply as they once did, and that we (still) long for the slight grate of nails, tongue wavering above pubis, the feelings of loss in where we have not been touched, or have not been touched in some time.  “You are making them in me,” hastain states of these places, the places untouched, which simultaneously arouse youthful hope and dire misdirection.
“This is a romance of fractals”, one of conjoining and disintegration where “an endless prothalamion” meets “vigorous holograms” giving us the impression that love/weddings/gender identity/form/content are illusions, temporary calibrations of flux emotion without the soaking ruptures of experience awe.  When desire is pendulous, and knowing
that I came back into
form
in order to feel myself
refusing
frame
it is difficult to feel anything but distraught.  Wrought from “a paper cornea” from which interpretation/projection seem ultimately penetrable, fallible, utterly manipulated, to an “amniotic marionette” in whom it seems we are all puppets in love, lust, in the disintegration of self.  What is there for us if we are all strung up/out on genetic limbs, hoisted by social predetermination?
But when all seems hopeless, a rose dying in static water, hastain brings us back into confidence, realizing that
it is so much about how
you belong
not what you belong to
differentiating between the real body and the given body.  We are all given a form, an identity, a self, but what happens when you outgrow the flesh, the pronoun, the title, the masculine/feminine social obligation?  What does it mean to be a man?  What does it to be a woman?  Are we inside each other any less when we ignore our sheer sameness?
Yet, even in our independence from each other, there is an absolute need to be touched, to be welcomed into arms:
you are curled so tightly into me
that there is nothing else
but this sense
that I am yours
that this is what I am
designed for
softening the borders between desire and satisfaction.  hastain writes that “only through the body/can form experience form” crystallizing further the notion that drawing lines between ourselves, our experiences, is a violation that requires blending, in order to perhaps transform into a new self, one that is everything and nothing—converted by a kiss.
My experience with this text was one of great humbling; hastain’s vocabulary is both scientific, poetic, and profound forcing readers to not only learn and relearn themselves, but to dissect their preconceptions of poesy, of others through intimacy, alienation, and the radiance of undiscovered territories we so ravenously invent and, as hastain writes:
perhaps it has always been
that I don’t want to be
a perfect
but I do want to be
________ ever-changing, the conditions in which we exist.  So, in defining these identities, these preoccupations, we are in essence limiting the extraordinary, the boundlessness of our own humanities, imperfect, (un)original, raw, pushing and pulling you inside me, me inside you, unencumbered by the restrictions of flesh: become the transmutation of loving expression, “electric”, “immortal” “to become a thing/that would never need to second guess”.
As hastain writes, “this is how/I becomes we” “so much like inserting/waves into waves” a finding and relocating that requires of us a willingness to contort, to use our “interior retina” to locate a “venerate peace” where we “love in countless dimensions”.  “You must meet me with the vow that I will not ever be the lace/that you wasted”; the lace, the latticework, the delicate intricacy of romance, human relationships, love, and how truly sensitive they are regardless of flesh dimension.
Whether myrrh here is used for its medical purposes, its fragrance, or both, we readers are guided through a distinct biological endeavor to not only understand, no, to inhabit our bodies, but to realize that our flesh, its costume, its sensory delivery is defined perhaps more conclusively by our relationship with what we touch and what touches us.  hastain leads us into the mouth, the fleshiness of tongue, the rough abrasion of teeth, and swallows us down and from there we are given a choice: find our way out, or succumb to the transformative nature of all beings.

Thursday, October 24, 2013

a very dark god

            nearer then farther, thinning and thinner still farther urging intently. is showing darkness nothing else than nothing and not more particularly signaling lights below than parallel to music is clear.

Saturday, September 14, 2013

1.
This space is occupied only by bodies in motion.
The former is not unrelieved; a correct picture of the psychic norm, the history that I know did not allow my senses time to wake for others.  It is the essence of modernity, the yet unnamable glimmer behind your eyes, those seemingly abstract and arbitrary signs still igniting controversy. 
Define language and writing elsewhere.  Remain enigmatic. 
A few words next about translation, and then we enter the text. 

Body, rupture, loss, I must, surging with cadence, experience time and distance I wrote my name in red ink the various ethical systems shudder to contain.  I have followed you as far as I can, the planets closed to your bray blazon I’m going to find out what love is.  

Saturday, September 7, 2013

Whether it’s explicit or purely embodies
Why not admit that my dissatisfaction reveals an excessive ambition
a tiny spasmodic thrill that is the end and the beginning of jouissance
one tells of her insomnia, another of her migraines, and others of her nervous rash and her nervous tic
all born with a taste for pleasure
a kind of clawing and biting to clear a path
through the irritated swelling of pulled hair
to silently take up residence in our bodies and minds:
the province of the animate
follow their course euphoric
at the first seminal drop
Almost every day, you tell me, you are forced to run in sudden panic
before launching into narrative
an affirmative outburst that immediately fades
burning the back of your hollow throat and irradiating the barren combustion of thought
in continuous conflict with your head, skin, bladder and bowels
It is tempting to assume that the images of rampaging felt an undeniable relief
in ceasing to be beautiful
pulsing and shimmering like an animated painting
of a bleeding, literally headless body of its queen



Sunday, August 25, 2013

mumble among ourselves

hush sunflower confess one thing.  You are everywhere partial and entire.  Nothing moves no words appear.  Wake a short narrative the hunger which finds a way to deal with a recurring and unseemly position.  The first phrase corresponded with need to form condemned to depend on something other.  Love song poetics but what do most know of windblown curtains carefully deliberately and wholeheartedly stolen.  But to be left with names translated into screams someone else’s country but this landscape gaping with holes restless birds dislodged the body brims romance through repetitive action.  Unbound complete—each brushstroke speaks sweetly of home.