POST 200: A CONFOUNDING ASSORTMENT

AS SKULLS TEAR BY


Another heavy
metal morning
A worm one
enters the abscess
of the city in
(or the excess)
as skulls tear by
I can’t breathe
as little as
I’d like
but love
your black cable
wire window bouquet
and love this bloody
nose anti-war paint
punctuating the streets
to go silver
and revise
another heavy
metal morning taut
in the fetid
gaze merger of trees



LOOKING SEXY FOR PEACE
for Erica Svec

These paper roses
seep black
from the swollen elbow
of her ceiling as John
smirks through
curly detergent
stillness, dear friends
forever crowding
out lack only
to fill it with a new
and indefatigable lightness
looking dangerous
or sexy for peace
as quaint Buds sprout
in the plastic black
where our hands meet
or suffering nightlife
we charge victorious
into the blue char
of summer, subnormally
wrecked with petals
sleeping over


SNAPSHOT AUTOBIOGRAPHY


First
nowhere,
now
here.


SIXING


Squint
Sequin
Secant
Second

Beckon
Bedeck
Bedlam
Meddle

Middle
Milder
Wilted
Walden


GRASSROOTS


Assholes continue to amass
Poking a dim axis
Of symptoms into happy hour

But it is I who
Judge, dear Friedrich
Winnowing grace

While the jukebox cycles
To submerge chatter
With its middling solemnity

Let me speak plainly: fuck
Less from shame, dear
Asshole mash, you menace well

Short of honor and no
I won’t speak
As plain as I should

Know better, the ceiling
Gorgeous with tin, the organic
Strawberries staining

The TV personality sipping gin past
Ethics, a new hole
In the heart I use for purchase

Curious about wealth
In a violent way
Unsettling each scotoma

The magazines wince
Into commute
But for now going nowhere

As the city chains
Further so
As to foster its uninter-

Ruptedness into our bustling
Cache of asym-
Metrical longing, gross


Billows rising
From the mouth’s open
Awe where we lope

Like a never before
Played song played by brilliant if
Untrustable musicians

Staring absent or
Restringing their hapless
Instruments into line

The jukebox breaking
Into Pixies, the bar
Cat sniffing at one scuffed

Shoe after another, rubbing
Up against nothing and for fuck’s
Sake it’s already half-past

Eight, we should
Be at church, Elaine Equi
Is telling our fortunes

PART FIVE

In a way, I had been preparing for the last couple hours for years. When I say, “we were not set,” I am speaking from an idea of the possibilities that I had been nurturing for some time already. It was as if I had been preparing a kind of hearth, a nest where the possibilities might shortly reside. At first this nest building consisted of word collection. Certain words stood out to me with an uncanny resonance. Disequilibrium was the first and would prove to be the most ornate. The others that followed—veer, oblique, provisional, amid, etc.—seemed almost like sequins that flashed and danced upon disequilibrium’s turning form. Or, further, I think it may have been these words that gave disequilibrium form. As these words accrued and the form of disequilibrium emerged, it became easier to recognize the implications it proffered. We were not set. A balance was not struck. The movement was not linear. The understanding had nothing to do with stability. Or, in more affirmative terms: everything was already veering into the improvised performance of the real. But perhaps that sounds too vague. This is the problem with language. We have developed it to express definite content. Unfortunately, there is no such thing. Ask yourself: “Am I already moving?” Ask yourself: “How many layers of ambiguity exist between this movement and myself?” Ask yourself: “How can I see myself if I am a moving target?” Answer yourself: “What is the use of an arrow if it is always moving?”

Yes, sometimes in the midst of becoming something else, a process that inundated us over the last couple of hours, the answer to a question was a further question. Answers, after all, in the Platonic world we had been thrust into since birth, only worked to shield truth by gilding it. And now how far we’ve managed to stray again from the body! It’s as if we are repeatedly drawn back down into the medium of our discontent. In the dying words of an alcoholic poet: My vocabulary did this to me. So, then, more questions. How is it we became so sure life was lacking? That there was another life preferable to the one given us? Does it not begin with the misperception of an alternative? Or, perhaps, a denial of perception altogether? Is it merely a trick of language? The imagination’s great betrayal? And now who is being melodramatic? Obviously we need to return to the actual events of the last couple hours. At some point after the shaking of the hands, or during, but after we had entered the experience of our own shaking and become it, we became visited by voices. Language, no, but voices all the same, and this is what kept us free from the nonsense above. They began as gusts. One small, deep, guttural gust after another, rising from somewhere central within the shaking of the body. At first they were simply expulsions, like a withered bag wheezing its last pocket of stale air. But soon they evolved from gusts into grunts. Or more likely the grunt was added to the gust. The vibrations of the body seemed to be pulling forth a new capacity, hitherto forgotten in the miasmic swamp of unmediated expression. Gust, grunt, glory. Gustgruntglory.

PART FOUR

Contrary to love, one might have expected the last couple hours to crescendo with a blood wash, a bouquet of limbs. And to the degree that we were pulled, ecstatic, past the horizon of the body, its practical violence did become an immediate, throttling aspect of our experience. Another of the things a body does is destroy itself. Or, at least, parts of itself, maintaining a certain resilient sum with which to proceed. The cells, the bones, the neurons—all of it under constant threat of overhaul. Let’s take the bones. There is an age when some sequence in the cell DNA tells it to stop refurbishing the integrity of the bone structure. Until that time, tiny proteins spend all their lives destroying the bones so that other tiny proteins can build them anew. This process fully refurbishes the bones every dozen years or so. Teenage bones, until the end, don’t exist. So, suffused as we were in the non-totalizable unity of the body, these sorts of processes did not go unnoted. But far from spelling out a sort of terror, they seemed to exist as a disproof of peace. An affirmation if you will. The violence of the body affirmed the body as a place to go on living. And as for the violence we’d become used to—the newspaper apocalypse, each morning returning to herald the depravities of abundance, of disparity and riot—this was conspicuously absent. It was as if the world had ceased to enable the archetypes of human drama. There was no revenge, no redemption, no plethora of reactive forces engulfing the now. Nor was there any feedback imagery, no involuntary ticcing of war or the daily, almost domestic carnage we’d come to know. Once, and only once, I was visited by an image that was plainly disturbing. The image of a dog, splayed, entrails rent across the soiled asphalt of the highway’s shoulder. Then the lyrics of a song: “To be red tendon dog, blood breathing by the side of the highway.” And of course it was beautiful.

In addition to these sudden song memories, what could be heard in the last couple hours was legion. True to Cage’s word, the ostensibly inviolate silence of our contemplation contained within it a great aural wealth. But where Cage had made it seem abstract, conceptual, this new flaunting of silence was the very essence of physicality. Suddenly the shudder was sounding. The shudder that we was announcing itself, or ourselves, in oscillating sonic tides that rose and retreated in consonance with the body’s unending revelation. How obvious, we thought without thinking, sound is touch. To vibrate, to sing. The body is a music, an unruly symphonic mass from larynx to synapse. The mess of the body—sloshing, zapping, choking, warping, unfurling, lapping, etc.—creates an aural field that fills and colonizes the air that allows its passage. It also reminded me of drinking—the undeniable intoxication, the gleeful loosening of self and loss of stability. There was the mysterious confluence, that feeling of throat and liquid undulating together, the substance indecipherable from the mode of its delivery. So it was: drinking in and spilling out: the same.

To quiver was to sing and to sing was to imbibe, torquing the last couple hours into a kind of spontaneous bacchanal. But would that have been evident to a casual observer? Having been an unmitigated participant, it’s not a question I could answer. And what might be meant by casual observation anyhow? Causal is more like it. All that time we spent gutting the wreckage of our world so as to see more. That was the problem with seeing. It filled things, created things, changed things and everything appeared casual. Appeared. Seeing reaped and harvested, carving deeper into the illimitable surface of things without touching them at all. The more I learned about seeing the more I saw that cause was effect. It’s like that old worn phrase: seeing is believing. It really is! But not one and then the other: both, simultaneously. And as cause piled up on cause we casually looked the other way or looked directly at it and did not see. If someone “objective” had been there at the end to watch us, he would have been wholly oblivious to what transpired. If someone “objective” had existed, that is. It all depended on the cult of separation, severing the real from our perception because we had been told it was insufficient. Severing each being from every other so as to isolate some convenient truth.

Unfortunately, language is also a technology of convenience, and thus far my account of the last couple hours has struggled between a desire to express things in terms of an experiential real and my inability to fully escape the realm of conceptual abstraction. The latter intrudes and impedes by dint of learned and, perhaps, neurologically embedded habit. But that’s where the last couple hours approached a kind of suturing magnificence. They constituted a situation. We became situated. The place-taking of site returned to us at the intimate circumference of our own bodies. And in being sited, situated, we were not set. It was as if a spotlight had been turned on. And we were in the exact spot where it had been pointed, patient, waiting. It was the sensation of performing, but with the added realization that the performance had been going on for quite some time. Already performing, then, in the spotlight of being situated, conceptual abstractions seemed to flake away. Qualities like warm, loud, wet, rough; these ceased to exist apart from the particular physicality of things. Where before they had drifted separate, unhinged, ready like transparencies to be laid atop the blank slate of the objective world, they were returned to the objects themselves. The notions of objectivity, separation, isolation, severance, definition; all these fell away like a dark game whose rules have been exposed. Or: we ceased telling a bad joke.