9. arouse alive / a suffering

new monster

the conferrence of all blame onto myself is an act
of
rage

self-loathing does not make me weak
just
limited

horizons a bloody mess--
the world a cage--
each sunset a butchered side

yet each shining vermilion and
strips of marbled white, the eye of bone
like the sun

i may close my eyes to breathe
but i am nobody's bitch
but my own

raucous freshness

for e.e. cummings

she was so fresh so ridiculously fresh i could smell her when she just walked into the room
so i took her for a spin
it was like spring rolled right off her after a bitter january and i could see what i wanted was it so wrong
to take her out on the road

she was so new
she was so fresh
so new and fresh and tender

and ready to ride in
they don't always know when they are ready
but i could tell.

dearest

there was something off
about the turn of my feelings for you.
as if you were the knife
i used to slice myself a door
walk into my heart and
carve carve carve.

deep in the hearth of me,
there was a reckoning made
between stone and fire.
i did not wish to hurt
the image of you, not even
with the tiniest breath
of heat...nor to betray
the stone of myself
with anything like hope.

then i was angry at myself
for loving you, until
my stone heart cracked and
the fire poured out.

deep in the cavern of me
is a coin,
flashing gold--the currency of you,
yes,
but also
something concrete
you left behind--

vanesa, i am filled
because you left me your worth.

roses

autumn makes success and failure
look like what they always were, that is,
moments on the line of time, nothing more,
each holding its overfullness of good and bad--

it casts time out like seed in the hand,
like broken shells marking tide-lines at the shore,
life-full and empty both, the twist
of things that can be felt and seen, their core

aspects as blind and hidden as a lintel-less door.
the lie of spring and summer, that what's known fits
with what is seen and touched, is over,
and autumn comes in private, its touch no grander

than one's own unknowable touch, no surer
than one's own face when looked at in the mirror.

resonance

i don't need a voice to sing, because singing is the thing that grows when nothing else can.  you and i know it; we all know it--you strip everything to make a song.  you strip the things that make you to dust and bone and heat, and in that desert your song grows and grows.  so that the wave of the sound is never a repetition, a dulled oscillation, but rather a force larger than the space and time it moves in.

ich grolle nicht

relentless mouth with your
relentless hungers.

veronica

meditations of a monster:

my policy is always to say what i don't mean.  never to hold conversation accountable for truth.  because truth isn't easily expressed, and spoken words are in their nature too easy.  i like to be around inside them like a dancer inside her streamer.  i like to hold them out in front

like a cloth pressed to a face

so that i can rage into them and people still hear laughter.  and cut into them but people feel caressed.  as long as your intentions are pure it is easy to decieve people

like a cloth pressed to a face

because people instinctively know what can harm them, but everything else flows by easily as time.  and the skin peels down so soft, so fine

like a cloth pressed to a face

easy like a loose-rind tangerine.  as if i were straining a ricotta. 

zinc metaphor

some would call it relentless whining, but i choose to think of it as recycling, what i do here on restless mouth.  the topics i examine over and over with the staleness of fixation, reteaching myself to hold onto my first love, to rechronicle and rerechronicle pain black as a prepubescent's ballpoint ink, and in the simplest of all possible terms--colors, things that don't hang together, conceits resembling badly-jointed furniture.

and i read ginsberg's chronicles of his everyday, his autoerotic travels and his visions, and so much joy, so much incisive, every line scissor-cut with love, accepting himself as--hell, striving to be--outside the grid, and he writes with joy he doesn't understand.

but i'm passing, and it matters to me--matters that i don't make my difference a thing of uncomfort for anyone else, matters that i keep it as private as a sore in a lightless place.  and so i prowl around behind words, throwing the same ones at the same subjects.  i write with words i don't understand, though, and subjects i don't understand.  and i never understand them any better.

i just

throw farther.

i wept in a dream: nocturne

for e m...

don't ask you to
heal me--don't want
to scar you nor
claim too much nor
ask for other than what i
really would like--just

want to
do you.

no lies and
no offers i
could make
without keeping

nothing about
the obviousness
of your beauty...



opportunity, feeling
like a red horizon
grander even
than the flush
to the forehead

opportunity what's between us
maybe

would call it
something better
but no good
with words.

milton: nocturne

for e m...

i feel something different.
as if i were quivering
on the cusp
of a new world.

don't want to say much, though--
it's hard to say anything with any freshness anyway.
i mean, for example,
your eyes are like
flowers
your mouth like
a flower
your hair
flower-like
your face
fair as a flower.
because flowers
are the most beautiful things in the world,
i guess,

or at any rate they will withstand
comparison
to you
if only barely.

quietus: nocturne

for e m

want to be
the bitch at your feet.

want for some amount of time
to be some one single thing,
univalent,
uniplicitous,

your
spaniel
this may not
be
normal

meditations of the beast: nocturne

for e.m.


exhaustion sets in like
a hot wind
weaving through
the petals of
a rose head

a sweet exhaustion, not
the metaphysics
of what

but
the delicate threading
of a hot wind a
languid definition
just
after

i thought of you
and reached inside