About our last conversation, I misspoke. The story I heard was this: Once there was a prince, and he was a dunce. He left the windows opened during the storm and everyone in the castle drowned except for the rats.
I want to be austere, I do, but I wasn’t built suchlike. That you forgive me is big of you. The story really was: Once the dunce-prince turned everyone into fish because he could. Some fish were old with heavy whiskers, and some were his friends, so they lived in the good coral. They weaned the coral into turrets with spikes.
I thought to wean meant something different. It’s actually more fraught, and that’s the polite word.
The story I remember: Once there was a queen who held a speck of filth in her hand because it entertained her, then the dunce-prince distracted her.
You may have heard the opposite. You may remember differently, as it was a contentious era. It might have two sides to it, one translucent and vulnerable, the other gritty as your tongue.
But enough with the rumors. The story really only was: once there was a girl and she sucked life out of every marrowbone offered her. And now I’m soft all around, and now you’re a little bit old, a little bit loose in the chin, and you’ve lost it, haven’t you? I still have the shrine of you and your foibles, still want to share a cell. Time is a different keeper for me. Toward you, between then and now, I walked in your shoes, double-time, because there was so much of you, dripping over the sides of me, the carnival we were.
Once there was a girl with long fingernails she used to kill her enemies. Years and years avenging old hurts. Then she got wrapped in a skein of silk and carried away by Eagle. I mean that to metaphorize the amateurs’ terms for a golden mean.
I thought, I am drenched in regret. I thought, in the shower,
I am wee. You thought, the woman must be drunk and lonely.
You thought, purification takes her so long. You thought,
surely she’s in a baptism state. I thought, my inherited disposition
doesn’t excuse all my gaffes but should. I thought, five-six-seven-rinse.
You thought, if we are thrown down the cataract, will we be crushed?
I thought, everyone depends on me for certain pleasures.
I’d like to be released into the city, but I’d be eaten whole.
You thought, I stopped reading art for this. I climbed
over barbed wire for this. I thought, a penny saved
is not enough for the twenty-first century, so let go of
agenda. You thought, what part do I let loose? The media
or the arts? Is this the Zeitgeist trope?
I thought, so I’ll try better. You thought, then let’s pretend
the big thing never happened. I thought, is it too late
for church? You thought, with hair gathering in the sink;
she’s growing old. I thought, I am making myself over with scraps
I steal from others. You thought, open the windows
and let out the roaches. I thought, my art is waggish, sad. You
can’t have déjá vu by proxy, so we’ll each earn our own revision.
I will say it base, you understand
Crossing a bridge and a narratologist tells me about harbors.
This is before I know you navigate your car through a landscape
of bridges. I’ve got an inkling of your smell. With that,
I decide to do everything right, knowing the magnitude
of that task. This was prior to your mouth.
This is what I mean
Egoista is how to say selfish. Ego: the self. –Ista like pharmacist
or philanthropist—one who traffics in the self. Last night,
I couldn’t stop describing my flaws to you as serious
and possibly fatal, but you darned every incision.
Which is to say
I can tell you everything that ever happened
because it’s already done. What about
what I am capable of ? I’m afraid of the next day.
And we
We are a fascinating sum. We have been squared,
spliced, and negated. Our totals have been heaped
with words that don’t equal.
(That’s my hope talking, making us the same container.)
It must be obvious
I am vain and conceited. I steal. When I am scared, I lie.
I love the water curtain of opiates. I’d abandon you
for the trifling. I cry foolishly when I am in love. Broken things
in love. I don’t know love. I love like a –philia.
I give love wrongly. I give it with spite and for greed.
Is that so bad?
I stuffed the gag of duplicity in your mouth,
and you bit into it. We were cruel probes.
We fixed the curtains
so dark would be ours for a time.
I saw you sleep,
so I saw you, my purgatory.
Forgive me, they were delicious
The windows are open. I speak through a fan
for the serration. I have a set of keys
to your house and to your car. I ride in your car
to the gas station with your money card.
I sit in your bedroom wrapped by your quilt.
I spill a circle of black ink, so not domestic,
and soak it with milk from your refrigerator,
and will be contrite and docile with you
and will leap at the sound of your
godwhistle at quitting time.
(1) The disorderly display of kissing with tongue is now public. You tear through your Shakespeare for reference or pull on buttons with the edge of your fingernail or yell you’re so passive-aggressive in the Indian restaurant. The origin has already launched itself outside of your orbit.
(2) She makes a promise she’ll appear and then she doesn’t. You wait outside the circus holding a balloon and she’s savoring that moment because it’s a war. You’re made two slivers like brittle soap. The violence drives you to the sublime hell of your gaze. I recommend the city. You can dazzle and grift, disappear there. Leave the cell phone behind so you return to its pulse, pulse, pulse.
(3) You make it a lucid narrative and tell friends different bits and pieces. They help you put it back together like it’s a puzzle. You amend the unjust parts and keep them as your own private scabs. Just don’t end it with: And then the light fell like shards of rain, because no one will believe you.
(4) In an embrace, you’ll find the sweet spot at the knuckle of the neck, under the scapula, in the fold of the armpit, and mark it with a flag of spit and your nail sickle. Not just sinful, but coarse and profane animal behavior.
(5) You’ll say we won’t fight around other people and you fight around other people. Shameful, what you toss in the other’s face.
(6) You refer to everything through cinema, say, this is so Before Sunrise or I had a Last Tango in Paris yesterday. You’ll blush. You’ll twist away. Oh, the trash you’ll read in magazines as scripture! The odds and ends of mania.
(7) Is it not what your mother once told you about the cow and the milk? Mad love? Yes and no. She lives on the surface having risen years earlier from its depths. Your mother considers your situation from a terribly myopic vantage point, trainspotter.
(8) He leans his head and makes a moment so rare it’s sacred. Or a mouth opens just so that you tangle in a hotel with strangers. The lighting of a lighter becomes hypnosis. Hair is disguise. The plumb line of an off-kilter face makes a bridge into you drowning in blue iris.
(9) You get violet thinking about it, drop by drop, absolutely violet. How will you fuck it up? How will you throw it in the rubbish bin of life? There’s no atonement. If you play the piano, that might work. If you make more money, that might work. Even at the beginning lives the end. It starts to die when it starts. The thrill of this is you do it anyway because dying isn’t so bad.
(10) Waiters are the most dangerous of men.
(11) The only depth: your undertow, your anesthetic. You scratch at your neck like Ophelia and her total drown high.
(12) To trounce, to pounce. To conquer, to vanquish. To domesticate, to fever. To defeat, to occupy. You’re transitive with a capital S. Bring a handkerchief and a steady hand. Bring taming stories, lots of self-pity. Bring fancy scarves to use as ties. Bring pillows and Viagra. Bring recipes featuring scallops and turmeric. Bring recipes featuring mint and lamb. Bring muzzles and tiny boxes of shells collected on weekend getaways.
(13) Mumbles on the phone. Sexting. Codependency and its tedium.
(14) You leave parts of yourself all over the nation. Bits in Northern California, in the far south of New Mexico, Iowa, Paris, Cuernavaca: bits to leave the grackles because they live off of the cast-off flecks of your core.
(15) You start as strangers with each one and they become a compartment in you with her habits and her sweaters, with all his stray bits: a Cornell box in you, the wreckage, each of the hims, the hers, the them.
When the telephone rings, I let it ring; it’s a term of my exile. I can allow ten feet of rope out the window and only four birds may visit the telephone wires outside. Figure it out, they tell me.
I can’t look forward or to the future or to the door of eggs and wives, and only three hold jailer’s keys. My hands, coy companions, look terrifying now, like claws or cloying snakes.
If the window is open and a parade passes, then I must close the window. Some terms involve windows, although I only have one.
Terms about how much I can say about the president. About how many cigarettes I can smoke. The length of my veil. Can I play Aaron Copland at five? One that insists I read recovery narratives: tracts in yellow ink.
My exile has terms that aren’t proscribed. Pushed out of shape and stretched, a price I fret over like the mishap of my hands over my face, the metropolitan succubus.
I can tell my past with abstract brushstrokes only. Black or white. I can’t even give a detail, tell you I was too young to see what I did, or about the length of my reveries. I am to memorize old maxims, then apply them as curative to my impertinent torso.
Fear of heteroglossia.
Fear of mail fraud.
Fear of carpeted stairs.
Fear of being perceived as phony-allergic.
Fear of noun plague.
Fear of magazines about walking.
Fear of mispronounced tenderness.
Fear of pens with chewed blue caps.
Fear of the memory lacquer.
Fear of stale cookie cups.
Fear of celebrity cellulite.
Fear of exile.
Fear of the vengeful God.
Fear of the slag curves of compact fluorescents.
Fear of lost Monopoly pieces.
Fear of the unsalvageable CD.
Fear of the memory that loops.
Fear of the empty telephone.
Fear of the metal coil of your notebook.
Fear of public bleeding.
Fear of your painter friend.
Fear of Hummers.
Fear of nickels.
Fear of white rooms.
Fear of the fear that the current takes you.
Fear of the songbook.
Fear of pencil shavings from the workday.
I came to know my rival’s name when it got posted on the billboard across the street. I saw them come and take down the old one pasting up my rival’s golden hair first.
Each tendril was as thick as my wrist, four or five shades of yellow in the picture. I couldn’t see her left ear with all that hair, but an earring, a ruby. We live in a windy city, so they could barely tame her face. One man held one corner and pinned it back. The other man pulled his end taut while this went down. He patted her rouged cheek.
It was just the face and not the body. Her mouth was big as a lifeboat, like she could save us. Her giant eyes followed me like the Mona Lisa. I stared long to see if I could know her, so much I came to know her story. Then we were connected.
It was spiritual. We began to look alike, her face as mine. I adopted her remote and pristine mannerism.
Eventually I wrote her to tell her about the goings-on outside my window. Since I had her audience I also told her about my grief collection. I felt like I could tell her anything and I did. I began at the beginning, spelling out for her the twists and turns of my exile.
I told her that I called myself Rapunzel after our long hair. I took pictures of her from every angle so she could see what I see.
The letter took me months and meanwhile her face disintegrated with the weather, bits and pieces of my Dorian Gray.
The lyric tires me because
it’s so familiar and open-mouthed.
But stars—my default,
a subversion of subversion.
I got trained for this affect
in the best schools by gray
masters where awards were easy
to imagine as arrival.
Crepuscular wind, take me back
to a wet and slithering modern
or at least acknowledge the rift
because I’m unrepentant.
To throw fire into the kerfuffle
is my wet dream. To anticipate
the end times, my nerdgasm.
(See? Do you recognize the vulnerability?
I hope someone writes about it on his blog.)
We make dogma out of letter writing: the apocryphal story
of Lincoln who wrote angry letters he never sent. We wait for letters
for days and days. Someone tells me, I’ll write you a letter
and I feel he’s saying, you’re so different from anyone else.
Distance’s buzz gets louder and louder. It gets to be a blackest hole.
I want the letter about the time we cross the avenue, and you reach
for my hand without looking—I am afraid I’m not what you want.
We float down the street as if in the curve of a pod
and the starry black is like the inside of a secret. We’re drunk.
The streetlight exposes us, which becomes the deepest
horror. Yes. End the letter like that, so it becomes authorless.
Then the letter might give off secrets: acid imbalances that detonate.
Blue gets plucked from the dresser for today’s
costume. I’m feeling demure, so I want
the faux-priss of the opera-princess-drag queen.
The days have woven gray into my hair,
have over-ripened. I’m saving my pennies
to inject poison into the lines that extend from
my nose to my mouth, lines I hadn’t noticed
until it was too late. My lithe Mallarméan hand
stirs up the violence of time, reminds me that all
things go in particles out of the windows. I am
disappearing bit by bit, and what’s left, pink.
Red gets drawn from the drawer for today’s
costume. If I stand at the window I stop
traffic with my semaphoric vamping.
All of Van Ness backed into a corner
for my layered, complex gender play.
Lavender for giggles. Gray for lightbulbs.
This is my bargain with mortality because
John Belushi is dead. Angela Carter
is dead. Samuel Beckett is dead. Mama Cass,
dead. Laura Riding Jackson is dead.
Marvin Gaye. Gabriela Mistral. Soupy Sales.
Turquoise gets drawn from the drawer for bourgie
pretense. Imagine the ruin of my testament if I get asked.
I’ve got an appointment with someone who knows.
Benjamin, dead. Grandmother, dead.
Maybe I’ll add a dash of purple to
my costume, my itinerary. I’ll add the puce of my Thanatos
hoping to drain the neighbor’s mortality.
This effusion of words would take more than just measuring. I think volumes, but I’m shown walls covered with it. Aloud is when my words make a mark inscribed in round pastel globes like musical notation, then bits of rage in India ink. Words in Sharpie, in fountain pen filigree I read as apocryphal because they describe my dulcet evasions, my good and pretty story. I get a chance to review.
I count the memes because I want to know when that conceit started. That was sweet, all mine, then cut it for me, then, I don’t trust the postman. Flea bite. I count these too. I make redactions and elisions to undo the past just enough. Do you know what I mean by that? Not just the grandfather paradox. I want to keep it bruising and felt, a red aura around my lies and the pale glyphs of obedience. Yet I also want to be loved by all. I want forgiveness idiom.
I shift names and add emphases. I revise decisions; make no into yes in the hopes I might change the brutal and the torrid. Do I muddle the story? Do I make the plot a Rorschach? This wall’s pulsing with alteration because I’m always saying in flashes thrown up behind my back. I complicate, I derange. I make such dramatic diction shifts that the walls’ gypsum just fumes and smokes with red tag violations.
Sometimes there’s a virgin in the room.
You make way for her light; she is
fountainhead. When the virgin is in the room,
she’s robed by dim wattage. Virgin, remind me.
When the virgin is in the room, our skirts
feel tarty, when there’s a virgin in the room.
The virgin has clean hair and there’s nothing
under her fingernails. She drinks water from the same
cup all night long. She writes her name on the cup.
The virgin writes lyric poetry about roads and wars
and the crown of trees but has a degree
in something outside the arts because artists
aren’t virgins. Everyone talks to her and she doesn’t even
have mascara on; her eyelashes are naturally thick.
I brush past her to feel virginity. There’s a big
difference between virgin and non-virgin, aura-wise.
Someone drives her home before eleven o’clock.
The virgin has a long driveway
at her house; a parent waits for her.
The virgin leaves her vibe behind, so we wait
for it to dissipate. Then we get nasty and high since
the virgin made us feel bad because we gave it up
in high school. That’s just her course. It’s not our fault.
I am blameless but not blameless.
I am pristine but not pristine.
I am hugged but not hugged,
all of us not hugged. All of us teem
with shame but most of all me.
I am plutonium but not that matter.
I am with a curse on my head but not vexed
by it. I am made a diffuse powder by grief
but not spread over the city.
Splinter but not aching.
Albatross but not dead. Am love
but did not. I am policy but not nervy.
Peninsula but not district.
These halting plaints remain basis
for the teeming discord I am,
a patient with a gram of mutiny.
Come asleep,
come purple deep.
Come firmament,
I sweeten the breach.
I’ll hold you in my lap.
You’ll be my gull, one bird
for the whole year.
Down one length, a pull.
Down another, the one art.
This path’s an alphabet.
Each stone, a sound
from your gorge.
Your mouth is a fact,
also a settlement,
fugitive sensation I resist.
A crime, finally, the abyss
and your same smeared mouth.
Another godsend. I make it good.
A critique of romantic love with lots of parking, no meters.
Enough with unmanned ships. We’re in it to win it.
Jingo, jingo, jingo.
The dog-faced girl will lead us to the water and convert seed to coin.
We won’t need the seed, though. We’ve got test tubes.
Does anyone remember the theme of the last overthrow? It had something to do with Greek tragedy.
The Swedish Commune Utopia ChildCare Program for Leftists.
You’ll want to take that call.
She’ll unfacet her diamond when we need it for murder.
When she has the bluster and the grit, we build legislation around it, then free agent in under ten minutes!
Or we make all lucre worthless except as material for building edifice.
The Camera Analysis of Streets for the Daughters Project.
Because I said so.
Sometimes smoking on the porch and in airplanes for the seventies feel.
That memory becomes tape dispenser. That your transference does, too.
We’ll live in poems that drown in self-awareness, and then live in poems that drown in the treacle of subjectivity.
Dissent will kill me, but I tie a rope around my waist to jump into the sharky waters.
Between the oracle and the MC, I’ll choose the one of dubious origin.
A Venn diagram of desire for boys AND girls. In the middle, sushi and digital sounds.
The Sincerity gauntlet at the airport.
Is it okay to say Bible in here?
Today I slip away for an excursion into the landscape on the wall.
It’s called,
Nothing good ever happens here.
A deer stares from the woods after being chased from the garden,
eyes tiny and piercing.
The only window is a wavering box
of gray paint in all the red and below all of it, a signature in a 1930s cursive—
trembly and sincere.
I write at a desk in the corner of the barn where I can practically not exist.
My fingerbones creak because of the thing that eludes.
I thought I would be open, but language has shut me out. The painting’s silence
is defeating.
What I’m working on (rough draft): A potion to lick off. Autumn was a place.
Crumb & crumb. I made a swear word.
When winter comes, you see the end of days.
My favorite part is the space between the crumb and the I. I’d like what I write
to reach into the center of the pastoral and throttle it, but the painting resists.
To really pummel the barn, to make a pulp of 19th-century agriculture,
but the painting wants to be just itself
and won’t let me elevate us. I would like us to slip into the unknowing,
the abyss, such a benign force to bear against. On some days
I can’t leave it even though the hum of censure overpowers like skunk.
When I sit outside it, no bees seem alive.
You’ll get a slice: the filigree
of my fingerprint on a glass slide, vial of my murkiest bile, petri dish of phlegm,
most acidic saliva, two jars; one of urine, the other my
dense evacuation—narratives of my gluttony, a fingernail
and its dirty furrows. A strand of hair and its rings.
Two blood ampoules: one drawn from a cut to the lip,
the other menstrual and tentacled. From my spine,
a tiny bottle of cloudy vigor—the thoroughfare’s dredge.
Pictures of my bones and their gaps, each as lack
or degeneration, obscure or ample. My blood’s index,
O positive, its counts and ingredients. Pictures of my viscera,
each organ’s pulsing humor,
my brain’s impulses mapped like the Metro:
red for frenzy, blue for cold wet study. From beneath my umbilicus,
clammy seeds for the test tube, for the long sequence of sequences.
You’ll have eternal decay stitched into
your binding, my invocation, manifesto,
my weighty XXOO.