31 October 2010

My work shirt is especially cold on the shoulder of the sleeve where I have wiped the running phlegm from my nose repeatedly. In movies, tears make a woman’s face sort of, shine.

I am surrounded by all of my things in my room. That is, they’ve got me surrounded.

My body appears, to someone, as a collection of bits. He or she waters them from the higher up place where he or she must is be.

When it is I who is crying, I find that I must comfort those who witness me. Just tears, only tears, I’m okay, just tears, only tears, etc.

I can press my naked hand into the back of a naked man and feel nothing. This is the magic trick of isolation.

Many things that I own are sharp. Good.

I am in agony in location A. I think about location B, and how I will remain in agony there. I mill about.

Everybody hangs up the phone. Everybody goes home.

friend on the phone

‘Afraid I’m not gonna figure it out,’

I would say to my friend on the phone.

What I would tell him probably would be

something like,

“It’s kind of like a forbidden romance.

I loved it, it loved me back, and our love was perfect;

but it was what everyone else thought we should be that ruined it

that made these impossible demands.

And now it’s too late,

I abandoned it, this is why it no longer touches me,

plays with my hair, holds me at night,

because I left it when I left there.”

And probably, “And now here I am,

here I am

everything around me is different,

and I am different, I know because I barely recognize

that person in those pictures,

except for the one lingering thing, that long string

of hatred strung from my own lungs around my throat.

I’m afraid I’ll never figure this out.

What should I do with my time?

I make enough to eat and enjoy a few things,

but the unhappiness caused by making enough to eat and enjoy a few things

during that time, what I am, all I am is unhappiness.

Follow your love,

do honest work,

miserable, irresponsible lies.

What should I do? What should I do

today while I am?

Because, I mean, I believe

that I am what I do,

that my life is how I feel

now, and every time that is now,

so that if I work hard for some end

but am weeping all through the hard work

what I am, even if I do manage to succeed in the end,

what I am is tears.

What I am is tears-

only that.

If a bus hits me while I’m weeping,

all I was is tears.

Man, I don’t know

except that the people around me

I want to make happy

and the time by myself

is filled with so much color and cold blue steel of feeling

and the pain of that steel piercing my stomach

is the pinpoint of a burning reality

like the focus of a magnifying glass under the sun.

Man, I don’t know

how best to deal with the love I feel for the people around me

or the exuberance of the colors

and especially not the urgency of that cold blue steel I feel,

the urgency of the hard, sharp syringe-like center of being-

what to do with that,

because I guess all in all that’s 

all I care about.”

I’d say to my friend on the phone.

Excerpt- Communication, Meaning

     "... in English classes I hear from students, 'Well if that's what the author meant, why didn't they just say that?' Because I am also a student in these situations, I sympathize with that sentiment, and have made a point of trying to write only exactly what I mean. But it is also the case that in order to keep the truth of what I try to say when I write intact, some of it must be vague, contradictory, without context, sometimes even without sound (as in some of my poems which are more collections and arrangements of punctuation than they are sounds composed of letters of the alphabet). It's like looking at rocks in shallow water on a sunny day. If I focus on the rocks, I can't see anything of the reflection of the sky; if I focus on the reflection, I can't make out the rocks. But if I let my gaze go hazy, the whole of the image, both the rocks under the water and the reflection on the surface, is clear to me.
     But then how to communicate that experience? Thinking about this question and trying to come up with even a temporary answer always leaves me feeling alone, wholly alone. People are so far away. One answer is to try to arrange a situation (a poem, oil on canvas, sound) that makes it possible for the audience (a person) to enter the same mindset, have the same experience, feel the same thing as I did. For me, the search for this kind of connection is desperate..."