.
.
.
flawed
bumbling
cracked
leaky
yet
still
vessel
enough
to
water
a
seed
(2022)
Line poem
Lilacs
lilacs do not last
though they break easily from the branch
the flowers wilt in the glass on your desk
almost before your eyes
and the reward of their fragrance is
not enough to
cover the loss
(2022)
a minor procedure
she asks the ages of my children
(one day apart and six years
something to talk about while their fingers are inside me)
The funny thing is, I wasn’t actually sick when I let doctors make a hole in me and take something away. Minor surgery, of the sort on reality shows, and so I was awake for the procedure. Let me say, does surrealism ever make a heck of a lot more sense. Speaking with someone who’s in the midst of prying open your skin is a singular experience, and one that evokes more body horror than I like on a Monday morning.
And I’d just posted that poem On Convalescence, not considering the fact that I was about to experience it. I was mainly thinking of an essay by Woolf, quoted in Reading Like a Writer by Francine Prose as an example of a perfectly valid run-on sentence. Writing on illness, on its relative absence from the novels of her time despite all the ways that sickness and recovery impinge on our psychic and physical selves, Woolf’s rambling thoughts follow an indirect path ending at ourselves, the first and last locus of one’s consciousness, the very place where one experiences illness and convalescence.
I wasn’t sick. I was only on holiday (see below), but I have the work ethic of a consumptive viscount and a moral opposition to hustle culture, so I haven’t obliged myself to post much of anything in the last two weeks. Add to that being still in a bit of a cocoon from my peculiar spring and from two years of you-know-what, and y’all going to have to bear with me.
On Convalescence
Not enough is said
the long tail curled around your spine
all approaches softened
the surfaces blurring into
inconsequentiality
Commanding silence,
the restless walls slide inward
as you bend gasping
the farcical ceiling tenting overhead
raining your own sweat back upon you
drops wrung from the stone which is yourself
Sickness
even when invisible
is there
is tangible
is a beginning without end
only a Before and After
separating you from those who were not sick
A buzzing fly
pinned between the window pane and screen
smelling petrichor
doubting the rain
(2022)
The gift
at the end of the world
when the cities are finished
when the satellites have fallen
and the plastic sand is weighed down
by the bodies of our ships
barnacles erupting from their hulls
no divers to salvage their ambitions
someone is sitting
with the sun on their back
eating an apple
spitting seeds
(2022)
Cold in April
spring waits in the mouth of the year
its words unsaid
its blossoms locked in time
as if in ice
the doorknob chills your hand
and you grumble that this happens every year
the day after you put away your boots
but if you kept them out
and spring didn’t come
could i forgive you?
(2022)
Liars
in the time of writing poems
the words said no
they said
you have not earned us
you have not bled us from your fingertips
until your heart is a wrung-out rag
you have not wept
no stone has lodged itself in your intestines
cold lurking with the promise of pain
we owe you nothing
said the words
not knowing how they implicate themselves
liars every one
for here is the poem
that they
refused
to write
(April 2022)
WHAT RUINED ME Episode 7: ‘The Story of the Eye’ by Georges Bataille
I read this little book on the advice of Björk, and my scandalous older boyfriend who had a serious crush on Björk. To judge from modern reviews, it is still extremely divisive, with many considering it irredeemable trash, and others suggesting it’s wholly allegorical, though that may be a wildly optimistic reading of what is at its heart a very filthy book.
What’s interesting (read: strange and a little frightening) to me now was that on first reading, not a bit of it seemed deviant. Of course the main character lifted her skirt and sat in a saucer of milk within five minutes of meeting the narrator. Of course they abducted a beauty, then drove her out of her mind. Of course they went to Spain and… For those who know what happens by the end, you may wonder how I read the whole thing and barely flinched. I have theories, some of which I’ve illuminated in prior posts.
France wanted to hang Bataille for a while. I blew my college teacher’s mind by even owning a copy of the book, which she borrowed from me. I think I might have made her a mixed tape, but socially, not romantically. Oh, the ’90s.
If memory serves, I bought the book at The Mystic Bookshop, the source of many outrageous ideas and my philosophical oasis growing up in a very staid city in a fairly conservative part of the world. Thanks, Mystic Mike (as we called the snackable indie boy who worked there) and the whole Mystic crew for letting me spend hours thumbing through Re/Search books I could never afford to purchase.
The Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille. YMMV.
Seasons – a haiku
one red leaf floats past
among the green
why did you leave me in autumn?
(2022)
Memories of a gallery
Making meaning. Can that be a calling?
scribe
conduit
fingers blindly falling
vomiting poetry
verse coming out of my ears
words from my hands
words made of fears
that nothing ever will ever be
enough
we know it’s tough
we know
below
and to the left
of the main figure
the artist has hidden a self-portrait
reflected upside down in the bowl of that one spoon
laid beside the sugar
painted so well you expect to see yourself
(2022)
[Working through some personal goals in a journal, I wrote the first four lines unconsciously. Once I noticed, the rest became inevitable.]
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