Doggerel in the Key of D; or, Working one’s way toward ‘madness;’ or: Fading Out with a Bang. (A tininnabula)
Category: desire
“Now” “again”: or, desire in times of control
The times are not easy.
Time never was.
Yet we insist
on enumerating
our lack of control,
unknowing…
.
“God,” we say, (in 3 digits)
“atom” at four, or the “facts” being five,
“knowledge” (as 9) over
“wisdom” – contrived in 6 letters
resembling “power” (which is slightly less-than) –
.
pretending we’re nearer
a “truth.”
Splintering this countless discourse
making babble –
pathways dividing again and again
.
Not to worry,
No-One,
least not here,
never there, nary hereing
we strive to forget –
.
the small fractions
we are,
even increments fail –
our instrumentation –
excrement turning to soil.
.
We say on,
calculating
in terms.
Splits on a dial
or bits switching voltage
to light
and/or sound –
inexplicably deafblind
we human – perceiving,
depleting, reduce.
.
The times never easy,
or real,
and all barely broken apart –
what we call the “fantastic”
(9 marks) nearly actual
.
what goes on
is a “now” and “again”
without ceasing…
a particle-waving
at sea
and to stars
.
an endlessness
born of its end.
On Thinking
jackrabbit mind, dashing –
here thick grass of nothingness
there a frenzied masturbation –
to and fro, quick left, jab right,
the daydreams, grief,
and absence fore and aft.
It’s a wonder, this pondering
machine, unhinged
of its bearings, moorings,
bodies baring everywhere
and not a drop to think.
What drives desire?
Seems pushed and pulled
and craven. Erotically
erratic, playing at its gloom
“it’s nothing,” says the mouth,
always caught between
the breathing and the axons
blood swelling pounding through.
The feral hind leaps out,
ruminate sparkle, devious
flux of concept, fact, or notion,
swimming in emotion,
nothing known.
Alias V. Harlequin, remembers (via language)
I always wondered at my naming – “Alias V.” Not knowing where I come from, and finding all locatable Harlequins tricky and at play.
“Alias Verbum” – who would name an infant that? Another name, a word. Also known as, logos. Usually I identify as iota subscript, after Robert Frost.
No one knows my origin, but he’s very hard to find, everywhere, continually on his odyssey.
i‘m reading a book entitled “How Words Make Things Happen.” What have we made? Ideas, spells; subjects, objects, and actions. Incantations all. Beginnings, I suppose, but not the first.
As I understand it, aging along, someone had to be there for me to come about, and coming-about would be my story. Who or what might tell it? Acted, sung, or read? Becoming other after other after other. Known again as… by any other name. The player. The trickster. The Joke.
In the beginning was… and I began, an alias of something… and everything its word.
Deconstructing Definitions
Perhaps “work” means something must be done, regardless of desire,
and signifies felt effort.
If “to love’s” “unassailable affirmation,”
something verbal, and not only.
“Education” as “familiarity with thoughts of others” (K. O. Knausgaard),
entails “experience” as “familiarity with itself”?
And what of “wisdom”?
I wonder if “deaf” implies “not-listening,” or/and, “our forgetting of the body.”
and who defines “republic”?
Or “nowhere” and “now here” in all their differance?
Frere Jacques (yes, go and sing it)
suggests impossibility fuels valuation –
negation requiring its positive with –
terms all ways relative in their contexts,
indeterminate and groundless,
yet term-in-able, undecided, written-in.
I don’t know.
But I sense it’s indefinitive,
de- and con- structure something else,
like trace or foggy margin,
the space between the sounds
that continues (us and them).
Tapping at Windows of Words
The bestial want
is it ever more?
Evermore.
.
Ache beauty
its terrible
hunger
.
The voyeur
at what is not
“mine.”
.
What can be taken?
What “had”?
In the seeking,
the peeping,
the glimpse
or the glance –
its desire?
.
Such beastly want,
evermore,
grasping
.
forth or out
I reach –
a solid pane.
.
I am limited
constrained
delimited –
.
it would seem
I see clearly
but it cannot be
touched.
.
‘I’ is alone
with-out.
With-in
comes from ‘you.’
.
So ‘I’ scopes –
a feral yearn –
and gazes…
.
tapping at windows
of words.
All-ways
HE in the feeling of HER approach. That syrupy abyss. Unknowing. Every anticipation and guess.
HER name. A bird’s song. Bird’s songs (all of them).
What other flesh is.
Any time you are enabled
to touch it.
We could imagine IT as HIM wanting. Awaiting.
But there is no resemblance to wait for.
Only HER, the delicious, dilemma, unknown.
Loss of memory. Hope of presence.
“Ecstasy” as commonly referred –
– the surprising rarety of ‘being-out-of’…
“HER,” “HE” calls it, names it, designates, conjures, conceives. (Perhaps “HER” has a name?)
In the center a shrine a temple. And no center exists, except by imagining, by metaphor, metonymy. Delusional illusion of some living cartography.
The words “NOW,” “HERE”…continuously NO/WHERE.
He longs. Desires. Fantasizes. Dreams.
This is urgency.
Each pressing and critical, earnest, persistent scenario and situation –
In-sistent.
It’s always coming. In. The status and singling. Ever singing.
Sometimes shrieking.
NO/WHERE : NOW/HERE. Same scintillating occurrence, occurring… per-sist-ence, pursuant and ins-is-isn’t-it? Awaiting approaching.
HE/HIM/HIS – SHE/HER/HERS (with)
[All-ways]
What might have been experienced as “LONGING” – that which is extended, strained toward…
SHE… a recoiling, a reconnaissance, some new emission.
HE laughs, as if capitulating, a surrender, a stab, asunder.
THEY… blend and weave inconceived. Inconceivable. Unknown. Never any stasis. Never NOW/HERE, never NO/WHERE.
In other words, too many… uncountable stories (may) have begun (begin)…
[All-ways]
Lettering
Dear Michael, Dear Jonathan, Dear Scott, Dear Laurie, Dear Lydia, Dear Sam; Dear Meghann, Dear Summer, Dear Tyler and Karl; Dear Edie, Dear Sara, Dear Mari; Dear Albert, Dear Paul, Dear Denise; Dear Tristan, Dear Aidan, Dear William; Dear Andy, Dear Pippin, Dear James; Dear Timothy, Dear Jada, Dear all of you who save my life from time to time, by being:
Perhaps I should not own a phone. It’s Short Message Service, in my employ, allows a nearly ubiquitous, immediate reach of the text, from my thumbs.
Thank you for telling me about the exhibition, I have the retrospective tome near me even now, attempting to go in and near the two-dimensional images on paper. It is not the same as being present to the sculptures and paintings, their ambience. But now I know I could not move around them, nor touch them, I’d have only to use my eyes and very little of my body.
This obsession with connection. Once I would have had to go to work unlinked to any of you for hours at a time. Once my going home would mean your absence unless we arranged for sharing space and time. Now I reach, I report, I ask and beg, and enter your lives like someone shoving a newspaper, pamphlet or flyer into your hands at will – without contact – propaganda blaring from speakerless speakers.
Your mails and email show deference and thought. I am happy to have your works near at hand to consult and resort to time and again. I see the care in the hand-writing, the pacing of thoughts, the reasoning reflection, the sense of your audience. They lie about me on the floor, I can feel them, turn them, taste them if I wish.
Your phone makes a hum or a buzz. An ejaculatory missive from Filbert again. He’s lonely, he’s excited, he’s drunk. He wants to share. He needs to share. He needs communique. He wants connection. He is not thinking of us, he suffers the duress of himself. He spouts, he shouts, he slurs. He insists he needs solitude and rest, needs quiet, less public. At any hour, at all hours, these textual packets flow.
Perhaps I should not own a phone.
Where do the gaps that make the heart grow fonder bloom? What is banal and what evental?
Thank you for your poem. I will read it again and again. Thank you for that clip of music, I repeat it throughout the days, when the mood demands an answer. Thank you for your books, your artifacts, your gardens, your hands. Thank you for your eye-contact (those of you I’ve sat or walked, camped or climbed with). Thank you for the melodies of your particular voices. Thank you for your hugs, your nourishing, your care. Your listening.
I do remember the ground there, how it fell away desperately or rose violently into sky. What the birds did. Where the fire flowed. Yes, the leaves. Yes, the sleeping bags. Here’s to the unknown trails, the stumbling, to whatever’s discovered.
I am sorry I flood your phones with less than thoughtful driveling – explosions of fear, anxiety, want. Am I alone? Am I alone? Do I matter? Does anyone want my voice? Am I also missed? But also love. Yes, sometimes I merely wish to tell you the difference you make to being alive, that I feel you out there, somewhere…
Perhaps I should not own a phone.
Letter to a Lover – March 2018
The month of March, in Kansas, can be almost anything, like most of the other months of the year, almost. Tonight it is moisty, breezy, there is wetness hovering like a redolent air, nearly a fog. I am killing myself. You are feeding me. I sharpen your knives in the kitchen. From the top of my throat toward deep in my belly is an acidic ruin caused by far too many liters of hard alcohol in far too much volume, too often, for too many hours of too many days over too many years to not be transforming my internal landscape into a ravaged terrain of destruction. So though I’m unable to breathe, speak, lie down, or work without unignorable hurt, I am still useful. I am sharpening your knives in your modest kitchen. I am reading and writing sentences. I am trying to keep myself from you. You are preparing a meal for us, and I find it so difficult to stay away from you – to not breathe at your ear, kiss or nibble your neck, grasp at your bottom, finger your elbows, hover, caress, overwhelm.
Boundaries are reduced in mist and wind. In motion it can be hard to tell where the lines that mark objects begin or end. In cloaks of obscurity finding shapes or sounds, edges or entries, can be, well, con-fusing (over-mixed, blended, woven)… as perhaps any “thing” we try to think apart ‘in fact’ always is… “inscrutable,” “indivisible,” “unclear.”
If you extricate the ginger from the garlic from the cabbage from the chicken from the oil, the rice, the salt, the pepper, the lime and ancho, the butter, the liquids and oxygens, thicknesses and scents… where is the meal? If you separate “me” out from “world,” relations, surround (like a theory, a concept, a logic…) how might I then live, or “be” what you presume me to be? I will not, cannot, am not (removed from my surround) and so it goes… limbs and flesh and organs… dissect… to cells and fluids, molecules and motions, viscosity and energy… to atoms… to subatomic ‘particles’ and/or ‘waves’ – and at each dismantle you will have lost the entity you proposed or pursued.
Division does not equal.
You’ve quoted out of context – neither copied, reproduced, nor plagiarized. Simply failed. Missed. Lost.
The burning rot, corrosive erosion of my body by the maladies of my preferences, pleasures, and habits…
…erasure of letters, terms, phrases, meanings…
…excision and surgery, atopic autopsying of…
…are things already dead, deceased once de-cised, as ‘identifiable portions or pieces, ‘things'”?
These written marks with definable shapes and spaces… yet if disjoined… no sense can be had…
What might “it,” “I,” be… apart-from?
I lay on a ground I cannot stand up without, cannot jump, move, fly or float away without…
I address you – impossibly – unless we’re inseparable… otherwise address and interaction cannot…
The gesture recognizes the necessary collusion as a dream of a fictive repartee, a figurative gap which – if there really were a break or breach – would have no effect or recognition – no reach, no contact…
Relation is repetition of conjoinment, actions without function if connectedness is not always already…
…as if drawing attention toward redundancy.
And so we kiss, we eat, we call out, we listen, as repercussions of contact… reassurances of inseparability. You reach for your phone, I fall to sleep, unable to be undone or we would not be able to know
Morning Thoughts in a Blustery March
…and so we think. I do not say we must think, for I do not think that is so – it is simply a kind of capacity we have, apparently related to external pressures and a possible pleasure, or unknown effects involving desire – a torsion, disturbance, a stirring unsettling perhaps necessary to our living continuance, like pain, like lust.
An activity we call by many names and nuances – reflection, perception, analysis, intuition, sensation, theorizing, dream… but all uncanny practices of turbulence as if trying out invisible options on our world, imagining alternatives, inventing holding frames for experiencing that must constantly and continuously alter and adapt and reorient as living never stills. Like language, like longing, like living. Such things show no signs of resolving, their solutions are their ongoing instrumentalization, their habitude.
- Writing, kissing, and walking are synonyms.
Polysemic Stupor 