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Tag: failure
3 Short Poems
for the weekend…
ARE YOU
I don’t think I have a question;
yet I seem to be
an asking
.
This one? Β This one?
Is it here?
Are you?
.
The breeze is not silent
as many things
that are not
.
Still I do not understand –
Are you here?
Am I?
.
It goes unanswered
along with the riddle
I am
.
Are we here?
Are you?
READY FOR SADNESS
I’m often ready to be sad.
Why is this?
What holes are excavated by living?
What sifts through? Β Falls out? Β Runs away?
.
It goes nowhere
Or anywhere,
Everywhere.
Still it goes
.
where I am not
welcoming
through all these openings
a peeking-back
[addendum]
Instead I seal them shut
I try to stuff them
full of rags
that reek of sin and toxic
.
What can I do –
will I –
in this cell
that seems my own?
AGING
What does one do?
Reducing teeth
or sight
or hearing
.
How does one choose
what’s worth
repair
when all is failing,
.
ailing,
come undone?
he asks his father –
buys a car
.
replacing failure:
another thing
that’s bound
to fail.
Untitled Fiction III
III.Β ββ¦with murderous careβ¦β
Jon had said, to Jesse, about the fires.
So we persisted, Jon, Jesse, and I, and the deceased Beckett, with perhaps thousands of others, unbeknownst any to each around some mythical innermost.
βFail better.βΒ The worst times are the ones in which one simply wants to quit failing altogether.Β Unfortunately (literally) that necessarily entails a kind of βend of the world as one βknowsβ [perceives, participates, experiences, or imagines] itβ β either suicide, tragedy, βterminalβ illness β death of some sort.Β Maybe silence, but thatβs not certain.
The game table is always already laid, youβre always simply βenteringβ it (LW points out this fallacy in his collections of numbered critiques of anything anyone writes or says or claims) actually (as far as we know) always already there (where you βfindβ β what?!? β your βselfβ β what?!?) and (again, perhaps, literally, unfortunately β or at the very least extremely limitedly) you can only occupy one position at the table (or wherever the action happens to be) at a time, that, unfortunately, always involves the very delimitedβ¦well, YOU.Β These are the arrangements as they transpire.
Language can (and does), we surmised, go anywhere.Β I try to record, invent, notate, mark, initiate.Β It all seems unnameable.Β Or of far too many names, references, usages, subtexts and connotations, inferences and denotations, already implemented in order to represent anything undone, reconstructed, deconstructed, novel or βnew.βΒ βThereβs nothing new under the sunβ was already a clichΓ© at the beginning / in the earliest phases.
Fires and voids all imagined early.Β [Apeiron.Β Chora/Khora.Β Clinamen.Β Flux.Β Infinity.Β ABSENCE.Β The βOther.β].Β I begin.Β Again.Β GWFH and Freud refer to this as βrepetition.βΒ A hopeless hope of emergence.Β As different or unique as it may seem, ever a plenitude of the pre-existing.Β The already-there.
Been there, done that, Beckett exhausts from his grave alongside.Β βHe was found lying on the groundβ¦a voice comes to one in the darkβ Imagine.Β Imagine.Β Everything is already there.Β The table set and set again, arranged.Β Already there when you wake to it.Β World.
It hasnβtβ¦apparentlyβ¦been given up.Β Perhaps it is inexhaustible.Β Limited though we be, we seem to be teeming with it/themβ¦ efforts at the unsayable.Β Unnameable.Β How it is.Β What is the what.Β Lost in the labyrinth of the occurrence, experience, now with shoddy, partial, biased and over-specified or eccentrically particular maps, guides, or rulebooks.Β Ourselves.
Alias and the Ants
Alias observes the ants in his bathroom.Β Each Spring.Β Spring or Fall, no matter his warfare – treating / trimming / grooming the perimeter of βhisβ home β no difference (or differance) β Spring and Fall, a trail, a train, a miniscule βarmyβ (whether βArmy Antsβ or no, he could not say) of tiny insects crossing his counter from sink rim to (nonexistent) god-knows-where and back again, doing god-and-perhaps-scientist knows whatβ¦traversing, infesting, conquering, appearing, occurringβ¦
β¦Alias is unattendedβ¦
Observing βhisβ (not-his) ants.Β A collective of interminable insects roving to and fro between a Lilliputian crack along the paint of his lavatory wall (an outside boundary of βhisβ βhomeβ), the cylindrical rim involving βhisβ βvanityβ (does he still possess any of that?) sink, his childrenβs toothbrushes (the βfamilyβ so wishes the infestation undone) and wherever they might journey over the surfaceβs edge, the drainage holes, the drawersβ¦
Ants.
Alias composes both paste and powder of Boric acid and particled sugar.Β A supposed deadly mix for puny pests.Β Like βlifeβ for him.Β Murderous moments of sweetness colluded with deathly compounds: vodka, cigarettes, illicit sex; bacon, buttery-fried flour, altitudeβ¦
Responsibility (instinct) and desire (impulse).
Alias is alone.Β Most definitely that.Β Solo and (interpretively) forsaken.
His βkidsβ are grown.Β His loves (clearly) outworn.Β His βfriendshipsβ recursive, reductive, assumptive, routine.Β But the weed-trees, the weather and wear, the spiders, the crickets, termites, and dustβ¦and ants, carry on in a differently (and differantly) incessant way.
Indefatigable.Β Undefeatable.Β (Like death.)
That within succulent sweetness, luscious limnings of love, lie poisons and trace, exposures β never a joy without risk, no ecstasy lacking its peril, no thriving without its decease.Β Positives all laced with negatives, happiness balanced inΒ depress.
Alias gazes.Β He stares.Β Isolated, trimming at an untrimmed beard over a sink he did not install, looking (and failing to seeΒ at all) into a mirror replicating demiseβ¦above a trail of ants heβs fed sugary poison for weeks, which appear to be active and thriving, in differance to his own βselfβ β choking and chortling on pleasures that keep resulting in pains, experiments emerging as monstrous, efforts destroying their ends.
He sighs, does Alias.Β However he seeks a team and a trail it leads him to toxin, bane eroding his chance.Β Considers Laramie, Lucy (his wife), and each child.Β Ruminates purpose or promise or hope.Β Wonders how relief repulses its reasons.Β Why remedy acts against cure.Β How ants insist on their patterns.Β Why exultation evinces in ruin.
What a Story Looks Like to Me
The Trouble Is
He feels slow, tectonic, deeply submerged even, unable to act, not able to speak, disabled (apparently) to respond, incapable even of processing.Β Something seems to have happened.
She β is confused and confounded β experiencing a complex cocktail of distress and depression, pointless and pointed-out, sludged, sloughed and slathered, comatose and doomed, sad and angry in equal measures.Β A compound.Β A compound problem.
But sheβs not.Β And he can.
And they will.
The trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is.
Not easily fitted.Β Because it is this time.Β Again, it is now.Β And now, again.Β The words were made from before, or for some last time, some other.Β Something foreign.Β Along with the categories, analysands and diagnoses.Β Along with the remedies: all for a potential future or other distinctively past.
But it is now.Β Yes, the trouble is.Β Is now.
Words of others.Β Ideas, aspects.
Always malappropriate and inadequate.Β Words are not it.Β Words are something else.
This is not discrete or verifiable.Β Simple.Β Is.Β Trouble.
Yes, the trouble is.
And the trouble is now.
She collapses.Β HeΒ freezesΒ again.Β And this frozen is yearning.Β Something excruciating.Β Like her.Β Like where she is, now collapsing.Β Collapsible.Β Collapsed.Β Thatβs the trouble.
The trouble is.
He wishes and fumbles, at light-yearβs remove, another era, disabled, catatonic, all too aware.
She breaks in and through her fall.Β He hitches and constricts.
She gurgles a sound, a horrible mutable sound, hardly audible in her destruction and dismantling, her infolding and coming undone.Β And he cries, cries out, a sort of bellow and howl of noiseless emission, helpless to keep up with time, incapable of presenting, shaped and occurring like shore-stones and wheat-seed.
She is done.Β He has yet to arrive.Β He will not get there.Β Too far ahead and far too behind, and she is in trouble, and the trouble is.
Yes, the trouble is.Β It is now.
Something has happened.
All my Words are Silent 