My posthumous

November '25 (part two)

Flower-vase dream. Oh, mythologizer. Never seen my blood like that, that red. Remember when I split your lip by accident? Let’s pass now to natural situations. Your diamond-sharp chin when you tip it down. If you’re feeling generous, dear—

==

“We know these lines of language are still a camouflage and we will only define and accentuate just what we want to hide! Halfclose your eyes and you will still see it. I’m sorry but I can only love you in this disruptive pattern, why I don’t know. I seem to have learned it somehow, it’s like saying if you will only change your coat I too will be able to see all the excitement of moving, you see we are trying to get this disharmony to hide the airplane of our love. I take this example of war to place this town easier here, or this crazy need to hide, I'll half-close your eyes for you with my fingers of tile false factory, false windows and lights, smoke effects so that the factory looks like a church and I am devoted to you though you are deceived, the road is hidden and the church is now a dummy and the highway it’s on is too difficult to hide in anyway, love is simple to conceal. The town can be hidden but the river cannot...So what if the sun heats the room and that in turn makes the window warm, can you tell? You just have to cover love if you love behind the windows with wire with laced cloth strips, the protective blanket is expensive and the whole war was dangerous. I wanted to tell you when Marie saw the other children she ran up to them to say, do you too have toys? Then what’s the use of photographing the bottle of aggression like sandbags filled with cheap sweet bourbon when the barricades of love are so overwhelming you can’t get in or out. I’d rather you knew I had a fringed edge and could be like you, you seem to have a lot of trouble knowing we are the same, do you think I’m also not a fool? Even the industrialist and the tall trees like poplars know enough to hide things. We often read each other’s writing without ever knowing that this is a way of talking like the idea of being someplace beautiful. If I were to drape light rope or net with rags hanging from it over the tall trees, soft cloths to allow for wind action, I could even conceal you in the future, no one would know you. Now how shadows envelop that shrubbery, we’re so inspired to stay up late and see. For once the sharp shadow distorts our fear of lack of love and where is the moon mostly. The only trouble is we're beginning to be aware that most of what goes on is almost over and we’d better hurry up unless by chance we live to be old, too bad, then we have a lot of dignity’s or despair’s time. So should I write this over and take out all the most important parts and try to include them all in some smaller part so they can be apprehended like landmarks, Niagara Falls, New York Harbor and the Mississippi River or, fast becoming lost in a maze of gas tanks, power plants, garbage dumps and industrial disposal areas anyway, here is fertile field for the lost and most devoted lover when war ends and the scheme of grass, wild grass, is seeded into factory of love where it will grow fast and love the dust and heat we know and then it will all become a mess and everyone’s a passenger then and grass is ideal to smoke but cocaine was mentioned, pilots and lovers are less obvious than people who drink all the time and the wheels make marks and yes, if given half a chance, nature is the master of the opposite of love.” —Bernadette Mayer, “Disruption/Concealment” from The Desire of Mothers to Please Others in Letters

==

I stand in you, where you stood, retrace your steps (all over town), I travel where you travel, stop where you stop, drink where you drink. And wasn’t it a way of calling you, semblable? The train station and route rising out like a pulsing vein to the channel, route of your life, your need, your love. Double incision on my right hand from reaching into the white bean can. My neighbor’s wet cough. “You’re coughing because you’re a coward,” Walter Kemmer says to Erika. I must ask what it is exactly you want from me. You need me to witness you. Better and Different. To have me again, or is it mere ego? To flaunt? You have me of course you have me always into the impossible end if you wanted. All time turns nonsense, water. I of mountains and you of sea, I’d be west to your east and south to your north. Compass heart, magnetic field. There’s your psychogeography and here’s a landmark: first time I ever saw you. I’d describe it all to you would you be asleep next to me (you will not grant me even this, which you granted always in the beginning and I granted even past the end): I turned on the couch—you’d burst through the door in a gaggle of men, probably wearing that ridiculous sheepskin coat, late January—and oh you looked me straight in my face. Svelte strange stranger.

I strike myself, on the phone with [X] and the blood springing up, as kind of pathetic.

==

Blunt-force-drunk and whispering for no reason. It’s just that wanting to know what happens next and living for it, going on, was part of the problem. That was meant to have a bouncy rhythm. Each thought sifts out of my brain and there is a grainy laggy shadow. Loved [X]’s “crucible gruel” and everything else. So limp and just trying to stay out of everybody’s way. I’m writing more than I’d think. The whole city though is turning past, it’s all him, turned dirt everywhere I turn and it’s split attention and I can’t really be in the now at all. Get sentences like this in the poems. But what poems? Hope I can cry in the movie today, think of anything else. How am I to know what day it is ever, especially this time of year? November is such a non-month. I hate January and February even worse. “That ferment and sophisticate.”

==

“If you had a psyche it was not known to me.

If you had a figure it would be heavy ivory. 

If you were a man, you would be

An autumn of black carriages filled red with leaves

from sycamore trees,

not scattering. I was not ready for such

earthward and unease.”

Lucie Brock-Broido, from “Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements” (Trouble in Mind)

==

Scissor punishment

promethean touch

pigeon iridescence 

stratus

velvet folds

“And where are you now, my posthumous.”

==

Behind the clouded window and red velvet curtain—to be a lover is to be one who waits, yep. Don’t mind it; have already waited. We ramble ramble, hold, tuck into the shape. Erupt in Blue Ridge, “parasitical,” what you remember, nothing new nothing at all, the receding future, trying hard to be better. I blab about the praying mantis anxiety masks; he’s impressed, wants more Lacan. We again are not sleeping to instead go slurry talking about the sound quality of words. The semblables and the freres. Clever, big-haired, wet-slitted me. Slap each other while fucking and crack up. Eye idol, Igbo masks: same story parallel to the freres. I wouldn’t go there. We get more coded now. I do my compassion and my wit. Landform of sun on the wall, flickering shift. He is a twitchy sleeper. Context’s a drug. So’s history. Grasp limbs, click bodies together. I know I love the just-roused look.

==

Hiroshima, mon amour: touching you, talking to you is second nature. This is the danger: missing piece uncovered, pressed back in place, easy. I had never felt so—and how many times had I dreamed of finding a real thing, an object, lost: the sleep mask in my coat pocket, the relief that is also a thrill because it was not realistically hoped-for; I believe they call this miracle. And how many times had it suddenly occurred to me—something having reminded me of you—how much I missed you? Your face, down to the slightest expression, the sound of your voice—amazed me at how precise they were in my dreams’ replicas, not having seen so much as a picture of you, really, in years. This is why it is so hard to shake the idea that you are a part of me.

==

Perverse plunge. All I’m drawn to—torture on the wheel, elusion, being made to wait, pathetic suffering—I’m not supposed to want or like, it doesn’t correspond with the concept of self—not as an individualized, protected thing—I can think my actions are measured but it’s more what I allow to go on, the position I take. The familiar adrenaline that comes on is not exactly unwelcome. I recognize on some level that in order for the dynamic to continue I must perform rage, frustration, waver in my resolve. The mental abstractions cross over one another, the web has become dense with hardly penetrable layers yet I skip from level to level, get my juice/jouissance. Who knew she was such a masochist. Freaky ass girl. I guess the issue being I’m not sure how much I like her; now I just laugh at her, wasting all her goddamn time and energy, scattering it to the wind, to the east river, Carl Schulz park.

==

“In this recursive loop, re-encountering forever and ever: at what point does it stop being a re-encounter and just become a new encounter?” We recur. Did we stagnate and not evolve? We have one another. Secret, an error, embedded: how will it emanate, drag down, ruin? What is the object exactly? Visions of the future, nightmarish, compress into a matter of hours, lance through me, wind. Scattershot reddish rain in the park, emptied by weather, holiday, already a sense of The End. Ring through the layer of silence (that screen). [X] in the toy factory, sweatshop. Dreamover of the commune, crouched in the weeds, property sprawl, mason jars. “What am I talking about? What am I saying?”

==

No use fighting back through the brain’s overgrowth to bring the conversations forth, meandering and surreptitious, sleep-deprived and meanwhile at its edge, coming off my vodka-soaked walk in the rain—only one important detail which calls upon my will. It translates or decodes, with a casual air of dark premonition, as this: I will hurt you. I will leave you. I will inundate you with the very thing that you wanted and then take it away forever. I can see the end already, the nevers unravelling at the frayed end, future on the fritz. Not a way through. What I resign to or from, trudging miles in the dark to spit on Nothing—journey of No hero. I’m not exactly sure what his level of awareness is, and why—if it’s apathy caught up with dull hatred, if it’s removed vengeance, if it’s innocent, sadistic curiosity one would apply to a captured bug—his great desire to get a rise out of me, see me react, get this affectless girl to bat one eye. For my part in this dynamic I am determined naturally to hold strong—endure. My calm withstanding is only rewarded because it allows him to continue on trying, reaching for more extreme torture devices. 

I could stay on the ride before it throws me off but I should probably step off now in case the impact kills me and if it could prove I have a scrap of self-respect. [X] whispering in her red sweater: “you have dignity.”

==

The island where wild horses ran has been forgotten, can only recall the hot sand which burned your feet. They are turning loose the Central Park carriage horses. We imagine the horse in our body.

I made mirror of you to understand you.

“The heart is not / a usual device.”

You were trains leaving me. You’re all over. In perpetuity I become you.