The Workshop

Renaissance Medicine


Burn everything that is not rightly measured:
baste in the choler of hungry men
all that is not recorded in stone.

(I'll sneak away the songs I love:
lola's longing for almost-lolo,
Jewish troubadours answering God,
bronze butterflies floating over
the paper hammocks of wasted lives...)

Dissolve the pulp in phlegm,
the hanging masses in pedagog spittle
and bits of lung coughed up by the forgotten.

(...pictures of your feet, your legs, your ass,
your fingers plucking electric bass,
eventually your songs strung with diaristic words,
words which know they'll soon return to earth,
they are the earth -- on which new grass will grow.)
 
Illusion of Control


Even the boy with a voice
that gives "voice" to the "voiceless"
by paying attention to the little details of their lives
and screaming, both loudly and softly,
"revolution!"

has not voice nor power nor even mind
enough to recognize that he has no voice
nor power nor even mind,
not until his victim, a squatter in another country,
shushes him with a stare

or until he finds that what he calls "survival"
is usually termed "growing up" or "getting a life"
and leaves few people scarred
across the throat.
 
The End of History: An Accident


Are we here, now, and has history ended?

What do you mean?

Have we moved into the future at last -- or does the very saying root us in our past?

Nothing lasts.

What about something? We're something, aren't we? What we see, what we hear, what we feel: they become memories. But what remembers the memories? Who beats his chest, reads his words, watches the moving picture?

Something has not been proven to last.

Why believe in what has not been proven, when what has is not is, and we know very well has does not last?

But what do we know? What we learned then, we learn not now -- we only remember, and remembering is not knowing. The knowing -- the knowing is fleeting. Perhaps the knowing is even the same as nothing: if what we see, what we hear, what we feel, they become memories, then why not our thoughts, our insights, our ideas? Are they not flashes of light, too, or bathtub screams of "Eureka!", or tingles of excitement down our spines?

Why must remembering not be knowing?

Because I didn't really know you, Anna. Otherwise I wouldn't have loved you.

But you know that you did love me?

I remember I did -- perhaps I knew -- but I don't really know. What we remember may have been warped by how we felt, or what we heard, or what we saw: it's easy to gaslight the self.

But does the knowing really matter?

It does -- it does! Knowing is having faith, is believing in the power to know, is believing in that which is known. If I do not know that I loved you, if I do not continually know that I love you -- if the flash of light does not become an image, or the bathtub scream does not become a song -- then what does the picture show, what does the memory mean? Nothing, as the knowing is nothing, and if it becomes the foundation for something, then that something will crumble into dust.

So for you to have loved me, you must still love me?

I must not look back at that love and see it as an object to be cherished: it must not be transformed into an object of the past, an object solely to be remembered. It cannot have been the knowledge of something if it was an object in the first place, especially not of love.

So do you still love me?

...I don't know. I remember hoping that you would love me, love me the way I loved you -- then I became someone else, myself perhaps, and now I remember that I hoped I would be loved as I loved you -- and now I remember that I had hoped I would love again, as I loved you, as I had hoped to be loved by you. But now I don't even hope that, just as I know that nothing lasts.

Ah! Despair, the bringer of hope, the archangel of death. Surely you do not wish to return to that question again?

But you asked it first: "Are we here, now, and has history ended?" You opened our conversation with it, even as we first met. And the answer, I know now, is obvious: yes, we are here, now, as we will be, as we die each moment and are born each moment, as we kill one moment and give birth to the next, but the fact that we live and die and murder and create means that no, Annie, history has not ended. History proceeds as it always proceeds, and history is nothing: nothing lasts, and only suicide will end it.

But even then it will not have ended. You said so yourself: "as we die each moment, we are born each moment." And besides, you know full well, your despair only clouds your judgment: it was always hopeless between the two of us. We were not conceived of as tragic lovers, but as two strangers, meeting again and again by accident, not like a dream but like a chronicle.

...I didn't say that.

Or so you remember, but I know. Now enough: you have answered my question. Time again to go.
 
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The Beginning of History


Walt Disney -- now there's a man
who knows his history.

Who knows how to craft it,
millions and millions served.

Who knew Pocahontas
was much more than a girl?

Or Princess Jasmine -- no, no one
in the nineties. It's arthritis:

we needed our joints, our
slim midriffs, vegetable oiled.
 
The Beginning of History


I promise you we'll make America great again.
Who's we? and why do I even care about America,
oceans and oceans away. I got my own problems.

Yeah, you got your own problems,
lil bitch, like them drugs
or how you handle them. You shoot them up
all gangsta, if gangsta had an academy,
a badge, and a hatred of all things
non-bougie. But you're non-bougie
too. You're a piece of Americana
and whatever that means to everyone else,
with your turn-of-the-century, dog-eat-dog
mentality. If you really had your own problems,
you wouldn't have tuned in to Trump,
to us, who see you only as a dumpster
for our niggers' unloved pups.
 
Fascist Prick


This horn is a horn of plenty.
Grapes and olives and French grenades
pour out of its wide mouth

which you draw close to yours,
kiss, and spit
tastes sweet as mead.

Or you ram it up your cunt
and nacre clamps your cervix shut.

Just the tip! you blast
through this horn into a rally
of kowtowing Jews,

you want to get the traffic moving.
Fuck-yous slip out of their windows --

Yes, this horn will help you hear.
And like Fafner dragged out of his cave
or potent Zeus birthing Athena,

you'll become a unicorn,
a stag, a devil-goat
shut up by cruel bombs.
 
Soulmates


1
It does not, it cannot, begin with two.
The breath emanates. The soul,
diabolic, whores itself to the world.
The senses tense up.

God's contraction,
a game of chicken.
We were broken
like a stick of cherry wood

picked for kindling.

2
Now we're a tent, dry grass
beneath our mesh of fingers.
Sparks fly. Something surges
but I cannot name it.

Our arms crease.
Our necks crack.
Our guts spill.
Our legs snap.

A chestnut log pounds us into dust.

3
I never lusted after you:
that was never the issue.
Perhaps we met prematurely,
perhaps I jumped the gun.

No, there was no issue.
Nothing happened between us.
I felt, I remember --
now there's an issue.

Now we're hanging from a bridge.

4
It begins with two: two spots
of light, two bodies
under an arch. He passes
a ring to her, she pays with fruit.

The lights
will meet again.
Eventually. The bodies
are not so lucky,

but do not mistake a beginning for an end.
 
Acedia


Jupiter the fat
will meet with Mars and the Moon
in the end, when the Moon paints her face red,
Mars is red, and Jupiter

the fat has his red spot
growing and growing, gas and blood
spewing -- and Jove keeps his smile,
Mars keeps sullen, and the Moon

turns bright and hot and dry
in the end. Venus will try
to quench it with water, Mercury

choke it with dirt, but the only one with a cure,
old man Saturn, is stuck watching the skies,
waiting for the dawn.
 
Acedia


Lock yourself in your room and claim
you've dedicated your life to God.
Masturbate all day, maybe
mod some Skyrim along the way.
Soon you're out of porn. You crack open a book --
retroclone you'll never play -- and pore through chapters
one to three. "Thou shalt have
six attributes for thy characters. Thou shalt have a single class.
Thou shalt choose spells for mages, weapons for warriors."

Look at an image of a girl you like.
Stare into her hair, then into her eyes.
Something you'll never do if you ever meet,
not unless she said yes
or wasn't looking. Not into her breasts,
of course, you have more class than that,
although the glance passes...
then weep for a bit.
Just a bit. You are no warrior

but a sorcerer-priest, and it's time to eat.
 
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Thirteen Ways of Looking at Teenage Girls


1
At fifteen I had a crush on a girl in a flannel shirt.
She had a big nose and even bigger breasts.
I had a wet dream on my second week with her,
but not of her.

2
You can't gaslight a girl into loving you.
At least, not while you're still a boy.

3
At twelve I thought I was too smart for my own good.
At thirteen, girls came into the picture
and I was depressed. I remembered a friend I had and thought,
My, she was lovely to talk to.

4
Girl, you're such a prude.
No, I didn't say that. I said prune.
You worry too much.
You're going mad.

5
At fourteen I didn't know how sex worked
and I never masturbated to the bodies of girls
I actually knew.

6
I wonder if I'll graduate.
I wonder if I'll get a girlfriend.
I wonder if I'll get a job.

7
The obligatory image
of blackbirds walking around the feet
of the women about me. The obligatory truth
that they're bitches
and they're girls.

8
You can't look at a girl
without talking to her.

9
At thirteen, I accidentally stepped on this girl
and she was mad and told me to say sorry but
I thought I didn't do anything wrong and
I didn't like the tone of her voice.

10
I'm gonna get crucified for this. Mostly by girls
who wouldn't understand -- or would,
and whose perceptions of me would change
unchangeably.

11
I knew a bit about human anatomy.
I still laughed at the girl whose tampon broke
during computer class. I didn't know it then
but I laughed out of fear.

12
I wanted to be looked at, I wanted to be treated
with a measure of delicacy, with a measure of respect.
I wanted to be above mocking -- the only ones who could mock me
were devils, Antichrists.
I wanted to be deified.
A big word, yes.
At thirteen, girls were Messiah.

13
It's never about the girl.
 
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Laylah


time to shut up
now,
time for deafness
and darkness

the only sense for you
is feeling,
your tongue will not move
to speak but to taste

soon enough the stars
will burst,
soon enough this roof
will fall on heads

but not on mine --
i will be far away

perhaps in another country,
eating grapes

waiting to hear your "soon enough"
 
The Beginning of History


Who can predict how the wind will blow?
Who can predict the coming of our lord?


The world is quiet tonight.
Even the electric fan's constant whir
bleeds into the warm lights,
the curtains' motion to that gentle wind
at one with the surrounding wall.
My body lies on the bed, waiting for dinner,
perhaps, for a knock on the door.
Above the black clock
and the white ceiling
and the red roof
and the thin mist
and the clouds freshly burst
and the vacuum of space
and the moon
and the planets
and the fixed stars,
angels hold their breath.
My beard smells of chestnut flowers.

A termite flies into one of the lights.
Its wings tear off. Its body
plummets into the floor.

I feel my chest
rise and fall.

You blow the horn.
 
Aaaaaand that's it for the suite. It's not a very good one, I know -- has something to it, but that something I think is a little ill-developed. I could maybe work on this a bit more, but I'd rather cannibalize what I have here already, especially since I have more fully formed ideas in the back burner. There were a handful more pieces written for this month, but I'll put them in spoiler'd form in another post.

EDIT: I might also do what is customary for me and start spoilering some posts again, though not from the very start -- even if I don't think a lot of the older pieces I didn't spoiler hold up anymore, I don't want to bother reading through them again, not right now at least.
 
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Dark Victory

My eyelids are curtains
and the show just ended.
Which side is the stage?
 
The Paranoid Princess to Her Love


I dream of shedding my skin like the hairs
of a dog in summer's heat. Yes, you vamp,
I saw you lift your shades at the beach
and purr at the mannish girl who strode
toward the ocean and the afternoon
and I wondered: was it right for me
to have given up my evening cilice
for our pleasure? But then I remember

our nights in my lonely lakeside room
where you would keep the watch and rest
my sleepless head against your chest
while the sun crept over the water --

and my wearying guilt would ebb away
with the darkness and your wakefulness.
 
excerpt of doubt

who are we to dream of first meetings?
of houses we own, without debt to any others,
even to God? who are we to dream of oneness,
when we ourselves are fragments of ourselves?
 
Pastoral


A world without language, without context,
Without hidden messages, meanings too complex,
A world of pure creation: a countryside
Ready for harvest, a clasping hand

Thrust out of fear and fire, out of darkness and delight
(Abstractions from the past, cliched metaphors)
Time and space contracting to exclude memory,
To exclude anxiety: to include only creation.

Only the archetypal details shall remain relevant
Not as archetypes (for there shall be no arche) but as subjects
In and of themselves, hypostases within one and without one,
All communication as pure thought, pure feeling, pure action,

Points blossoming into lines, your red hair and my rough chin
Wordlessly crying out, "Genetheto phos!"
 
hunger ditty

Dogs don't yelp from tooth decay:
What they eat don't cloy.
They'll eat shit, for all they care.

Leave a fissure in the gate,
They'll run out to meat---
Beg from neighbors, chase the strays.
 
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One night an angel appeared to me with
hair your color and eyes your color but
no, it was not you, nor a dream of you,
nor an embodiment of my very idea of you, but
an angel, a person all her own, and she
dropped a lump of coal onto my tongue
and the world where she popped into my life
transformed into links to click, short stories
with cheap little lessons to absorb, images
barely worthy of but always looking for
comment, polls to answer. She told me
my answers there would give me no voice,
my friends there were no longer friends,
and my work there was no labor as in
giving birth to a child but slavery.
She told me things that, if I were not
dreaming, would sound crazy: but then
this world is one big fever dream anyway.
 
My Lady's Red


no one wants to be alone but
everyone wants to be alone with
sometime someplace something somehow
time warped together, like weave died the color

her shape is her name, her words the swing
in air sucks up booty, sugar and hook
even as ten to twenty is forty
teeth fall out, breasts sag with belly

and even brains splattered clumps of sex
pellets of lead big toe bare
hair trigger

soul's new, soul's smart, soul's you
my lovely lady spinneret groove
tying up time with your mulberry buds