La Poésie
Some by me, most by others.
The Mime Keeper, the Parrot and the Cornered Dog all belong together in the same way the Lamprey, Remora, Hagfish and Eel fall under the order of scavenging fish, eating dead animals and plant debris
Dancing around commensalism and parasitic violence
The Mime Keeper, too selfless for its own good
Its body broken down and tapered into nothing but abandoned bones and stiff cloth
It screams from its eyes but remains silent, drowning in the wasted time of my youth
It and the Remora do not harm their hosts. They feed off of their left-over scraps
Never eating anything of their own, always consuming discarded, regurgitated waste
In thanks, they attach themselves to rid the host of predators
The Parrot spends its days within itself but amongst others perfecting its mimicry
Like the Lamprey chooses and attaches itself to a host, the Parrot chooses its voice
The Lamprey rasps and punctures the skin, sucking the life and draining the host
(Reverse) Darwinism has created the Parrot in god's image
It has no need to attach itself as it drains the host
Instead, it grooms its vibrant colors as it repeats what it hears, never saying anything it hasn’t already heard before
It is unable to think for itself and means absolutely none of it
The Parrot does not mimic the Mime Keeper, but the Cornered Dog who cries to the darkness and snaps in the light
Nursing its pups until it no longer has interest
It and the Eel lie and wait
Teeth bared, they strike when prey is disarmed
I resent each one of you
And what is left but the Hagfish? Who, once coming upon a dying or decaying animal, devours savagely. I know where the hagfish is,
Salt
“What purpose is this anger serving you?” she asks. My ribs feel like they’re cracking.
“I don’t know,” I tell her, “and I don’t know what to do with it.” I wish I had something better to tell her, something better to tell myself. Instead, I rest my throbbing head against the wall at that angle that I’ve realized makes my neck look broken.
I tell her there are three parts to it.
Le Sel que J'ai Volontairement Ingéré – “The Salt I Willingly Ingested”
I feel like I have been flayed alive and salted like raw meat. I’ve been left alone in the sun to bake and cure wrapped in that stupid, ugly, discolored white sheet. My skin is shriveled up, my face is gone. What used to be soft and pink has hardened and turned into the deepest shade of red that harbors no moisture or life. My heart has stopped beating, and my eyes and my tongue taste bitter. I am angry because I ate the salt. I wrote about the salt. In the morning, I used to lick the salt and it would make me happy. Now the salt is curing me, it’s killing me, it’s slowly drying the life out of me.
La Chambre de Durcissement – “The Curing Chamber”
If he really could see what he’s done to me. If he could come into my body for one day, step into the curing chamber, and feel the dead weight of all of the love that I drag around with me, unable and unwilling to discard it yet. The weight of the lies and the deceit and the disrespect and the choices that say “I don’t care if you live or die.” If he could feel the density of the half of my body that’s rendered a corpse. If he could feel it, if he could taste it, he would die, too. It would kill him. The salt would draw out every bit of love and moisture and softness left in his body and he, too, would die alone, dehydrated, and burning in the sun.
La Chair Cuite – “The Cooked Flesh”
I am what this has made me. Before it all he had me as I was, as the person that I hope to be again someday. Soft and unwavering, loving, kind, and warm. It is unfair to punish someone for an inability to remain as those things when he has sawed through my neck and disemboweled me by his own hand. He felt my teeth, so hungry and desperate around his arm, and he swung hard and knocked them out leaving my mouth jagged and dripping and bloody. It cut his fist, no doubt. I’m sure he can feel that. Did it feel odd to hear my blood running onto the floor? Was it off putting to see the sharp, jagged edges he has created in my mouth? Did it scare him? Did it make him want to run away? He did run away, so it must have. The dripping sounded like screaming and it felt like “fuck you”. It felt like the desire to claw his face down to the bone. I don’t look like myself anymore; neither should he.
John Jonas Gruen/Hulton Archive
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles
and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
it seems they were all cheated of some marvellous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it
August, 2024
I remember the feeling of going to the city when I was a child. The sound of the highway and the soft, velvet-like scratching of my winter coat against the seat belt.
The city always looked how I dreamt it would because I always made sure that I found what I was looking for.
It reminds me, so often, of snow and salt and the sound of cars on the street. The light is the color orange, whether that be from the tunnel lights or the street lights or maybe no orange at all, that is just what color my memory is.
Orange and my cold teeth from the snow.
Once in a city when I was a child my father picked me up while waiting for a bus because I was tired. As he held me I could hear his heart beating inside of his chest.
As he talked I could feel his chest vibrate against my head.
This was what my dad sounded like; I would remember it forever.
I remember closeness like this one time.
Fifteen years later I would lie on the chest of my first love, willing my mind to remember his heart the way I remembered my father's.
And I do, I remember it very well and I remember thinking the same thing: this is what his body sounds like as it keeps him alive.
​
Take your head out of the snow, put your gloves on, get back in the car. Put the seatbelt back against your puke stained winter coat.
I know the feel of the cold window glass against my nose and my fingertips.
I made many promises to the stickers on the back windows, promises I remember almost as clearly as their hearts.
The city always gave me what I wanted because I knew how to find it, and because of that I live with a bit of the orange light.
When the city was lost in the distance and when the lights in the sky no longer lit up my face as we drove along, the promise fell into nauseated grief and sickness from being inside of the car.
Goodbye to the city; goodbye to their hearts.
I wish you both, and every city I've been to, to know how often my heart grieves for you.
John Jonas Gruen/Hulton Archive
Excerpt from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
For though men be merry of mood when they have mightily drunk,
a year slips by swiftly, never the same returning;
the outset to the ending is equal but seldom.
And so this Yule passed over and the year after,
and severally the seasons ensued in their turn:
after Christmas there came the crabbed Lenten
that with fish tries the flesh and with food more meager;
but then the weather in the world makes war on the winter,
cold creeps into the earth, clouds are uplifted,
shining rain is shed in showers that all warm
fall on the fair turf, flowers there open,
of grounds and of groves green is the raiment,
birds are busy a-building and bravely are singing
for the sweetness of the soft summer that will soon be on
the way;
and blossoms burgeon and blow
in hedgerows bright and gay;
then glorious musics go
through the woods in proud array.
After the season of summer with its soft breezes,
when Zephyr goes sighing through seeds and herbs,
right glad is the grass that grows in the open,
when the damp dewdrops are dripping from the leaves
to greet a gay glance of the glistening sun.
But when Harvest hurries in, and hardens it quickly,
warns it before winter to wax to ripeness.
He drives with his drought the dust, till it rises
from the face of the land and flies up aloft;
wild wind in the welkin makes war on the sun,
the leaves loosed from the linden alight on the ground,
and all grey is the grass that green was before:
all things ripen and rot that rose up at first,
and so the year runs away in yesterdays many,
and here winter wends again, as by the way of the world
it ought,
until the Michaelmas moon
has winter’s boding brought;
Sir Gawain then full soon
of his grievous journey thought.