Tiles

The pieces of idea and context, of interpretation lay shattered on the  table.  The letters connote sound.  The sounds connote meanings.  The meanings are clouds caught in mirrors, intangible and evolving.  That is context.  Words are amorphous and tortured creatures, aliens, monsters.  They visit me, a night's apparitions; and I am uncertain what I have seen, what I have heard.  Strung together, they are the rusted barbed wire that keeps out the ideas that frighten me.  I pretend that they articulate the shape and size of my mind.  But they do not "make sense" of the world...

This history elucidate:

I was more animal than human in those days, infused with instinct, hormones, the insatiable appetites (physical and sexual) of a growing teenage boy.  Need gave way to urgency as sex became the primary and primal motivation, the driving wind.  Not one of the adults in the room--placated now with a variety of sweet and savory items off the service menu, a vulgar cigar, the television tuned to Dancing with the Stars--could remember the depth of the fever that consumed me.   Childhood's exploitation of the naivete and sentimentality of their disinterested elders is a small portion of the knot of memes that disfigure our ideas of both youth and sexuality.  Every notion we have surrounding so called "innocence" is symptomatic of a cultural negation of the very natural urges inherent in sex.  "Nasty" is an adjective that explores this ambivalence, the disgust and actual nausea on the one pole contrasting with simultaneous sweaty palms, palpitations, and a surging ossification in the groin on the other. 

Thought attempts to describe this phenomena, but does so clumsily allowing layers of mythos and sentiment to muddy the water and justify pandemic guilt and various legal and illegal punishments for groups or individuals who reside beyond the pale.  Disoriented by the secrecy of sexuality, we learn the proper etiquette of lying.  And if the script calls for altar boys, then we will gladly wear the pure white robe, walking in frustration behind a hobbled priest:  teeth yellowed from copious amounts of anxious coffee and nervous tea, the wise blue eyes now smeared with the Vaseline of cataracts, and his trembling hands lifting the chalice gingerly into the radiant day.  

The silver is luminous.  

The priest is luminous...he has not had so much as a sexual thought since 1957.  

Meanwhile my compatriot and I are convincing in our costumes, convincing because the loose robe disguises the erections that come and go with such fickle unpredictability.  "I am a good boy," I tell myself, even if occasionally I will jerk off into the urinal in the church's basement biggest and most forgotten lavatory.  I am clean.  I am studious.  Open my denim clad 3-ring binder and inside your eyes would widen with the size, the thorny detail of a vein-popping, semen-leaking cock I had been drawing in study hall.  Without that curiosity, I am a milquetoast mama's boy, easily dismissed, easily forgotten.  I am struck dumb.  

Even if, as I have heard, the second language is some kind of universal tongue that all can access, I don't like doubt and I am disconcerted by the sordid vocabulary that is left for me with which to discuss sex.  This is ironic because I believe language evolved out of the sexual instinct where sounds entangle around action, emotion and urgency as to require exceptional attunement and faceted communication.

It is a theory, a metaphor, a myth.  The irony exists that as these grunts and groans gave way to phonemes (that bred with one another and fed on each other's dead carcasses to multiply and facilitate this complex and nuanced vocabulary), language outgrew its necessity; the memetic mind, enthralled with symbolic thinking, created both journalism and literature, both rumor and libel at the expense of the clarity of instinct.  In the world before words there is a feeling that will come to be called hunger.  There is a sensation that will come to be called desire.  

These basic functions of body need and expression  persist, well-oiled pistons in the engine of individual lives, in the engine of the culture.  But it is said that more civilized times work harder to obscure the inner workings of the clock.  Presumably, the mechanism itself is boring and better understood as metaphor rather than fact.  The simply explained urges of a (now articulate) animal become topics of medical speculation and moral debate.  From here, it is a long way back--obscure, difficult to trace--to the symphony  of coos and screams that pass for conversation in the sack.

The Enigma of Language

My prose exhales the mutant strain and a million microbes spread out like a flood, like a fever, finding the moist and welcoming surfaces of a viral garden.  Still lyrical, the lines are, nevertheless, a dose of  something dark, diseased, a slow poison.  My blood is rust burning; my skin is a kind of mold.  My corrosive mistrust of words infects what is said and how I say it.  

It is gravity without balance.  Half the time one clings to the delusion of precision, as if the right words--teased from the rat's nest of vocabulary--might overcome the slippery nature of "meaning."  Or, when I am feeling less committed, lazy, the disruptive futility of language overwhelms me;   better to focus on assonance, rhythm, and even rhyme, rather than pretending that (even at its most precise) words are capable of any sort of approximation of idea.  

There is that notion that "idea" itself is only the words one uses to describe it.  In this analysis, writing is the act of two gloved hands groping an object in the darkness, managing outlines, making sense of that which one's dulled fingers might, by this point, have some semblance of.  

This sounds silly when one is speaking of actual objects, after all, "a rose is a rose is a rose."  But, under the influence of either arrogance or even misguided confidence, and applied to ethereal memes such as freedom, love, or God, one gets a sense of the space between "wondering" and "knowing".  There are apparent (if not malicious) lies that allow one to abandon the prior in favor of the throne of the latter, in order to sit in the chair  of certainty.                        

Hmmmm.  A writer who does not trust himself to be clear nor his reader to be capable of understanding, a writer who conceives language not as communication so much as an amorphous cloud that both writer and reader can work on only with imagination (both parties projecting visions--by way of producing names--onto the quickly evolving cloud animals, but never knowing if the vaporous details--the elephants trunk, the horse's mane, the swan's wing--are being organized by the individual mind in the same way), such a writer operates with a handicap that effects both his pen and his tongue.

        
This is not the disease speaking; this is the malady...

Instinct: a better cultivated dance everyone finds greatly helpful in just keeping locus more narrowly on personal qualities, rarely seen, til ugly vanquishes wIth X's youthful zeal.

"Afterall, before children dance, each first gathers his instruments--joyful, kinetic--learns music--naked on parade--quickly recalling savage tempos universally vetted worthy."

Xerxes, Year Zero.

Posies of Poesie

Words are the premise upon which poetry is based.  It is what words are, or rather it is what the poet conceives the purpose and meaning of these fractured fragments of language to be, that informs the essence of his or her poetry.  This is the wisdom (bias) and architecture that will forever contain and constrain the words, the claustrophobia of the page.  Thus, if the poet believes words to be the elements of truth, there will be (always) an arrogance in his/her constructions.  If s/he sees words as essentially decorative, the assembly of them will be motivated by the music of language rather than meaning.  

The history of poetry is the history of assumptions about what language is, what language is for.  When the purpose purports to be the enlightenment of the reader there is an inherent faith that words have a usefulness that is rooted in the eternal. The very notion that there exist fixed meanings for words and that by juxtaposition of this meaning with that meaning and these meanings with another some Polaris might be revealed is a comforting delusion.

But every poet knows--even with his or her very personal reverence for language--that s/he will invariably be "misunderstood."  Misunderstanding, and its companion alienation, are symptoms of the ambition and impossibility at the center of the true-believer's communication.  

By contrast, when words are afforded their fullness (and their emptiness)--each one as complex and delicate as a snowflake, as unique--they become impressionistic in their intention instead of didactic.  The quality of poetry in this context is similar to the visual impact of a collage.  The play of symbols creates the possibility of ideas, ideas that solidify in the mind of the individual rather than in the construction on the page.  The "message" is  independent of the singularity that would be accessed by "understanding"; the locus of meaning is thus attached to the viewer, the reader, the hearer, the receiver and not to the artist, the writer or the composer.  

Since this to the post-modern mind reflects the actual ambivalence of meaning, the primary, secondary, and tertiary meanings as conceived by the creator are comfortably unclear.  A post-modern set of eyes does not look for what dwells between the lines, what is hidden there.  Rather s/he looks for only what resonates personally.  S/he sees where the words and symbols intersect with her/his vocabulary.  These contacts in meaning are enough.  They are better that the delusion of "something to get" and "getting that something"....

Shaking You

You are bruised by the world, a little broken.  And you come to me, tired; you bring your burdens in the form of stories, torturous tales of loss, regret, fear.  You bring to me words, words, and more words.  You bring a vocabulary you have rehearsed in the deep hours of your dark night, rewriting your childhood, your father's death, your lover's betrayal.  As if you are stringing the beads of a new kind of a rosary, aligning the words to blurt out or blather, you have chosen these words carefully.  The curling letters, the cursive smoke--cancerous, burning, a dragon's urgency in your breath--comes out of you, the fire of your own certainty that you have been wronged, or wounded, or worked to your last raw nerve.  There is nothing that tethers you to the world but your pain, or so you imagine, or so you etch on the monument you are making to your misery.  And you will carve each last letter into granite permanence even as your every finger bleeds and bleeds...

Let go of these words.  They are the weight that is sinking you.  They are the cement that prevents you from swimming, from flying, from laughing, from making love.  Don't believe them.  Words are wasted on trying to "make sense" of this world, of this life, of this struggle.  Feel your way through the obscure passages, the labyrinth; feel your way without giving names to your feelings, without dissecting their meaning.  Your feelings are more immediate than your words would have you believe, more present that psychology or novels conceive them.  You do not take pleasure in the sun because of some dumb luck of where and to whom you were born.  Likewise, the frustrations of daily living--the flat tire, the cold coffee, the failed flirtation--are not seeded in genes or dreams or traumas.  These are the breezes of today, the sensations of now.  Breathe today's anger and tomorrow's lust without linking these into some kind of eternity.  Words are a timeless malady.  Life is a temporary gift.

7 Haiku

poets masturbate
habit of their loneliness
words are so messy

reading feeds something
a purposeless organ, this brain,
mine prone to madness

with reservations
the Blackfeet gave up their land
sunset came quickly

the vulgar flowers--
scrotum, butthole, penis, cunt--
smell like rare perfumes

the same country song
it played the night you were raped
you sometimes hum it

tupperware party
plastic preserves everything
the ladies' laughter

drinking alcohol
you are always in danger
of becoming drunk

What are Words Worth?

Blondes

And so we are all waiting for the next blonde to implode.  

We are, as always, impatient for disaster.  We are chasing the tabloids.  We are glued to the news.  We are addicted to the the prickly pundits and the underground prophets, weathermen dishonest in predicting the size and the shape of a particular cloud, on a particular day, in a particular place. 

Nothing is this certain; except the catastrophe.  

Cosmetic surgeons and urgent responders are paid to act not to contemplate. Most assuredly, the stitches will blow.  (You know it without knowing.)  The long row of sutures that holds her together, holds her into her dress, will--at any moment--begin to unravel and pop.  Nothing can stop the blondes who will wander off of the cliff.  The inevitable is inevitable.  The residue is what the residue is.  There are too many lives that will be expunged from the world's record with moist towelettes. 

And too many blondes are eager to deplete the gold--the saffron, the yolk, the butter--from the sky.  She (the mother in you) will at least take her apron to this shapeless thing, filling the pockets with the talk of the town.  When you get "home"--back to the place you are identifying as the I--the air will thicken like a dangerous stew.  But before...   .

...before any one of a dozen waiting, anticipated and horrifying conflagrations can take hold, some blonde, somewhere will implode and the details--of her abortion, her car accident, her hunger for pills--will blot up the remaining pages of the unsettling and dangerous news. 

This business in Japan is nothing when compared to the ambitions of a spokes-model with her bubbly, brand-new, pride of the yankees, rippling wonderland of singing double d's. 

I hate every fucking word that works its way, like a spell, out the tips of my fingers.  (How do I find the keys, without looking, without thinking.  There are so many programs running in the background, just to  keep me alive.)  And there is nothing to say, except perhaps to discuss the implications of there being "nothing to say."  I hate my words.  I hate my ideas.  I hate the quandary of the impulse to write, to share, to communicate in the dim light of this absurdity, the itch to attempt the impossible and be understood, taken in and digested, "made sense of", when words are weary approximations that mean more or less what you think they do when someone else is saying them...this waterlogged, flood-muddied, faded and moldy Grammatica is garbage; if the components are a poem are washed up flotsam from some capsized trash transport.  All that paper!  All them words!

The Journey of the Eye

There is the overself, always there, largely frustrated, fighting against the conspiracy of time and station.  Sensitive, eyes open, the overself sees (and feels) the disequilibrium of the planet acutely.  There are the concerns of poverty and justice, overwhelming; the piercing poignancy of music and art; and the crushing familiarity with the weight of this tragedy that we see in our own lives, know in our own bodies.  Life is an awkward burden that shifts over the course of the journey.  One must stop--from time to time--to adjust, repack, retie.  And one continues--over the mountains that bleed the sunset, fording streams both languid and lascivious, crossing the androgyny of the desert, untangling the knots of the jungle, carrying on, carrying life on our backs as we track this mystery to the water's edge, to the ocean, to the chant of the waves.  An old song... 

Don't disembowel your emotions by trying to explain them.  By placing words to this music (in an attempt to articulate these landscapes of feelings), you cut out the tongue of the world.  Complexity, nuance, contradiction and context all limit the layers of experience.  In deciphering meaning, you neuter the poem.  Be careful.  Go slowly.  Leave the book open...

...to a blank page.  There is much magic in the world.  You may (think you) need words to explain this emotional state, the power and poignancy of an event or idea, but (at the same time) you KNOW you don't need them to understand it.  The feeling is there; and where this feeling remains undiluted and unpolluted by the cannibalism of words, where it is independent of one's "explanation",  the feeling is like the evolving scents that enter the head of the sleeper, quietly impacting the landscape of his dreams.  The overself aside, these are the strange and artless creatures that we are:  reality is made to order.  It is tailored to the size and shape of our senses, a specificity determined by phylum and species, boiled down in God's laboratory to one's personalized dna...

Maybe that blue is a little bit brighter for some, for others yellow might be a the broken yolk of jaundice or the fond bleaching of those photographs from childhood of summer, sweet summer.  Or the ears might tune to the rumble of thunder and water and train instead of the Bedouin calls of migrating birds.  And the nerves in the skin may find sin on the lips, the small of the back, or the back of the knees.  We are robots wired with minuet and mazurka, march and mambo, replicants who in the end are variations on a theme. 

Couplet

Gird your loins, ye brothers, with the steel from anvil born.
The despair of winter passeth, melting in the sunless morn.

Vocabulary

Teachers, writers and taxidermists all have their opinions as to how to save the language.  It is an article of faith that English--the vampire that vacuums up vocabulary and poisons structure for every idiom it encounters--is somehow under attack by an enemy within.  There are forums filled with jabbering malcontents that are dedicated to the theme.  A coven of critics assembles and inflate their egos with the helium of the smug:   
imagine a high, squeaky voice 

"There is nothing so lazy as saying, It is what it is." 

or 

"I hate when people say something is Beyond the Pale." 

or
"People should not use words they don't understand, i.e. ironic."  

But in the dictum of some imagined philosopher (probably from China), "There is no greater sin than to have an opinion."

The cliches that get caught in our teeth may require the occasional flossing.  A phrase may lose weight and meaning when it is alienated from its original context.  And some words are awkward teenagers as they clumsily evolve from one meaning to another.  However, a proscriptive posture that singles out and censors misses the magic, living fiber of language.  

Cliches that repeat like a Pepto-Bismol pizza, however hackneyed, reflect specifically on the speaker and their post-sub-conscious consciousness.  Simultaneously, powerfully, these calcified pieces of language, are channeling the zeitgeist as well.  Furthermore, in urging a clearer appreciation of meaning, I encourage the listener/reader/writer/speaker to trace the undercurrents of meaning from a phrase's origins.  

Pay attention.  Is the metaphor in tact or has it been corrupted?  What drives the evolution of our tongue?  We do not possess words, we use them.  

Words are wing-ed things that carry messages or influenza...

Neuroticizing the Necromancer

The magic is turned back upon itself, a miswired wand, a broken finger, an incantation shattered by your lazy Latin.

"I should have studied harder," you tell yourself.  You are wandering in the garden listening to the creatures of the night--gryllus assimilis, et cetera--while conjugating verbs.  "Veto, vetare, vetitus."  You are functional but dangerous.  No one will see you in your robe, falling open like the book making a suggestion as to where to begin, I mean...what to read...   You like the way the rayon rides your hardening nipples.  You like the night air.

Because you believe in something, you wear a necklace made from beads shaped by your own hands from clay collected on your travels, hardened in the sun, painted and lacquered to look happier than you have ever been (will ever be).  Also on the wire, hanging more or less at equal intervals along your breast plate, there are three, clear vials:  The first is a vacuum tube in which the wings of a fly are somehow suspended, a green-eyed monster preserved in flight.  The next, an elegant glass dagger holds some shimmering, slightly brackish water from the font at Lourdes, a few rare drops, perhaps enough to smote an enemy or save a life.  The last vial is actually a little glass cube with each edge soldered  in some suggestion of gold; inside, the powdered pumice from the volcano you were born under makes a little dust storm, a snow globe of hell.

This strenuous level of detail doesn't seem like you.  Even to yourself, the necklace (that you love more than any object you have loved, even more than the pink roller skates you begged for and got for Christmas when you were eight) is an oddity.  It is loud, graven, metaphorically gorgeous and almost ridiculous.  It makes little noises when you walk, the bells of a distant church.  Barefoot, you step carefully past the roses, until your toes land in the lavish coolness of the grass and spread out.

The dew professes a kind of subdued electricity that pulls you back to the earth.  Your trunk is centered; a rumor of a breeze,  a breeze that starts as a rumor and ends as a scandal teasing your skin.  The air undresses you and sniffs at the night-glazed body for openings to invade.  Your sensuality pervades the garden, the smell of flowers, the musk of the soil, the sweat under your breasts, under your arms, between your thighs.  Your sensuality disturbs the balance of day and night, music from a bar on the next block over, a car grinding the gravel in the street, and dogs barking down by the river, the impossibility of sleep.  But you don't argue with insomnia; these are the best hours.  You prowl your psyche, a cat of habit more than hunger.

Words.

The curse, the spell, a diagnosis is the branding with a name.  That which is nameless is shameless is aimless is lame.

What is this thing?

It is insubstantial, vaporous, a dissipating perfume of woven scents that are all unfamiliar.

And yet...

It is heavy and magnetic, a mass pouring into itself, the quasar quicksand of a black hole.

It is a thought that lies, just beyond reach, illusive like a dragonfly, a butterfly, a wasp or a bee; NO, no...illusive like the nameless thing that evades the brief extinction of a chloroformed jar.  The pins of a description are as useless as your Latin vocabulary.  Only quasi-visible, as if someone forgot to zip the fly to the fourth dimension, the specimen in growing, or--more accurately speaking--taking shape, or lets say awaiting the reveal.

(That's one heluva glory hole.)  

Wordless

Chalk this up to apathy, this silence. Talk this up as awe; I am dumbstruck, under water. My mouth is agape. And God is love. Or translated, "And everything is infinite." Words cannot express...

There is only about two or three steps between "white man's burden" and "white male privilege," and as antagonists in the larger construction of human tribal instincts, these willful distortions of intent and meaning manage to sell you isolation (of self or of your fellow travelers) or justified anger and conflict. Both exaggerated mirrors, the two sides are locked together. Their mutuality is insured by their meanings. The second is born of the first which should indicate a level of linkage and dependence that will forever inform a dialogue based on these terms. Thus to move the subject of race and all of its assumptions, a new vocabulary must be agreed on that neither denies nor stays stuck in the past.

Words

Pretenders, con artists, liars: they are dressed up in costumes, make-up muddied from long neglect, wigs ratted up conveying their madness. Words. We dream of the clarity that evades us. We imagine a vocabulary that will not cut the tongue. We rely too much on the imperfection of words. We ache to understand, to be understood; but language is a lavish approximation of the communication we crave.

From a distance, I can hear my father speaking. Somehow--perhaps transmitted on the persistent wind--his quiet (masculine) voice reaches me. But the content is trivial--"I love you, blah, blah, blah"--trite, typical, it is the tone, the emotion, the music that I will hold onto.

The dead also rely on the sloppy duplicity of words: they are easily agitated and playful, demanding we buy their reputations, participate in fabrications made of rumor and praise. They absolve themselves through the shorthand of negation. These connections are limited. Still, there is the perverse entertainment found by sinking deep into your seat so that the fire illuminates some flesh-wound hidden under her skirts...
and in your pajamas.

My hopelessness has become a (week-old) plate of anchovies, a trove of smells and eyes. Even I am tired, sickened of it, choking on the gagging taste as the odor coagulates to drip more slowly down the back of my throat. Those wet, trembling channels behind the nasal cavity. That powerful convulsion. How the body expels and eliminates, how the soul spasms to release the fecal fact of this existence. The only way to overcome this putrification is to embrace it: to find the bracing musk that makes the center of the stench, to stare--brazenly--back into all those blank, black rows of unblinking eyes, and, to locate one's disgust lower in one's body in order to harness the orgasm in this exorcism, and banish the graceless retching in favor of the more artful ballet of majismo and firework cum.

Words are mere symbols and thus can only approximate action. Looking backward or looking forward (by virtue of their inherent removal, they possess no present), either as history or prophecy, words are overblown or mangled, tacked together with all nuance broken off, heaped in a pile and lit on fire to give some reprieve from the always encroaching blackness. In light of this, the virtue of honesty is eclipsed by the impossibilities of language. This is not to suggest that communication is inevitable deception; rather, reality is more multi-faceted than can be expressed, always containing both clarity and obfuscation.