Read an Excerpt
from “Orlando”
Don’t make the morning come, Orlando, place of “how did this happen?”
and to what extent, your body, heaved inside the abacus moon, I begged the gods,
the upward whatever, “don’t make it happen this way,” already too late, a dented taxi rushes off
into the palm tree afternoon, dented sun, dented hotels, shiny and sad, remote
as money, the future you told was incredible and made me feel like a real poet,
more that my favorites even: Frank O’Hara, John Wieners, Alice Notley, pulled at my throat,
until I was above my own circumstance, until I could float above my life like a moth
whose lifespan is so short but still she tries to extract some horrible beauty from this world as she
hovers over the tender waters of sleep and I hovered there too with the flourishing language
you offered: Oh, I was the great moth, great Sewanee River, and when you said of yourself
“I’m a really bad person,” I didn’t believe you, couldn’t believe this would devolve
into failure, ink of the adolescent’s diary that comes off so easily, powder off wings.
[. . . . ]
I can see the audience, full of Xanax, full of that narcotic dream moon we discussed
for hours, I can see them in the velvet theater of manic energy, roped off,
never making desire their own, but we did that, we took the fantasy of the flesh,
the porn of the body, and transformed it into our own psychic architecture
as in the Dutch tourists who have filmed The Pirates of the Caribbean ride, also called
the Yo Ho A Pirate’s Life for Me ride, everything Victorian and frilly, a repressed fantasy awakens
a YouTube-Guy-Debord-sex-toy world, fake orgasms, shaved pussies, chlorinated
water pouring and pouring from the corpse-like molten spaces, the crystalline and mechanical turns
of what is no longer human, what can’t be human anymore, I begged you to beat me,
and as I told you my life story, a whole history of trauma unrolled like a scroll
from my blue, frothy mouth, and you replaced my mouth with a black, lace corset,
and I liked it so much I threw my flesh away like my computer that begins to focus on
[PAGE BREAK]
the tragic origin of philosophy which is the inverse of Tomorrowland, a trauma
mired in the past, aesthetics of light, every great spirit needs a mask, chromatic blood,
pulsation of Floridian insects, green of its seas lying halfway between white and the dilated pupil,
black of its false lagoon, an image of a deity as ruin porn, and the pervasive pattern of a shattered
self-image, 6/12/1997 Smoked weed on the haunted house ride. Long story short we all
ended up in Disneyland Jail! The cool air, the fan in the room, a whisper, an underground nod. I wish these
idiots knew I’m actually a prisoner of my own creation. It’s fascinating. Marvel of curved mirrors,
giants, dwarves, light as the principle of all beauty, opaque splendor, inward and upward light,
the outward light of plants, arced, growing around the design of the human body, note how far
the castle looks from Main Street, lips from the nose, history from its context, the wavering
inner experience from confinement, one comes to realize that sexual violence, is, at its heart
impersonal, sociopolitical, innermost and outermost phenomenological way to control people.
[. . . . ]
Orlando, infinite series of nature masked, authority figure in disguise,
when each veil goes up, when we finally see your fearful face,
we know you are every song called “Fantasy,” constructed
to suppress the voice, the longing for revolt, I hold their little hands,
pain is pain, threshold of art, pepper spray on the centuries piling up like bodies
inside the scarlet sun, when they said all you deserved was rape, we said no,
that is not all we deserve, and when the oak fell and Craig threw a cup
of coffee in my face, I said pain is pain, the way it moves outward over
the pale waters of Hotel Rosenberg, sound propogates with remarkable strength,
a crew has come to cut up the oak, drag it piece by piece into a truck,
the sun shines hard, imposes its vertigo on the story, the pastel ways of memory
August 7th 2013 Hiked to falls, drove to Clingmans Dome, raining, . . .
from “Demon Spring”
*
I’m a witch who lost all her powers,
and in place of my powers, I got the coiled beauty
of seashells and sleeping infants. The coiled
beauty of eardrums, and the sound wave
of bells. The bells! This is the country of clouds.
The molten body, the Floridian pinks,
and centuries of sand dollars examining
the arcing waves. New territory
of interiority and I’m in the middle of this.
White like a negative belt.
I am an airless thing. When I get high, I get low.
But I’m real and airless.
*
It was a time
of precarity. All kinds
of time. We were living
on scree.
Someone always there to like your dumb
dream or the dumb
things your kids say or the new swing set.
Be parking lot.
One more selfie
closer to Ross
Dress for Less.
Be friendly.
Dress like you’re from Connecticut.
B+ / be surplus.
Sometimes B-. Collapse
the personality. Don’t fuck away
my agony just to replace
it with more agony.
Be cunt? Be wet. Be kind.
Be Whole Foods orchids. Be pursuit.
Be benevolent. Pursuant.
Be communicable. Make claims.
Claim everything.
Then reverse it.
Poet be
like “like” or whatever. Poet be like list.
That’s the body
electric. And it hums. It hums a
dumb electronic hum.
