monstering the logos eros

 don’t know what I’m writing about: I’m obscure even to myself. Initially i had a lunar, lucid vision, and then I clasped that moment to myself before it died and perpetually dies (Lispector 1989, 16).

apprehending the text in a blind alley, or it me, i deflect any direct hits and don’t look it in the eyes. rather, i smell the anxiety of the text, hold my breath and allow it to act upon me. allow it to reach out a slender alien finger and stroke the side of my cheek with a long yellow fingernail. allow it to cross the space between, heavy with heartbeats. my cheek tingles.

traces.

traces my profile from brow to the small hollow of my throat, where words lie in wait.  a pause and then i feel it, feel the jaws of it, feel the multiple jaws of it. i die and i die and i die. eventually the text retreats and oh! i am a colour-cycling angel, from milk-blue through cobalt-edged merlot to jaundiced green. a bloomin’ mutable text, on the move from dermis to epidermis, florescing.

i absorb the asemic marks.

this is what i might call reading, through a contused-coloured lens.

on the road. rubber spitting out asphalt behind, eating the endless, transforming conceptual distance into a nausea of separation. my mouth is dumb and chalky. i swallow pebbles, mouthfilled and choking. ferried, reading across landscapes, plateaus and platforms—mobile, nodal, transverse—the reading unfurling inside like a symphony. in the grip of a transcendent mis/understanding i recall a concentric coming, deliquescent eros galvanising to a point. not jouissance, never jouissance, just points of intensity. Pressed by silver tines. bestiality giving way to a precise peeling away of parts, blade slipping between skin and muscle, or an unruly revelation, a feverish orbit, a skin of rivers, a parasitic tête-à-tête, a flowing stuttering parapraxis pulsing, a ridiculous irrational heartbeat.

in an act of erotic civility, the mouth gifts the vellum a gentle blue.

dead blood dries on the petal.

i cup my hand under my mouth, heave
and bloody pebbles fill my palm, sticky with bile.

inside, i am as big and cold as the moon. pulsing with the same frequency of cool luminosity that radiates from a pearl. i think if i could swallow it maybe i would glow like a pearl, from the inside out. or maybe i would just understand the real nature of otherness if i knew luna that intimately. the shards of moonbeam pass right through me. 

i shiver as they go.

the wax and wane tugs at my bloody oceans.

the suck and pull purges a pretty haul of death—plastics blue and red, tangled seaweeds, dead birds, fish heads, shoes, soles, soles, souls, blue lipped girls with pretty long hair, twisted metal skins, grey televisions, billboards of red and white, buildings all full of cries, broken neon signs, multitudinous sadnesses, tongues licking the sand. disgorging my sea gems in a flocculent tide that vomits and vomits and vomits. i am littered and bedecked, such a pretty ode to excess. only my tears are amplified, through such a lens.

i read you and weep fat shivering drops, caught in a rapture of immanent desire, of touching across texts.

Longing.

i want your secrets, your breath, your stuttering silences full of howling, your vociferous disclosures, your spacious unspeaking, i want your glottal implosions.

stammering becomes you.

in the static i find you, a chimera

in the cough, spectral

in the stumble, shadowy

the intake of breath, doubled

in the trip and not-quite-fall

in the not-spoken i find you, burning a hole in negative space.

in the scissure.

i find you.

full of tears

unleashing utterances that dereference upon plosion

atomise upon articulation

in the  [                                                                   ]

there is and. so. also. but. there is end. there is word without.

we’re fucking in the yawning vacuities where language stutters and fails

in our orbits, relational, elliptical, oscillating, erratic or stable, close or far, but always [                                                                   ]

you

burn too bright too fast
ash covers you

the black clouds, inky,
are leaking out of your mouth

you are the smoke of my breath in the unbearable pre-dawn chill. mist hugs the stiff grasses close for now. the first piercing rays wait just below the horizon, calling you back from the dead again.

it is important to fall from grace, to grasp at the very stuff of oneself in a graceless and futile attempt to unify, to quantify, to create a formulaic subject. to coalesce, to curd. then to be relieved of such an impossibility as one witnesses the splitting of light into crepuscular rays; as one experiences the permeability of a membrane; as one merges with the ocean—is nothing less than an ecstatic revelator. clotting and flowing, a beautiful abjection, a grotesque and unacceptable florescence, a bloody blooming. sylvia’s odorous bleeding from sweet deep throats. we merge, ectoplasmic, ethereal, in the penumbral dawn, shapeshifting.

i mean we’re all damaged goods, right, and if we look with the naked eye (scales fallen) we get to see each other’s ragged parts, where selves become unseamly, and the fraying fabric is endearing and sobering, because yes, we see frailty and broken bits and tremulous insecurities.  this mutual seeing—it’s like two wounds are kissing, and pathogens mingle and then there is an infection.

we are all we are all we are all so shattered and undeserving. and yet, pure. you know.

and then there was the square of window, and the inedible blue sky, not a cloud, but scratched by the fingers of wintered trees, framed, a grid of probably three thousand interpolated microcosms, making it not-whole, this picture of sky and tree, and there is my body in relation to this. sometimes dancing through the picture, creating a shimmering of molecules. sometimes looking at it and watching it shift, and myself with it, shifting constantly, in response to a change in hue, or a compositional change. and i shimmer inside, like steel, or milk, or alabaster or the water in a ditch.

walking between domiciles, against the slight resistance of air, pushing through, it parts in a slipstream around me and wraps me in vibrant vectors of velocity. i become air, a body of light, hear sounds coming at me from far away, they are adamantine, their bodies bouncing, thrilled, tumbling tumbling. in a fever of impossible nostalgia, i catch breath in my throat, suffocate myself with desire. my head falls back. i am on the grass in the sun, vibrant, shivering. your hand hovers in my mind, then falls on my flesh. my body sings at a beatific frequency.

in this long moment of drowning/flying/falling, desire and dissolution dance in a double negative two step.

i know nothing. i know that i will always and forever know nothing.

i cannot

and on the other hand i cannot

but somewhere, breathing, between these two…

Bibliography

Lispector, Clarice. 1989. The Stream of Life. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.