Anesthesia: A Suite Not Dream

"In his mind abandoning photography meant submitting to loss" 

-House of Leaves

"We have surpassed all of our templates..." 

-Laura Mattingly, 12.25.19

Anesthesia: A Suite Not Dream

i.

let me wing over you 

a pass-

ing,       passage "of time"    "with

                  out sensation"  steer   bliss

under you, i am reach

i am   _____ible 

          

          swallowing my tongue               its tail 

rip her up out/ rip inside          

down my throat              

        between my legs    instrument of extraction 

 i caress each intrusion into the body  

         was not love that pulled me apart 

             there is no drug 

                    there is no drug

                           there is no drug 

    that will ever sleep me through that raping 

i would have found it by now

      i would have folded wings down

i would fly  

                       but i

stayed strapped down          you   are     going 

                    to have to hold her d____

ii.

drown      i sing into the twilight 

what is a controlled loss / does it temper

   does it twinkle.... look at the lights in this hotel 

i was dreaming we walked there.

           i sing           down into a time line 

 not my own. i come to

i woke up here. in this place. where all is similar
and i 

i am the different             stone angel 

                                        prayer like water   

prayer like my name erased. 

iii.

xmas day: i told her ask the cards what i need to do when they put me under again, 4 hours in the tabling. as close to death, i would shimmer. and what is it you want. to hurt god.    G-D.   to refuse that love. b/c if that's not good enough. girl, if no one is g--d enough          is it you or them  quitting early, is it you or them bringing you back up.... 

                          it's never all going to be fixed

iv. 

  if i can just solve this piece

      if i can.

         if i am worth it. 

                   

                        i can make it cohere. i can make all of the words

fit. 

            under my tongue, the skin sheared where they would silence

           bowls echo           i struck        i was struck 

v.

        unpin scapula.    let me never be afraid of losing you

    my palms were filled with shame.     still.        after all this confession

      after all this doubt doused.                shame pouring between fingers

       an offering:    look at me.          under the lights.       universe perfect. 

        i built hard as cement. i held inside me hard as rock. stone to stone. 

the world touched me and i turned it out.  impenetrable.   

tell me the truth, dream,  

                 you've never met a girl as hard to see as this one. 

Wanting to Die

and the love, whatever it was, an infection

i tried to last as long as you in the shatter
memory, a lip drooling, i have sliced
off more sounds than most

let me taste it, not rotten, a low
hung bruised fruit no one wants
palmed into violence, i have cut

my way out more than once, that song
sings inside my head constant, silence
is what takes the shape of love here and no

one touches, no one sees, till you disappear
and then let me tell you, bit by anger
planted inside you, i am one more line
written where you left, i emerge to surrender

excised from the deep tap root
you asked me to take in damage
say the woman was forty two and dear
how much time do we have left

put this blood angel up to my ear
we enter their star, they've all gone away
i whispered but you were gone too

anne, i will enter death a light
anne, fur and rings, it's lovely, tell me it's not lovely
how you will look and look for me
in ways you never tried when i was right here

where light meets light creates a darkness
and i like it more than i like me
i am unbalanced, to meet the bleeding trees
i've wiped the program

i am in torment and have no place here
i know your blades of glass, the shock
of sunsets, how i have loved you and all of life
is not up for discussion, it's how i could not

feel any of it, how numb can you swim
forever: how could love ask this of me
ashamed is the life i can't live

the way love will fall around you
riddled with the desire of it
and you falling, can’t grasp on to anything

   

Dear Poetry, boated to grief

Dear Poetry,

Do you ever run out of words for a breaking, the way language falls short yet we squirm inside the telling, desperate, a can-you-pull-me-free from the container of loss plunging under.

Do you know how a sibling will slip so birthdays become times of both where did I meet you and some stranger takes your place, touching me.

Do you remember the weight of a child laid on your chest, the sweet scent of you emerged from the cocoon of a place I considered land mine, a terror, the horror show of riddled fate.

Do you know how seduced I was by longing that I swallowed my name, went long silent in the draught of learning to speak double edged, forked tongue, spells loosed the swept hysteria of she screaming whose voice I can't echo.

Do you recall whole cities disappear, the past washed under watercolor, all of it traced as heart shapes in the sand near the coming tide.

Do you know that I looked for love and couldn't see it around me, my shame I held before me blocking my view as if good enough even existed, as if the notion of deserving was no more than a fiction.

When I controlled the poem, I thought I was writing my truth. I was writing a death sentence because my cells coded that lust in the making, what I grew into as legacy, mud and dirt of country houses held up by secrets names.

For you to have kept me in your sight.

Lined to the castaway. Even now I think what life carved into by love, the fissures of sound knifing beneath even bone.

-M