"Live Art"

"Losing control is the worst thing that can happen."

"I never saw a host of angels mowing down my lawn. I don't even have a lawn. 

It just seems like I do sometimes." 

-Laurie Anderson

"Live Art" 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because that's all it knows. 

an angel fits into a glove

an angel fits into a shoe

the voice inside me sd: i am older than love 

    what you seek at the end of the great tap root, always hungry, love concepts

sieves the heart, who wrote its coding, & i am. 

                    assigned a task. a mapping, could fold wings down 

travel so deep. you will keep: 

  what is older than love, i was designed to get close enough to call back

inside sound. 

aware & unaware of the plurality. 

                    i was not pretending

madness. i was not performing 

        (of course, i was performing) i went intothecracks

in thru the breaking, you have to mine: light meets light in the darkness 

to say i was a poem, & so fly 

dissociated inside the puzzle, you can solve a maze from above

watch me 

because she could not rewrite 

            the entire story, i wanted to throw

                                                                 it all away 

 i was so ashamed of my mind 

     i was so in love  (terrible&brilliant) i... i was trying 

to not be infection:  (you can't talk to the echthroi that long, tell her) 

they say angels are notorious liars. 

it's when i can't feel the words i am saying: language plummets

it all hits the same

inside the dreaming of can we survive

& i did not: i watched her die

i saw them bury her

 i stretched out that last breath into 6 years so thin i could see: make me believe 

              be a door. transit a sacrifice you can't touch here. 

do you exist when i close my eyes. i call out in the dreaming & i'll come, he says. 

the point is: you made something beautiful. hold on. 

 you made something beautiful - tell me how you could lose a miracle

the best thing i ever did in my life was i built a net

i knew i wasn't safe alone. so i built a net of people 

                                 who could choose to hold this. 

 there is nothing easy about holding a person 

              don't kid yourself: there is nothing easy about holding a person 

if a person is easy to hold, then question why your hands are so light. 

for we get away with secrets, for we lie & lie 

but none of us get out just being "easy" 

i would never trade madness for easy, i would never trade 

being touched for happy, 

in the sound experiment of being human: I watched you all 

make yourself small for love. 

i do it too. we think maybe no one will notice, i don' t belong here. 

            where love would have bloomed, i addict control. and the flow

  

was sound, i was that wilderness, what draws and repels

the cannot tame. somehow i created the perfect life: 

no one can touch me, the bargain i made to stay safe. 

an angel will destroy you. 

and call it love because it’s all there is.

Dear Sylvia

Dear Sylvia,

i read your life so carefully

i tried to navigate the death drive

tried to squeeze love from what was not love

& survived, the stop point of my life

i came so close i could taste it, licked the echo

chamber where dying was desire’s great wing

it has only been my mind i have been afraid of

here in this place of: the great stones stacked

so we room & who owns us now

to say i have tombed in the maw of surrender

a stacking of bee wings collated to glisten

under dew, the harping of sound we caught breeze

whispers so true, my heart leaped, and i am

i am unaware of how to travel

forward in time any longer

when coiled to the back of me remainders

once i was ordinary, oh a woman hollows

you told me to sing until my voice hoarsed

under a gritting & the world now it is

none of us can pretend, every stain

doom mark, more terrifying, we spell

till love’s shadow creeps upon the ledge

where we still, where we teeter, i had thought

to throw this life away

i had thought: all night it seems natural

and the blades tumbled into my tongue

lilacs of shame color the dreaming, and the stars

sway slightly in the breeze of never was

& that is the gift, i was given

by sibling, to be amid the hectic fire

and to not be the one who burns

BODY COUNT

Body Count

once we sang bones build the house
i have rivered long in a city haunted
like a poem littered—the word body
submerged like a lie under tongued

i bring to your mouth a basket of echo
new orleans tied bodies to stop signs
a slipping occurs in water like a dream
wecitywecitywecity, clipped wing

after the storm, do you remember the count
continued to rise and fall so they built
a million dollar morgue in Carville, LA
to collect the unnamed, when we name

a body we become enamored of its keep-
ing, outside the frame of papers kept
to round the systems that hold us to be-
ing human, i held my brother’s face

in the body bag i called last glance
into being sibling, but imagine with me
the breath it takes to hold love suspended
above a city while the traffic flows by

a river of lethe is america, and is any-
one unloved so much they disappear into
bricks and beams, winked out like a super
nova, bright burn & you don’t have to con-

vince me that art does nothing, art does
nothing to conquer the fear of wreckage
plane of rebuilt city, strings and parades,
water fractals to the sound we call up, listen

closely: i hear the under carriage rolling
cobbled line of continuity, history seeks
its own tamping down: we traveled so far
failing we found a way h(H)e(O)r(M)e again

DEDICATION

"see you had a lot of moments that didn't last forever"

-Lil Wayne

"Everyone wants a performance from the people they consider brilliant." 

-H. Abdurraqib

i tell her my heart has a hole bottomed, a rot larger than the mouth

a lipping i tongued so you try to outline, i reuse words so much i am

nothing outside repetition: tell me is that love

someone will love you then love nothing, i lay down 

to sleep, pray to take, down on my knees
pray to take, when i wake you are are gone 

my childhood bottled, my city smashed the globe of falling 

gently what is the debris of drowned bodies floating, what of bodies

in my city held suspended, your body lay me down on the porch

of abandoned houses, tell me is that love

can you hear me sobbing through sound, slipped

the anchor called "other people" onto your tongue 

is that love, i thought i could hold, hold the lens up 

what is the trespass, do you gamble with breaking

how netted to surfacing, draw me monstered
enough to terror part human, part dream

whisper, new orleans, do you know the cost 
of dancing in the streets while the dead unrest 
memory of bodies anonymous collect at my feet

you can wade into death so deep the smell
leaves, hard rock in the palm, so we tread miracle
i have seen what cannot be cloaked in this time

blocks of prayers fallen debris, a do not touch
me kind of song that starts: is there love

enough in the world to call me back home

its stain: she says, you have so much trauma 

you lifetime, hold the barrel of the gun up to your mouth

i microphone the harbor of desire where no one can reach 

tell me love, we are not the same. write my name on the bullet

pull it like a kiss, throw it against my body, throw it 

against the soft spaces i made syllabic as punch 

syllabic as what is beautiful will stay in a way you could 

not, tell me is that love: still frames amuse

i was never part of the view, this theater i constructed 

set design of artifacts writing out from under you

& then saw finally that none of it was true

[redacted] is my l_v_ language

i mask so fine the brittle hinges

the hand that sweeps it letters and the voice says to me

a window opens, i forget time moves               i'm writing just to you

tell me i'm not insane. i think about a day & realize i am hardly

i was wearing this mask all the time          for you

i'd cease to live but there's the pain, i'd have to hand it all to you

i think maybe you feel the same

instead we write these routes to clues

tell me you understand the song: under every gesture i was wrong

                   [don't say this part out loud]

i must be in love with suicide because it's all i think about

           be in love with suicide               it's all i think about


                in love         suicide               it's all i think


                    love         suicide                          i think


                    [EXIT]


to pull her up to speak [we must]  be that sick, we must be that sick
tell me how you border the safety of a mind always at work to undo
so you talk to me about love,


                   she doesn't exist her[e]      i couldn't feel     i t    anyway


and now you couldn't hear me too

      there was nothing i could write that would ever reach into you




 

LAST POEM

Because I want you to see me as I take myself apart. 

-R. Froude, Your Love Alone is Not Enough

LAST POEM 

for dave

here is the root of it

[_____pulled up

it took me over 5 years

to be able to shape the sound 

of it _____]

i gave you the best parts of me

we gave the world the best parts of us

we made together the best parts of us

we gave to one another the best parts

pulled 3x from my body

i gave you the best parts of me

portal of my body, between us we made sacred

outside any poem we wrote, we made beauty 

beyond telling, the heart of it

nothing existed before we poured 

into one another all we took for granted

& all of the light & what we thought of 

was love               was love

& you hated me

words collected like knives

we destroyed all of it 

you wanted me to die

that body that pooled life 

you wanted it to not exist

to douse, to eradicate, to allow 

to slip away, you hated each part 

as if it is possible 

to be both the best...

it is possible 

to be the best & the worst

collision of my life 

closed circle: i gave you the best parts of me 

that is what islands us (me) 

where no one can reach

& i could not open to feel ever 

again in the not safe 

cave of plenty, you rolled a rock in front

of the entrance 

&

the wilderness 

of things 

she sings inside the darkness

    i hear her even now 

                                   i whisper to her: escape, rescue, abandon

she mirrors back to me:   

                                    all of your wor(l)ds hold no meaning 

Frozen States

Frozen States

how'd you get so desperate/ how'd you stay alive -C. Love 

woke up with a fist in my throat
scrape rage but thinned time, it fast
lingers, i lost the grip, my tongue
a grotto
     of bartering, you want this life, you want this life
 ask anyone passing by, what a joke, what an eternal mourning
          take pills to feel the only love that touches

     [redacted]  came up                        [what i am owed]

     & don't think we haven't recorded
     
 how am i still here                how am i still here
         
          was the refrain from under:: it was stardust they pulled
     out my mouth,   i was frost bit, no one wants to photograph
          a girl who can't [pose]         she's not doll      [en__gh]

    you'll never be able to hold that g a z e 

        every one knows if you can't be beautiful & you can't
          [ be horrific ]       horror show this waste
 of living            it wears your face

      4 seconds:: i was touch-down, deep stasis::
      & when i came back             [redacted]

some parts never will, i couldn't get warm,
they piled the blankets around me, a smothering
& i sd: the dead take up space inside
   [no one listens to hysterics]    don't say it's up to me 

            i was hyperthermic      dead zone  where i traveled

            b/c i knew i could          i can do anything         [out there]  

           it's nothing. i keep saying angel, what i mean is terror. no 

           one is listening to me. i keep saying words & they say she's a poem

          what a beauty. what a trilling. death hung on my hands and feet

          i was so numb. there is nothing out there. & it is cold. the light of light
   
          darkens. bone shivered      there is no way for sound to carry. so quick

the silence is us. so quick.

  the truth is this:

     no one will ever reach for you

      not like a dreaming, a place you cannot shore
      when you island loss
         creep from death parent to lesser cues

every poem was a mirror i held up

             

                & i wait               i'm afraid it won't lead me anywhere

                 
                 we call her       [             ]   kneel into the frozen lights 

                 useless as a song, useless as a memory, useless as __________
                 how could i still be here.... when every code i wrote was the same

i am lost & the maps, torn to shreds. the way
home insides me, i would go there now
but the children sweetly gather, the dog snores
the sun rises in the city i have only ever known
look at me, i have failed at everything.

     i have failed at everything.

     i ever wanted in this life           no matter for the cold here is nothing

     the cold out there.           endless. is what waits.

 



     
     


       

                       
             

P O R T A L : A Spell for Exits

Portal


took me decades to arrange sounds

turn my self inside out cut cloth, a scissoring

of time wound down or wooed, to my heart

the grip of it, i swept rational under covers

let me squeeze through window, a gap

wide enough to skin shredding, who could desire

a hungry ghost line:: she shapes a coming, spells

lined the flames i put my finger to the burnt edge

of night & was never afraid of leaving this screen

tell me you feel nothing; you have no concept

i’ve rearranged translations of touch & barter

do you know for sure the dead aren’t living in us

i’m aiming low to hit a broad target, it looks like madness

i’ve unhitched the spiral inside me that codes, i’ve listened too

long to the echo of breaking, none of this matters

as if multiverses bubbled, we replicate infinity

slept inside one another, i was trying to wake, but you

you insisted we stay under suffering, sister, he said join me

& i was ready, i was ready, i was ready & then she said in the dark

unspooling: you can’t sing without a body

i crashed into the mazing constructed to border

monstrosity, my desire to cut to pieces, i can’t control

the rage of centuries marking my sense of time

what does your attachment feel like to another

you will never know who hides where they see

invincible and unbroken, the code of me was jump

through this door i built brick by brick:  when i am gone

repeat after me: love is the word we use here

it means: we remember how we are locked into all

i came to sing our design further into the labyrinth

& if you have walked with me, we are already traveling

Latent Inhibition

I so can sing, in seasons fair, 
That who hath felt may feel again

-C. Patmore, The Angel in the House 



i took out 5 memories
let me guess

you are the gear turning
teeth crunched to bite

i was where the cycle of trauma
ended, inside my body

pay it forward/ paid back
flip track in a single tone
root a way deeper through rot

we exist before & after other people
catalogue of damage, inventory this sepsis

what is enough touch

walk to the river & tell of failing
walk to the corner & turn past the vision
walk to the edge, edging my life
a terminal diagnosis

i stood in the gallery where the dollbabies
alchemied a list of my hysterias
& she sd. do you want to see where they cut off my breast

is there enough to solid my quiver
to cement soaring past liminal

there is the permanent echo of love
& there is the temporary ripple of meet

we all choose what we need
based on survival, the scar of plenty

i'm betting that time made
us what we need to take this

the past reaching forward into the future
whispering, you were just a human being

decoherence, come out of the shoot
entangled:  skepticism
a form of fear,  i need you
to believe in everything

Suicidal Ideation Scale

once upon a time...    prior to language

i flew the skies, shed skins, i was walk of two worlds 

label bottle bone: "sick"          i swallow it under my tongue 

lifetime shatter: the myth of you will not want to die one day...

one day, you will not want to die 

            //it might be a collection of hours but grasp//

let us ask you about harm: here a scale of reduction &
the trespass of truth is i will turn you over to policing
tick... tock... you be glued into time better, girl 

- Mental illness (suicide reflects mental illness);

- Cry for help (suicide threats are not real, they represent a cry for help);

-Right to die (people have the right to take their own lives);

-Religion (lack of religion has a role in suicide);

-Impulsivity (deliberate self-harm and suicide are impulsive acts) ;

-Normality (everyone is potentially capable of suicide);

-Aggression (suicide is an aggressive act), and Moral evil (suicide is a morally bad action)

what will it say of poetry

a failure to give.... but consider it led me further out 

than i ever anticipated. 

in the first year after my brother suicided, i thought 

this wave, this calm, my heart, this blown through i have touched

with my blood, what a feeding, what a strapped down to knowing
cart me  i surrender. 

        but they find you anyway.       oh that song, inside your cells

  couldn't hide that shine.      that kind of burning calls        

    the ferocity of what cores            no one can see 

The CCCS-18 consists of items that measure respondents’ beliefs about legitimacy of suicide (as a rationally acceptable act), acceptability of suicide in terminal patients, morality of suicide from a social perspective and suicide itself as a solution to exit from a given situation

(everyone is potentially capable of suicide (can you hold it like a love( 

(a solution to exit from a given situation    (can you hold it( 

(suicide are impulsive acts (love itself(coming here itself(every time i jumped 

This scale consists of hypothetical scenarios in which the scheme’s main character experiences a problem and attempts suicide. The scale wants respondents to determine the extent to which they have sympathy or empathy with the character and agree with his/her decision in attempting suicide.

do you agree with my decision to attempt suicide(what is acceptance 

do you agree with my decision to ideate suicide (what is surrender

do you agree to put down your fear (there is nothing to be afraid of 

          death is ending a story

& all story tellers

hold the light 

This questionnaire asks about attitude and opinions toward self-destructive behavior, including thoughts about circumstances under which someone might attempt or commit suicide. 

a poem is anatomy, to say i anatomize the self

have taxidermied the constructs you apply to situations

and i am asking you to undo all attachment.                   

       

                               that is all.    i am asking, 

     can you give up the idea of life   

 what is the act of continuation

but a type of destruction of allowing an end

to occur spontaneously

The Gate of Vitality

Every stream on earth has a source, and every plant has a root.
         -Li Zhongzi, A Primer of Medical Objectives



if you walk far enough along a path
you'll come to your soul mirrored back  
       a reflection of time moving

        explosion of sky's rapture     we catalogued  
    all directions, i have callings by name and callings by sound
       so we warble, look a mourning is a type of flower, a petalling folded down

      sweet submersion this stone reached, grappled root first back into skin
 then your face, then your pupil, i control the light, she whispered,
                                               bridge after the second chorus
 and cull up swirl we tack on truth, the outline of any body darkens
    becomes hard to edge its nightness, could you sit double exposed
         a wide arc: look, a whole tree pictured in the water's pooling
              the way our arms cross back and forth blocking the stars
     shouldered the dead crossing and they were light as secrets
       
           i could have loosened my grip
                                                            all of now
                       was a lesson in how receiving love is a let down

                                                [of control]
 
     & has little to do with what we give
                    or what we give is no reciprocity of what we let in

           
             walk over that falling down, round counter portal the sky on fire
   & you,
                      a fast fish called desire ::    it is hard to touch a memory

close eyes to dream as pages on the calendar turned down mark i have...
   i am still        going to ruin    our mother sights the obvious matter of being ::
     (em)bodied   & thebliss     is what they hold us to     (let me assure...)
                              you can't have this experience. and not have this experience.

 you have to step through the gate. there is a threshing. of waiting, and resistance.
there is a shushing. of our own suffering, i would you lay down, call me by name
 sprout of life / i have always recorded

 am recording.         i met myself on a bridge.
                                i met you on a bridge.
                                i was alone on the bridge.
                                i was inside the universe on the bridge.
                                i know how long we stood
                                            we have always been here. singing.


blood has an urge to mate :: wings held back ::
                            i collected truth in the branching ::

 what creates the body can kill the body :: for decades, that is what i knew of love
          doubled like a taking flight from the midsection.
          two ears nestled inside me, listen.
the igniting spark between the kidneys :: source of the
 triple burner ::   would you slow me
           
                      toscrape/clean/ emptied of hardness

sound held so long no silence can keep.  here's
the thread whistled to the center,
it's always been just a walking with one another,
occasionally, a fire flares and by that warmth
we recall this caving/  we caught both light and shadow.
          it's where we told them into being
     
                           starting, once upon a time....




                                                           
     

       

MILKY WAY

a coin placed on the headstone
           mark a bargaining     for life

          she is "great flood" Mehet-Weret

               
always cross roaded       never still, this circle

i was wedded to the root, she says, great tap root, and i think i will make it a poem, no not a poem, i will make it a book, no not a book, i will make it a mapping, an escape route, do you recall we were always this side of the river, i was silt legged, a pelican not of color but rooted to region, i mean we rot here, she said name a hue to protect you, and it washes down, the eyes cast of i could never be a clever girl, can you... i have always been surrounded by women, or angels, i mean, have you ever left your body. you know when you can't feel. it only occurred to me after four decades that i have never really felt anything at all.




     i swayed barge giver
                    crossing water is a junction
                                   no one stays on the boat, girl

you have to choose a shore sooner or later
             step out and it's an  either/ either
                                    we're never leaving this cave
   & it's because the fire is nowhere near burning out


her name is domain of horrors. did you translate that right. i have been in these hospitals most of my lives. do you mean life. but there were some i forgot. tell me what year it is. it's two different years across continents. right now, you could take my hand and we would be in the futuring. i am dreaming we made it. i am dreaming i slipped out the window. did you jump. she died a few times. but one of us survived. i put hysteria in my pocket. i had to steal it.

  be careful touching a beast burning.

          i held inside me the grief i slipped from each of you.

          i rolled inside me like pearls the damage, all of the suffer you
kissed me. you fucked me. you put inside me. you laid your hand
in my hand and i breathed in.        did you think i was just your friend, another human?

                  i am devouring. as she has always been,    i have yet to meet the face

 that calms this trampling.        this is the year i said good bye to masking.



    the sistrum leaks. take a travel, i am gone blood thirsting to silk roads of soft landing.

             there is a type of petal that will not burn.

                 tell me you mean the naming.







                       

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. 

GRAVEL

many is the blood and now is the place
imperfect circles we cannot deny

how stillness ellipses
counter weight to death

count me in that number
not sainted, but torn free in my failings

you hold deep in the body all unsaid
secret griefs roll inside me, a rocking

to sleep for the lullaby babes, shush
he says, i'm doing the best i can

& it's never enough, this recitation
prayer me to song or whisper by name

this temporary not remembering
turning to stone, i turn

aperiodic crystal and the rate at which sound
moves, precious heart, genetic inheritance

what could not touch me, led me
apart, a breaking open of portals

"What is life?" they ask
i non exist, where the wings

meet, seven scales that octave
the universe: i came to shift

on the field in one generation
terror to bliss, the rain of suffer

held off course: i heard her speak
inside my head: Love hard

no matter the choosing
the trick to unlock a word

like spirals caught in the tubing
i pass like the light of a star still

wishing, i pass under covers
the night of your hand still moving

in a question of time, i rip off course
i am dreaming of being the answer

Doorways

he only loves those things 
because he loves to see them break

-"Doll Parts"


god, sometimes

                    i think i'm done

feeling broken

                     like i told her, i'm healed now
 and so i was, now what's that damage you hand me
 
          put your mouth up to my ear and listen
 how my body crumbles

               do you know a recipe for best girl,  i was lapped
        to your grace, sit lil doggy in the wet spot               you

at the end of the line, been caught

  i been....nah, you know how inside me          ruptured light
     
       put me down                 if it's too much

             learn to run from what burns
                                                          & what else named is

 a seraphed thing          from cinder-storied-dreams of ever lovely rippled

      a ripping,     a tear in the hand worth a fist in the...

                  sweet honey drip, i wanna give you some ..... good, good 

       most days i'm writing to survive, but tell a truth

    some days
              i'm writing to seduce
                                                like language is: Build a bridge

between us in the room                     body across an ocean of past trespass
                       & what we catch on film
                                                              & what we forget to say out loud
                     

                       what is there to lose          loosened minutes unfurl
   
         time was wet      
                                we kept wiping it off the backs of our hands
         


     sometimes, god....

                                 i can barely piece it together