IN SUMMER WE CLEAR SPACE
& our flower bodies riot. Through leafy & ruin & vast & now you are loafing in a pool of light & now you are the lip of the next wet morning.
Something ghost & something amniotic move through each other like water through jellyfish & you emit profane mutation.
By the melancholy edge I root into rot with feeling, while angels spread themselves across the geraniums & wifi. I think unlike the tyranny of gazing—the violence inherent in its distance—you invite the connectivity of sensing without possessive desire. It is an erotic demolition in which the wrecking balls in the distance sound like tigers roaring.
Ursula says: capitalism’s power seems inescapable but so did the divine right of kings. You say: see with the silence of the spectral and show the rip in what seems.
We sleep—all of us—on a queen bed on a cliff. An improvised composition, a rearranging city in which a still life feels like an artifact from elsewhere.
Here the softest surface is threadbare where you have fallen & there violet firelight courses inside your wrist, this suture separating time from uncertainty—its occult intensity no its negative no its dark horse light.
Here we maintain fidelity to chance in an unhindered present where we glow in lunar silks and are prone to ancient gossip as a means of pattern recognition.
You lift the skirt of the scaffolding to expose the pulse and wait for a greener promiscuity to outgrow us. The tigers roaring in the distance sound just like revelation.
– for Lauren Luloff
§
from the long poem Figure 8
In which grief is its own ozone, a power of O whiplashed by faceless babel hemming in. These red hums a kind of kin. These deshabilles a kin of nothing I found you wandering in. Febrile weather is the habitat for a gauche pre-seeming wake. Decibels run the gamut & I return a femme beast from a velvet earthquake. I emerge a funhousewife wasted on game. In the surveillance hall of mirrors my cuntic arrogance confuses the gaze and grows I’s from my death hand to say with the other I am expecting you in this a kind of unlit lake becoming. Let me pour you another. You can break glass sense with this glittery brick. My rad hemlines skirt the edge of seeming then scatter when I squat in the shards. Why speak cleft when I can all-fours? Why conquer when chance can prod us into the pulchritude of the vexed body bardo. How it might feel posh now to flash you in this grim boudoir a violet light. Somewhere a lost majestic lit, there a new sound is listening
•
The answer is that it is always contingent. What was the question? Headless voluptuary of worlds in a pond full of a) coy, b) melodrama, or c) enough. I need a milkmaid of false boundaries to blade the finer expression. Where’s the cord? Is that your thesis? Baby’s last words were the very womb of enormity! In profile barely reef. Waving in & out of sheaths of light I slip away deep under hearsay & therefore a part. Half shellfish half tart half projection of a suppressed sense via exclusive unconvincing literature seeking a novel supersaturated literally wet nurse when the whole crowd crowns ravished another energy departs. I recross & doublecross trying to contain their names in us this paunch so puffed half-human half-humiliation. Get back in my luminous lament ripple. Sudden intimacy half-humid half-hunch
•
In which the specimen is still speaking as if subtracting from stagger the limited energy remaining to support the insistence of the vitrine. In Waco a man is booed. In wacky vitriolic music a mom is fiended. I was caught mid-wife. I was awful melodious crisis. I was caught with my storm up and my night charms swollen, consoling gathered limpets at the gates of pander monium. With my harp lofted & displeasing hard, I popped out happiness. I popped out violets & clavicles & electrics & voila—a whole piano! I only pooped a little oh I strummed & preened! I pined for encore floods in the fall-out. I posed topless for post-mortem. Ruin voodooed all the particulars in which I was devo but all devochka still gurgling. Sentiment but all presentiment antebellum retching. As an act of utopian reaching I had my cakes & ate them too. With my fur. In the light of a relic welling feeling.
•
You have come far away. You have come furrow from retrograde to retrograde. Fermentation its own kind of reproduction working with a mother night in the scandalous abundance of drawing up the trash. Take out you & another is the matter. There are folds & folds & in their unseen an alien warmth & thus a peregrine wandering. A fuzz of breath hovering. In the dark between faces & failure I feel a ruffle—blood-stiff & heaving it clings it is moulting it is snowing in my heart in my heart pearlescent dolphins are vomiting P.S.s in my heart it is fucked in my mouth perpetually being stuffed with fluff & deathmeat I burst hatchlings. I come out glowing to feel the hot core spread. My cheeks burn in the archive. I freak in the sample. I fondle the edge/scars of evidence their very amplitude a kind of sentence running on shadows