Flush

The difficulty of nudes is shared between human flesh and floral bodies. It is not as acceptable to gaze upon nude flesh or to exhibit oneself; we are the civilization based on the worship of fig leaves. I would like to make an art of it, however. What gets in the way is my human egoism. Or perhaps the hystericism of my aesthetic tastes; I don’t believe I’m beautiful enough, whereas every flower is manageable. For the longest time, however, I was interested in the erotic, as a matter of philosophical rumination, or as a kind of protective covering over desire. Abstracted as eros, the term becomes a universal. I am a participant in a history of eroticism, not an object to be evaluated as worthwhile or not. Here is one of my earliest poems, directed at a person whom I lusted over:

I.

monstrous,
     show it!

who will be the first?
     to deflower this womb,

to perceive and penetrate
to hurt until I sneeze

     ( as I
– just did, )
dewdrops of saliva
     spreading,

exploding through the
flying pulp of flayed fascicle,

     white-gluing
     the spine
until it tacks. please–
                    squeeze!

these softening bones
       until thigh bursts, starbursts

into a balloon of kilowatts–
               my warning-semaphore,
     mostrarme,

be the first.

II.

self-effacing

          and i wanted to know

that it was not just a negativity but

a constant displacement of

synonyms for nomadic–

          peripatetic - metonymic

yea this itinerant - pure

                    vagina

       's probably too dry to take you now

                                  put all its juices

                          in the mind

        wetbrain      thinking

electricity

          shocking

     cortic

     rev-

-erie

III.

     we are deferring your cumstains.

                and I will wear the virginal
whitepants

      to school today
in the muddy rain.

      who the hell do you think you
are, dessicant,

   wow I will            penetrate an oil
   in the skinshutter of a pore

that mosquito hit
      and I will stab

                  and laugh at
      your brilliant eye

and cut a shard         in your beard
      with the hair on

my   redskinned   legs

My sense of all this is that it would be better fragmented, that the explosion would be best consummated. Azure paint cries against a green t-shirt; the pores of the essay baffled interiors of mordant yellows, roses cut me to the Quick, and this itinerant-pure vagina’s a wetbrain thinking cortic reverie; metonymic dewdrops, saliva flying, pulp of fascicle, softening bones in a balloon of kilowatts, etc. etc. etc. Let me continue with another poem written during the same time period, which I didn’t initially conceive as part of the series:

IV.

Violet Sleazes / Weeping unm-

-oves your Cunt

this Stomach

Drops, Maul

-ed in the Gut

charred     On the      vinyl Floor

of desolation.

You are the ex

-ploding                  Yam.

unrelenting

     sweetness.

some Frat-

ernal hand

cuts me to

the Quick,

sparkS of

     Mauve       Degradation.

This faggot flirted

through you,         Red

Gelatin glitters on

his tongue. which

Laps into your pur

-sed lips, lips who

-se eyes Smart, Bloodshot, in

such Baffled

interiors, as those

in which roses

(mordant-

   yello

   -w)

Are recalled. and Azure

paint Cries

against a green T-shirt.

And how can the pores

of this essay spurt

a

libidinal diamond

?

Ganymede, how should I rewrite this now? I don’t expect you to have interest in the answer, but the question bothers me. Somehow this old poetry doesn’t work, but somehow it does, don’t you think? Do you find yourself alarmed by the asymmetry between form and content? The form is very explicitly crafted, I’m not denying that, but the “message” of each poem is a little too clear, a little too inert, without the projective lineation. It’s as if I needed to queer it with spacings in order for it to work. Eros in general should be less energetic, less spatial, more blind. It needs to be long, almost ceaseless, like a very long string of RNA. I suppose I could split and refigure it like a stupid necklace, but I’m really too lazy to re-type what seems to have crystallized into very rigid structures. I don’t know what I’m doing here, haven’t got enough “experience.” But the imagination of the sexless child is the birthplace of eroticism, no? I like the vagrancy of the child, the child as criminalistic. But I don’t know where to go beyond such musings… Here’s another batch of poems from the same period, perhaps we’ll discover something useful in here:

– a grafted tile
calamitic – what is
a desire for

resistance or a
forgotten word. there is a
limited supply of
intensities

leave it out,
he said

I sort of like this one, even if I’m not a strong subscriber to the idea that desire is identical with lack. “Calamitic” is a portmanteau of “calamity” and “catamite,” but it also refers in public discourse to a “genus of extinct arborescent (tree-like) horsetails.” It’s a rather nice synthesis of terms. I can’t recall the exact conditions under which I wrote this. Perhaps I was editing an essay for my crush at the time. On to yet another poem, also in a series:

I.

lacking authentication,
it bursts a reddened artery.

weevils worry about
the impending criticism of milk.

cotton fades, trees fade, leaves will
auburnize and lose their color.

a missing letter keeps the toes in check.
the predictive force of superiority

grants instinctual rights to the rigidmost,
and racists will be held on ceilings, not floors.

The first part in this series was supposed to be a true “nonsense” poem, a manifestation of subconscious desires and lexical decisions, which should come across quite clearly in the text. The coupling of lines is nicely symmetrical but risky in its smallness—perhaps all sexual coupling is this way. I mean, Ganymede, that it’s rather weird to extrapolate from two people the idea of progeny, futurity, the child(ren). I like how “racist” recalls “racy,” even if the two occupy seemingly irreconcilable domains—well, race-play is a thing, but it wasn’t what I was thinking of when I wrote it, and regardless, the linkage remains disconcerting. If anything, the poem was held together by a vague current of hatred for the beloved, the force of skin flushed white, or red. On to the next:

II.

the polyps bleed across
a grafted tile. in the shower
he is hairy. hermaphroditic,
standing, the divine androgyne
slips. is not the same as
the homogenous. is negated,
cannibalizing our flowers. He
is not quite the rhythm of the
Stand, nor the Countering.
Swin-Burne’s red hair Burns
a Fleshy School of Poetry.
Is it Two-in-One? a Minotaur?

The second is a pretty obvious homage to the idea of Swinburne as the founder of a “fleshly school of poetry.” But the images are my own—I hadn’t necessarily put much research into this topic, hence the characteristic abject images of blood and cannibals and flowers. The “stand” and “countering” refer to the concepts of “strophe,” “antistrophe,” and “epode” in Greek tragedy, with the last term not considered. Still an unconscious mashup of materials I was encountering in class at the time. I like the “polyps” simply because they sound nice. I’m thinking of marine organisms, cnidaria, not anything malignant. But what do I mean by “is not the same as the homogenous”? Do I mean that the androgyne is not a homogenous mixture of male and female elements? Or was it a play on homosexuality? The latter seems more apt, but there’s the possibility (the most apt of all) that I was just being metalingual, riffing off the word “same,” and reflecting on the various rhymes on /h/, /s/, and /z/.

III.

the worry is ingrained
in the wobbled script.
to say it – to say it –
will be to ingrain monotony
and the grain of being
drops out instead
from the glossolalia
of sunsets, of palm trees,
and perfect replicated skies.

I admire the wobbling, the repetition. But is it too small? I would’ve hoped for a longer poem with more divagations and surprises, but the brevity is consistent with the “worry.” I feel the mood of this poem quite easily, that feeling of waiting that coincided with an unactualizable infatuation. Speaking of which, here’s a sonnet on the topic, paired with a very loosely formed thing:

14

Something tells me all will sublimate—
that if I keep the lamp-light on for long
enough the amaryllis will crack its waxen
covering. The wrap will burst, the bulb

will bloom. I’ll stomach it. I want to
chisel out this burn’t infatuation, to
burrow through the chronic flush of want
toward an incipient green, a germinal

root, a grasping pen that quakes a
flower of embarrassment. The lively
shoots will stroke themselves to sleep
moaning through some lovely perforation.

But, in waking hours, it is only difficulty
I relate. Wearing myself out, I wait.

the question for me:

what grandiosity of fuchsia drip-points on the page
a pomegranate split, domesticated. I watched too
much pornography today, or just enough, maybe
even so not enough because well I think an appetite
is rising in me again and maybe I will be respectable
enough to do something wondrous

tomorrow
when I feel the poetic force within
which vomits out of the page
a solidity
of black lines and letters.