It seems worth returning to this site. I don't like how the serial format produces an expectation of a new thing, though. Everything I do here is iterative. I like the power to modify the past. Prose blocks, especially when the reach a certain columnar length, produce a sense that labor has been done. When I pare something columnar into a dyad, it seems incomplete. I am working on the poem "Screen" out of necessity. It is incomplete. I'd like to make a long "Screen."

Antagonism. It seems good to return there. Too far gone to be irascible, I can still inhabit a ball of stillness. Under the down puffball of the sleeping bag, I become a wrought cannon of anguished sex dreams. Condensation of wish, thwarted by walls of happiness. Everyone knows that the medium you use to write will have effects on what comes out. In the same way, my decision to think of disturbing subjects before I fall asleep is a way of writing on a new page. "I am running through new habits." This is meant to be a provocation. Nobody "runs" through the "new." A habit is formed in the knot between "running" and the "new." Could I try to condense this now? Loop the antagonism into the hole of dreams. (1/31/22)

Considering that desire to make myself powerful through knowledge of the psyche, knowledge of the sexual, knowledge of the infant. What makes a person so disinvested in politics invest everything into these primal, pre-political states. I am voracious and this sounds like a desire, but it is a drive, and under the drive, there is nothing to evaluate, no connections to understand. The drive (or instinct) has nothing to do with its object, or spreads over and beyond its object—"thus the credulity of love becomes an important, if not the most fundamental, source of authority." (Freud, "Three Essays on Sexuality). Ah, even the formulation of the question seems so boring!

"Like the pile of plates whose collapse is the main attraction of the classic music hall turn—leaving nothing in the hands of the performer but a couple of ill-assorted fragments—the complex construction that moves from the discovery of the migrations of the libido in the erogenous zones to the metapsychological passage from a generalized pleasure principle to the death instinct becomes the binomial dualism of a passive erotic instinct, modelled on the activity of the lice seekers to dear to the poet, and a destructive instinct, identified simply with motility. A result that merits an honourable mention for the art, intentional or otherwise, of carrying a misunderstanding to its ultimate logical conclusions." (“Function and field of speech and language,” Jacques Lacan, Écrits, p. 39)

"Does the subject not become engaged in an ever-growing dispossession of that being of his, concerning which—by dint of sincere portraits which leave its idea no less incoherent, of rectifications that do not succeed in freeing its essence, of stays and defences that do not prevent his statue from tottering, of narcissistic embraces that become like a puff of air in animating it—he ends up by recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his construct in the imaginary and that this construct disappoints all his certainties? For in this labour which he undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another." (ibid., p. 42)

"Indeed, however empty this discourse may seem, it is so only if taken at its face value: that which justifies the remark of Mallarmé’s, in which he compares the common use of language to the exchange of a coin whose obverse and reverse no longer bear any but effaced figures, and which people pass from hand to hand ‘in silence’. This metaphor is enough to remind us that speech, even when almost completely worn out, retains its value as a tessera." (ibid., p. 43)

THE MIDDLE

I would never put your cock inside my cunt
( I am admitting to the ravenousness of it ) 
in other words: encountering my capacity
for rape ( rapere, to carry off, your semen )
“I,” avoiding narrative frames of reference
avoiding even having a name, a character
pure voicing unstamped, no stencils made
“I” couldn’t imagine anything more like hell
than a kiss—a sliding away of outlines erased
in a softness so slight and now I am forgetting
if the formula exists for a hardness-hardness,
membrane-membrane, or for mucous creating that
silent touch—mute and blank and absent pleasure,
were it not for the respiration of the penis
with its in-and-out alternations, the cunt also
gasping for what she lacks, so full of it, impetuous
grateful (or imperious)—yes I told the analyst
there was nothing worse to my stilled brain
than two mouthes together—the parts aligned and
equivalent in function and form, asking to be fed
Is it because this is what language threatens
to be—and now my cunt is weeping now
I meant to say, why is it weeping now or
Is it salivating like a rabid brachet in heat
But it is not that I want your open mouth
When I have you written down my lips are
sealed and it works, the way one encloses
the lips around a thin sheaf, dry and able
to cut in a rather harsh serrated fashion
But I did not tell him that I had sometimes
pressed my tongue hard against the bent
basal knuckle of the thumb and thence come
to know what that muscle could mean on some
other surface, catching wind of the memory
of a smell, and the general truth of feeding
But it was not my purpose to arrive or come
because I was just a machine for utterances
"I am afraid of becoming omnipotent," I wrote
and asked what I meant by this by a character
in your story I replied that it was the machinery
of carpe diem saying that I didn't want to face
the possibility that you might want something in the
same way I wanted it, that you needed to say
anything to check the smoothness of the spool
of character and I was a character who believed
you were squeezing me into utter submission
in your silence, and that character drew
attention to its status as a leaking vessel
and lacking in a fundamental darkness
I splayed out light and ruined your film
And I thought I was stealing your light
But I had already taken something out
And was just on my way to return to it
I admit to wanting to put light in my mouth
It is somehow more powerful than the alternative
(an illuminated womb) which is expected
Ink is black and I possess it in these squiggly hairs
Erased landscapes stepped on make me feel you in me
“Where can an email drop like spring snow,” I wrote,
“Obsessed with the image of your head pressed into...”
I slept with my shirt off, “for you,” or in order to feel
how you might feel me, so I could be “in the middle”
as I once slept between the first two I had known
who had “done it,”—Is anything central, one poet asked
another put down a jar on a hill, and another spoke of
A bower and a flowery band and of brakes and rills
Starlings congregate around a pile of rotting wood
I breathed and my sacs of adipose were tender