1.
When you left I was reading Foucault.
Turning the pages
I could still smell you on my fingers.
We remember what is familiar.
Learn to live entirely in transitions.
Reading Foucault, I fall asleep
and dream about horses.
Giant raindrops driving the pavement.
A thick black smog moved in and
filled the entire apartment.
I lean my ear against the wall and listen
to the small animal crying there.
When you left I was reading Foucault.
Turning the pages
I could still smell you on my fingers.
We remember what is familiar.
Learn to live entirely in transitions.
Reading Foucault, I fall asleep
and dream about horses.
Giant raindrops driving the pavement.
A thick black smog moved in and
filled the entire apartment.
I lean my ear against the wall and listen
to the small animal crying there.
2.
I close my eyes and summon
the image of your hair
being gathered in to expose your neck.
The ritual of the endangered: a scar, no larger
than a thumbnail, rounded, a half moon.
It is never hard making the image appear
but the slightest movement causes the focus to blur
and I have to start over again.
3.
Reading Foucault, I say, is like witnessing
a certain extravagant decaying.
The smell of you being slowly absorbed
into all of Foucault.
Any moment now everything
blurring together.
Foucault is a half-wit, you say, a fucking immigrant.
No, I say, I don't think that is true.
When we fuck, you say, we approach
a perfect language
consisting entirely of clichés.
A kind of anti-poetry.
4.
Hold me by a string and reel me in.
The half-open window, the sobbing.
Call me by my mother's name.
Count backwards from 10 and then
spread your legs but not like you mean it.
Instead you should spread your legs like you
say "I'm sorry" or cradle a small bird
that you find on the sidewalk.
5.
Take me somewhere. Show me off.
Hold my arms behind my back. Choke me.
How many days passed. The greedy fall wind
lapping at the curtains.
On the TV they're showing footage from the mudslide.
17 people dead. To be buried under mud.
The newscaster is wearing a purple tie,
pronouncing every word.
6.
On the third day I place a small blue flower
under your head and whisper the safe word.
You offer a smile that is almost sincere,
the best kind. You tell the story
of when you were six and was found
torturing a bird that had lost the will or wings
to fly. How you threw rocks at it
at first and then poked at it
with sticks until one day
you caught its eye and the sound
of it entering and breaking the terror...
7.
There is a disturbance echoing outward
from the center of this wall.
What does the wall think? When will the crying
become commonplace? Does the wall notice and accommodate
my pressing against it?
What would Foucault say about this kind of suffering?
I like how your skin fits, you say after a long silence.
8.
I use a pin to attach the image of you on this wall.
I want to push through the initial comfort of the act.
Where the violent becomes the comical.
Was the “I” created because such an intense need
for humiliation called for it?
Like a necessary puncture to relieve the pressure
and allow the air to finally move freely?
The severe gravity of things, holding everything down.
The crying has stopped, the fits subsided.
Only the animal is breathing now.
The sound of the ceiling fan.
I close my eyes and summon
the image of your hair
being gathered in to expose your neck.
The ritual of the endangered: a scar, no larger
than a thumbnail, rounded, a half moon.
It is never hard making the image appear
but the slightest movement causes the focus to blur
and I have to start over again.
3.
Reading Foucault, I say, is like witnessing
a certain extravagant decaying.
The smell of you being slowly absorbed
into all of Foucault.
Any moment now everything
blurring together.
Foucault is a half-wit, you say, a fucking immigrant.
No, I say, I don't think that is true.
When we fuck, you say, we approach
a perfect language
consisting entirely of clichés.
A kind of anti-poetry.
4.
Hold me by a string and reel me in.
The half-open window, the sobbing.
Call me by my mother's name.
Count backwards from 10 and then
spread your legs but not like you mean it.
Instead you should spread your legs like you
say "I'm sorry" or cradle a small bird
that you find on the sidewalk.
5.
Take me somewhere. Show me off.
Hold my arms behind my back. Choke me.
How many days passed. The greedy fall wind
lapping at the curtains.
On the TV they're showing footage from the mudslide.
17 people dead. To be buried under mud.
The newscaster is wearing a purple tie,
pronouncing every word.
6.
On the third day I place a small blue flower
under your head and whisper the safe word.
You offer a smile that is almost sincere,
the best kind. You tell the story
of when you were six and was found
torturing a bird that had lost the will or wings
to fly. How you threw rocks at it
at first and then poked at it
with sticks until one day
you caught its eye and the sound
of it entering and breaking the terror...
7.
There is a disturbance echoing outward
from the center of this wall.
What does the wall think? When will the crying
become commonplace? Does the wall notice and accommodate
my pressing against it?
What would Foucault say about this kind of suffering?
I like how your skin fits, you say after a long silence.
8.
I use a pin to attach the image of you on this wall.
I want to push through the initial comfort of the act.
Where the violent becomes the comical.
Was the “I” created because such an intense need
for humiliation called for it?
Like a necessary puncture to relieve the pressure
and allow the air to finally move freely?
The severe gravity of things, holding everything down.
The crying has stopped, the fits subsided.
Only the animal is breathing now.
The sound of the ceiling fan.