I mean, this is the progression of subjects / bodies in my collected works, such as they are: 1. Cyborg; 2. XXXXX [unspeakable] 3. Monster [progressed, also, from Haraway: “an entity produced by discourse.” To paraphrase. To write: the mutation.] 4. Wolf-girl – the beginning of a socialist approach. 7. Adouéke [a war chant by Andia, out of the memoirs of Louise Michel: The Takata
Gathered adouéke in the forest,
Adouéke, the shield herb,
In the moonlight, adouéke,
The war herb,
the spirit plant.
The warriors
Divided adouéke.
It makes them fierce,
It charms their wounds.
The spirits
Of their fathers
Make a storm.
They are waiting
For the brave.
The brave
Are welcome.
Friends or enemies,
They are welcome.
Beyond this life.
Those who wish to live
Go back.
War is come.
Blood will flow
Over the earth
Like water.
The adouéke
Must be blood] To this end, as each book takes me further into the enquiry or subject matter that all the books share, I lie down on the floor of the world. A wolf-girl lies down in the lap of her schizophrenic mother. A monster and a cyborg have complicated sex. Two monsters have a different kind of sex. The schizophrenic goes down on all fours, as does the feral child. I think it is also, as Dorothy Wang says, that sometimes the people who look like you can hurt you the most. None of this is easy. I loved that 85% of the workshop was about attuning the skeleton – the bones and the blood and the breath – beep, beep: as the Hyundai jeep backed up over the peacock ore and the vermillion powder. But that was later. And this was before. And they forgot Hebrew and used a limited Spanish of only a hundred words. The great cats learned most of those words and in turn taught their trainers an extensive range of growls. When rehearsals or shows ended, after dinner, at midnight, in the intimacy of the great cage, humans and animals would sit face to face to stare fixedly into one another’s eyes. In those moments, the lion was the teacher. It was he who was there, present, concentrating, with no interest in the past or the future, united with totality. In his animal body, the divine essence became palpable. The lion taught the Arcavis about economy of gestures, strength in repose, the pleasure of being alive, authenticity of feeling, obedience of oneself. Finally, seeing the nobility of the beast, his majestic inner solitude, they understood why Jacob compared Judah to a lion. The Kabbalist rabbis of Toledo understood that a new form of biblical interpretation had been born. In silence, with the greatest respect, they entered the cage protected by the miraculous touch of Salvador’s hands. They meditated, staring into the lion’s eyes. They asked permission to bring their brothers in study, and with them came handsome old Arabs dressed in white and pale Catholic monks with sunken, burning eyes. The Koran, the Torah, and the Gospels were eclipsed by those imposing beasts, capable of standing so still that fireflies fleeing from the cold dawn rested on their warm skin, transforming them into phosphorescent statues
and if you have to ask
if Beethoven is really
like if Dr. Demento
was any good, you’re not
the Mars Rover at all.
The aim of this poem is to assess weather produced from rat feed, grain,
and four doses. The study uses 480 male and female rats
and their little rat cell phones (under Simulated Microgravity)
which did not have cancer. One will study acupuncture.
The other will study old rats. Words from the Simon
and Garfunkel song, that ol’ one, incorporated into rat their rat anterior pituitary
Like a rat in a maze the path before me &
One rat out of 23 failed to develop &
Hooked heads of little rodent swimmers &
the apoptosis of EITHER
tail or ears you explained that
you were singing the suppressed
verses, verses which had disappeared
with the advent of assembly line production
and the production of replaceable small metal parts,
mercy arrives, she says: “I am mercy; I have no understanding of who I am; though, with my thousand arms, I have written of my own nature since writing began. I inhabit you and you write about me again. There is always the sound or color or feeling in which I can arrive. Lying in bed suffering from loneliness or anger the woman with eyes closed sees me bending over her, a many armed figure wearing a rayed disk hat.” Dear friend, you have excited crowds with your example. This landfall happened at your exact flooding and now you are sitting doubled up in pain, your head wet, streaming, smelling faintly of milk and oranges — your eyes are lidded and balled, like Blake’s, like pinwheels and burning schoolhouses, never the same river drowns the doorsill. People weren’t suffering from having too much blood.
Passing in front of the enormous openings that for
thousands of millions of years were printed in the sky
the tourists on the highway to the bombed out
neighborhoods of paradise, the Japanese tourists
who see Nagasaki and Hiroshima floating in the sky
People don’t laugh a lot when they read my writing.
The poem starts with Magellan crossing the Andes
and he sees some straits and immediately he names them
and identifies them as the straits of Magellan
as if their existence as the straits of Magellan
predated the name he gave them:
Crossing the foamy ocean the splitting breakers
bursting over the peaks of the Andes It’s the strait
of Magellan says Magellan as he steers between the
sunken islands of the cordilleras These are the new
caravels of the Pacific we reply watching the plains of
Nagasaki and Hiroshima pass before the Chilean sky
filled with dust drifting like two days shattered into
pieces coming closer between the fjords
The images of the burnt children for example ...
And you are Buster Keaton on a mast climbing upwards in a storm
and just as you adjust you’re on a giant clock’s hand
hanging over Manhattan.
And the moon does not influence the timing of human births or hospital admissions, a new study finds, confirming what astronomers have known for decades.
[Note: Sources: JBR; Bhanu Kapil, “What I loved about &Now: Blast Radius”, “From an Interview with Flore Chevalier: A Question about Difference”, at Who are you and who do you love?, 30 & 29 Mar 015; JBR, but see next; Andia, war chant (tr. Louise Michel), quoted in The Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel (eds. and trs. Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Ellington Gunter); Alejandro Jodorowsky, “from Where the Bird Sings Best by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Translated from the Spanish by Alfred MacAdam”, at BOMB, 27 Mar 015; David W Pritchard, “Poem for Zach and Alice on the Couch”, at [“IT’S TIME TO HOP TO THE BLUES.”], 29 Mar 015; Rod Smith, “Infinity Revisited”, in Touché; Susie Timmons, “Lost Verses”, in Superior Packets; Elizabeth Crawford, and Alice Notley, Culture of One, quoted in Molly Schaeffer & Elizabeth Crawford, “Some Letters in and Around the Alice Notley Symposium”, at Entropy, 30 Mar 015; Tanis MacDonald, “Cherish: A Cento”, “Laurel: A Cento Elegy”, at Lemon Hound, 30 Mar 015; Anne Gorrick, “Heartbroken * Feelings * Turn Off the TV * Depressing * Positivity * Prayers * Sandy Hook Elementary”, at Shadowtrain 43; Raúl Zurita, and Daniel Borzutzky, quoted in “DB: I’m going to ask you now about a specific poem …”, at there were wrecks and wrecks, the keeper said, 30 Mar 015; Susan M Schultz, “55”, at The Tinfish Editor’s Blog, 30 Mar 015; “Stop blaming the moon: Intelligent people can develop strong entirely incorrect beliefs”, at Science Daily, 30 Mar 015]
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