at the top of the tallest building
array of color
film cut: Berlin in the 80s
cut again: Paris
wonder in image fragments
light swirl my stomach
from a building above, a prerogative
interrogate, flash image of
apartments
streets, littered with color
crumbling like graffiti from
the wall, cut
to a poet speaking in verse
verses likes lines of the film
in 16mm, and sliced, like a layer
of fog, celluloid fantasy of the real
viewer silent frame by frame
ventriloquises her own dialogue
over images of glen close, faded
a ghost of features: eyes, lips
in slow motion, nearly stopped
circus music, and the distraction of
make believe, suspended belief
words fall from glen's hair
secretly

how detroit is half full, of color, graffiti lines etched
on a postcard, coral against blue, outline of a skyscraper

a skyscraper, against a forest, can you hear it, in color
like graffiti that is art, publicly, on a wall, that is a city

a quixotic illusion of space, on a horse or in a dream
a city that is a heart full of water, pumping, like life in the veins of an ocean

an ocean of coral colored art, on posters that surround the city
of water, against a building of glass and dreams, or excursions

from one story into another, an adventure etched in lines
on a wall, against a city, as large as Quixote, as real as the fantastical

postcard, layered in blues, pumping like veins half full
of illusion and scenery, a windmill falling, a knight striving

etched in opposite pages, of space, layered in colored graffiti
like an ocean, told on walls, in grooves, at the very tip of the tallest building

instrumental imaginings
while the blue girl swims toward
death, she gurgles, breathing, blotches
for skin, and marshmallows
melting into her lips and washed
away, like the blue girl, enclosed with
secrets, others' mystery or guilt
like sugar, melting on her lips, washed
away, secrets of a life, of a blue
wave, ebbing and flowing
toward or away from saving, a living
and dying, intrumental to the succession
of imagined realities, like secrets, held
in the chests, of the drowned

a body or a voice

reading Lolita. the body. the disembodied. the narrative voice in first or third person. Lolita is not a voice. is not a point of view. is an object of the narrative. of narrative desire. of desire. Lolita is a fantasy. a possession. to be. possessed. tamed. those nymphets are driving me crazy (Humbert.) I will find out the mystery, the evil, why they possess me, by possessing them (Humbert). Her. she is them. the nymphets. this is an obsession. an addiction. but it is not. evil. evil handsome charming violent offense. the body or the voice. a voice of a nation. the landscape of a country, before the interstate system. from one highway to another. through one town and another. visiting one and then another and then another tourist trap, scenic byway, historical monument, cave, lake, hotel, marked hotspot on the map, famous attraction, whatnot. driving. reading. the body. a narrative of lack. lacking it's own main character. not a character. a voice. not even a voice. an idea of a voiced desire. fantastical elimination of subjectivity and free will. voice subject to constraints of power and gender. a manipulation of rational emotion. intoxication of power. possessing and containing. creating a void of a body, of a life, of a point of view. narrative homicide, gradual and violent torture.

untitled

this is part of a longer fictional prose narrative work I am playing with... don't know what it is or where it's going, but I just know that it's continuing, at the moment, which pieces like this...


I brought some envelopes with me this time. And then I ran into the clowns. Clowns for jesus. Really they were congregating on the corner, in their full body patterned clown suits, their faces painted about grey beards and facial hair, and two of them used canes to balance and walk around. I got so distracted when I saw the clowns that I gave them each an envelope, told them thank you for helping to save the world from evil, and then proceeded to give the rest of the envelopes as alms in the nearest church. By the time I got to the parade I had little to do but hand out beads and drink cold sweet tea while the marching bands passed by. I believe I will embark on a new mission to fill red envelopes with messages of immanent despair. I mean, when the refineries are burning at full blast and the plastic cups turn to mountains in the muddy street in front of our most colorful houses, then it can only lead to one thing. Or a series of things that include bad air and damaged emotions. In the future we will negotiate with trees, for oxygen and shared ingredients for color.

I am rolling in
punctuation
pause
dog bark
dog bark
a semicolon seems best here, describe
a sentence on either side
or a hyphen
the dog on a leash
on a leash
tamed by a period, question
mark why are we sitting here when
there is snow
falling over ellipses
ellipses
more ellipses . . . i get in trouble
for this when I speak
in ellipses
rolling over spaces
breaking
every
thought
I perform in quotation(s)
mark the end
of each line
the line that signals a line break
in prose
gathered, like a block quote
according to MLA
swimming through textual
notation
that has little to do
nothing do to
has not anything to do
with the content
of listening
and pleasure
the dog does a dance
a thought bubble above her head
speaks
syntactically
incorrect
properly
punctuated
desires

on Lolita

Having recently finished reading Lolita for the first time all the way through, it swirls around in my head. It is a heart wrenching story represented in a (meta) fictional/philosophical/psychological way that enacts the need for art in the articulation of experience. It is a book "about" aesthetics and morals, maybe, but it is also really a work that ruminates on, and examines, the relationships between language, human suffering, psychology, power, gender, and contemporary American life. The novel is painful and instigates potentially intense emotional responses in its depiction of power (H.H., language) and lack (Lolita, lack of language/point of view), and in its narrative arc that begins with the ending of death and destroyed lives. And yes, the writing itself keeps one engaged and moving through this brilliantly articulated psychological thriller while simultaneously tearing at its reader from the inside out.


from the Foreword:

This commentator may be excused for repeating what he has stressed in his own books and lectures, namely that "offensive" is frequently but a synonym for "unusual"; and a great work of art is of course always original, and thus by its very nature should come as a more or less shocking surprise. I have no intention to glorify "H.H." No doubt, he is horrible, he is abject, he is a shining example of moral leprosy, a mixture of ferocity and jocularity that betrays supreme misery perhaps, but is not conducive to attractiveness. He is ponderously capricious. Many of his casual opinions on the people and scenery of this country are ludicrous. A desperate honesty that throbs through his confession does not absolve him from sins of diabolical cunning. He is abnormal. he is not a gentleman. But how magically his singing violin can conjure up a tendresse, a compassion for Lolita that makes us entranced with the book while abhorring its author! (5)


There was the day, during out first trip--our first circle of paradise--when in order to enjoy my phantasms in peace I firmly decided to ignore what I could not help perceiving, the fact that I was to her not a boy friend, not a glamour man, not a pal, not even a person at all, but just two eyes and a foot of engorged brawn--to mention only mentionable matters. There was the day when having withdrawn the functional promise I had made her on the eve (whatever she had set her funny little heart on--a roller rink with some special plastic floor or a movie matinee to which she wanted to go alone), I happened to glimpse from the bathroom, through a chance combination of mirror aslant and door ajar, a look on her face...that look I cannot exactly describe...an expression of helplessness so perfect that it seemed to grade into one of rather comfortable inanity just because this was the very limit of injustice and frustration--and every limit presupposes something beyond it--hence the neutral illumination. And when you bear in mind that these were the raised eyebrows and parted lips of a child, you may better appreciate what depths of calculated carnality, what reflected despair, restrained me from falling at her dear feet and dissolving in human tears, and sacrificing my jealousy to whatever pleasure Lolita might hope to derive from mixing with dirty and dangerous children in an outside world that was real to her. (283-84)


Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book. But while the blood still throbs through my writing hand, you are still as much part of a blessed matter as I am, and I can still talk to you from here to Alaska. Be true to your Dick. Do not let other fellows touch you. Do not talk to strangers. I hope you will love your baby. I hope it will be a boy. That husband of yours, I hope, will always treat you well, because otherwise my specter shall come at him, like black smoke, like a demented giant, and pull him apart nerve by nerve. And do not pity C.Q. One had to choose between him and H.H. and one wanted H.H. to exist at least a couple of months longer, so as to have him make you live in the minds of later generations. I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita. (309)

dear mr. beckett

I have been waiting here, in this airport, in this state, in this state of mixed emotion, in this layered existence of sexual and independent free-thinking and socially programmed subject, in a moment of entirely stalled and stale air, under the spell of romance and flowered scents, under the impression that something good comes to those who wait, or who work, or who let go of attachment, under the guise of confidence and balance, under a bridge to nowhere and everywhere at once, for something to happen or for everything to stop, for someone to feed me, to sing to me, to call me confidant and trusted soul, for an array of color such that stops sadness and anger indefinitely, for an assertion of something genuine, for a promise of ecology that doesn’t end in chaos and death, for a promise of peace or negotiated treaty among my pet fish who battle for each pellet of food, for a sign of luck or love to accompany the dice, for the dice to roll splendid, for the splendid dice to result in hopes and dreams, for the dreams of splendid dice to open doors and sell cars and make poems and create choirs that inspire lady luck to become man’s skilled feminine side, for whitney to love indefinitely and intimately through a gospel incantation that stops time puts an end to this waiting, for an extended moment of nostalgia in which we remember the real or unreal situation of ethical thinking, for books covered in orange like Zami’s stories of intimate awareness, for intimacy that is more like trust and personal intellectual understanding, for each tree to begin blooming with the knowledge that on a Sunday anything is possible if one is able simply to suspend time, disbelief, and expectation for previously contrived plans, the wait for which may linger on.