you are not here
five or six you fold yourself between the sink and the toilet.
you can't reach the bolt but you're a resourceful child
wedging the tipped back of a chair beneath the handle
this wad of paper - or whatever
in some improbable fist
(the small ghost of that hand flickers briefly
beneath the surface of this hand)
how much does it hurt?
less than when; riding by the canal
the front wheel of your red bicycle hits a stone
and you are thrown about ten feet forward over the handlebars
landing face first and skid on that face over the rough ground
a further two feet or so
passing out in a clump of nettles
and an imaginary round of applause
or:
this post in the yard made of small chips of flint embedded in concrete.
you climb with your legs pressed tight to the post
inching upwards with your bare feet like it's a palm tree or a mast.
from the top you can see into all of the surrounding yards
(they are the same as yours)
climbing down your foot slips and you slide to the ground
shredding the flesh of your inner thighs.
a reliable measure of significance, some chart or map
etched into the hollow under your left arm?
(painstakingly elaborated upon or furiously scribbled out)
lists or discreet badges pinned directly into
the delicate skin of your chest
somewhere (but not here) a child vomits, this clot of meaning
stuck in it's throat
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I'm gonna be honest with you. I'm printing this but i'm not going to read it. Not now. If I read it now, I will never pick up the pen again.
ReplyDelete(sorry for never replying your e-mail.There's no excuse or justification really, I'm just an ass but i have to thank you for your gesture and I will, i promise, I will reply. sorry.)
oh - ok i wish you'd read it though, i'd appreciate some criticism or something. i don't feel like anything is working.
ReplyDeleteit doesn't matter about the email
i didn't like this that much at first. i thought it was really well-written and everything but it didn't resonate. i read that you are trying for a novel. so instead of reading it as a poem, i copied and pasted it into word as one paragraph. i think it's fucking magnificent now. seriously. i hope you can post some more on this. maybe add more specifics about the first couple lines and just go off. but i now think it works well on it's own as a poem. maybe its just that sometimes i guess people (ie: me) need to kind of break of their boxes and see things in new light.
ReplyDeleteyeah - i think the structure is kinda clunky and contrived, i wrote it originally as a straight prose piece - but then i was thinking about form a lot and how the text interacts with the format of the blog plus i was also sort of responding to something i read - a poem, so that influenced this shape. so i guess that makes this read as what it is - something kind of shuffled into the shape of a poem.
ReplyDeletethank you for reading & commenting like this, it's really helpful and appreciated.
no worries. i've been stuck on how to properly present poems and stories in the blog setting since my first post and i am still no closer. it's kind of like, you have the finished product and usually with a painting or a poem, etc. the work is done. finished. then you post it on a blog and it's all wrong. but where it was originally. it is exactly how it was/is supposed to be. i don't think there is much choice if blogging is a permanent thing... we will have to start creating art knowing prior that it might be something for a blog. which means, gah, more work... they should have taught this early in school.
ReplyDelete