Funeral Rites
Peering over the fashionable box
an aperture, just wide enough for comparison
opens. My hand: taut-smooth, wound
from circus tight ropes. Hers: threatens
unsound architecture, and I am amazed they ever wanted
to perform at all.
perfection, and I was also very perfect at turning the pages
making them breathe across her face. The fine hairs quivered then
suspend, mid-thought, waiting for the next chord.
jolted to paralysis.
On this day death
has its revelry, but my hands don’t look right.
Feigning consternated prayer, I coerce my skin back
in place. This smooth patch under a finger.
That rough patch where I forgot scissors are sharp two Mondays ago.
With horror I realize I am
my Hatshepshut hands
can only clap with glee.
to my body, and I cannot lay in the tomb with her.
I am glad not to have to walk beside her:
to have to sit at her feet and rub the dust in my eyes.
How can her skin, which melts and drips away
from her bones house the same fury
mechanism in me?
her rotting skin in my youth. This must be contagious.
unknowingly, definitively, beside her
I inhale the dust of her divinity and
her paper lips smile
6 comments:
"My mind is mummifying outwards
to my body, and I cannot lay in the tomb with her"
fucking awesome, i'd cut out the "to my body" bit. nails.
And GODDDAMNIT I DO REVISE YOU AWFUL BITCHES.
you just don't see it, because I like my stuff to get dirty before I clean it up.
man, you and bendi should start the "jon writes like a 3rd grader" club, and I can be the group pariah.
ahhh.
anyWAYS, so ward six is watching us. hawthorne effect? I feel as though I am being judged and found lacking in my attempts to smash my block, but for some reason its pushing me to write more and more obscene things.
There's a weird motion in this poem - it's descriptively there, but syntactically its really kinda clean and just-there. Matter of fact, that might be my issue - there's serious emotion and movement here, but it's too clean and described. I mean, skin rotting in mouth? the same fury mechanism? let it out!
and I also am in love with "With horror I realize I am a thing entombed and my Hatshepshut hands
can only clap with glee." i want it seperated from the mummifying. i love both, and i don't want there to be an egyptian trope mid-poem - spread em out?
I like this, "let's infer assignments from each other's work." and I'm proud of us, as well. i'll be putting up some stuff tonight, because hey it's a friday and i got nothing to do.
oh, and fried chicken? SO MUCH MORE DELICIOUS THAN BOILED CHICKEN.
I wonder if all caps is even scarier.
ars poetica: apparently I can’t revise. and can only respond in poem form.
I. Completed Circle
from word comes absences,
the fingerpaint, the ecstacy
of not knowing origins,
the bliss of the unauthored.
feel with punctuation,
periods approximating walls, pushing.
I am trapped in between words, in
the space between verb and direct
object. dialect like fish eggs. like
a cat, my clichés stretch and curl
in their line spaces. this is the
box underneath the bed where
all those ars poeticas go to
die. this is the completed
circle; this is the sum of all of it.
II. jon bought the farm.
when I die, it will not be in medias res, it
will be its own event. there will be
flowers and much singing of poetry.
alesia will croon “there will never be
another you” like she really means it,
even if it’s another other, another another.
I will not be calm in death; I will make
demands. No flowers. No revision. they
will leave my grave half full – I will be
buried in a mess of dirt, cleaned up a week or
two later. no boxes. no urns. just dirt in a hole.
just dirt in a hole, filled to the brim
with other people’s words, flooded, full.
III. time travel
wormholes are cheating, like multiple personality
disorder is narcissistic.
If I could, I would spy on myself, to see how I
act, to see how I perform in the wild of the internets.
if I could, I would create a wormhole and be more
emotionally direct with my paradoxes. I’d strip my
insecurity of it’s ego blanket. I’d write more about
how much I loved you. even if
okay, so, freaky shit happened and someone, somehow posted something under my name.
if it was one of you two joksters, we're gonna have words.
also...what a lovely ars, jon. i'm bitter that the alesia in the poem has such lackluster dialogue, though.
I think my syntactic cleanliness is a direct result from Alice's class. It's actually much more difficult for me to write something like "Funeral Rites" than some of the other messy ass stuff I write (think, "Poem"...the poem that I will probably both sadly and happily never live up to).
You are battling death like a motherfucking, Miss. C. The poem is structured beautifully, but somehow, despite the anxiety of the piece and the very real tension - it feels inert to me.
The language spot on in some places ("how can her skin...house the same fury / mechanism in me," "hers: threatens / unsound archiecture") but in others, seems to be working a bit too hard ("feigning consternated prayer..." and "an impossibility of the physics of preservation"). In some cases, it's seems almost like the language is getting away from you and becoming a little too writerly.
I think my suggestion would be: condense. For example, the three stanzas before the final one can go much faster than they actually do and the thought "I am glad not to have to walk beside her" is repeated in "I refuse to lay beside her" - these two can be condensed into a more precise, evocative line/stanza/thought and pushed to meld the imagery of decay (which can be done with better stuff than "rotting skin," [I know you, Alesia.])
I'm really pushing on this one, because it's almost like I can see you mind at work on the page. If you get down to some brutal editing, the work will come through here in spades. At least, I think so.
Let me know if you need me to be more specific on anything.
xoxo,
B.
Why do I hate editing? Somebody must have programmed me to be a staunch bitch perfectionist. Imma do it, though, and rock the hell out of this poem. It came out of nowhere, and those kinds of poems usually end up stuck to the insides if my desk drawers..but all those damn poems are comin' out now (with careful editing, of course, why yes, of course)
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