Situational Irony

if i love you (which i, indeed, do

not) it is only corporeal love.

(i do not love

your stainlessness; your blue

indiscriminate warmth)

if I love you (which, emphatically,

I don't) it is not with the love of

presence, but

with the hate of absence:

love that does not Echo from

the hollows of non-being, love

if I love you (which, surely, I

recant) it is the love of the nose

to the elbow. O certainty of

Otherness, O infinite proximitude

of spaces (you are a virgin/I am not a god).

if I love you (which is, n'est-ce pas,

absurd) it is with the love of the port

for the boat on the shore:

the rowboat sparking warm and yellow

in the superfluous coolness of morning.

process.

something about echo and narcissus? something greek, decidedly

------------> beautiful/destructive simultaneously (? or maybe beautiful/ebullient or placid)

stanza

stanza

stanza

i am publishing this prematurely for you, matt foreman

----------->allusion to Song by Adrienne Rich

if I love you (which I do

not) it is with the love of the port

for the boat on the shore,

the rowboat sparking yellow and warm

into the superfluous coolness

of morning.

Varanasi

God watches from a clean and

Well-lit heaven over India.

Daughters, Sons of Ganges

Drink the waters of their Mother,

Clot her shores with blackened feet,

With ash of former generations.

Now, a man is washing

Garments at the River:

Beating clean a rumpled cloth

Against a stone waxed trim and

Holy by the waters of his Mother.

Shout, sing, beloved country,

For the men, the wars within you:

Cry for brothers (mirrored brothers)

Raising fists along your shores.

Cry for children upon children

Poured into their Mother's store.

Lips Cheeks Knees Foreheads meet

Earth at the Ganges, and

God watches from a clean and

Well-lit heaven over India.

Now, a man is washing

Garments at the River:

Sing, Shout beloved country:

Sab Thiik Nahi hai.

Beating clean a rumpled cloth

Against a stone waxed trim and

Holy by the waters

Of his Mother.

On another Holy morning

Men of ash rise from the River

To beat clean upon the rocks

Not cloth, but God:

And find that they,

Not cloth, Not God,

Are clean.

Ishmael

Fathered by Our Father

And we ourselves great Fathers:

I born of the Moon,
And he of the Sun:

Eloah following Allah.

Planetary blood is shed

And wrists take root in heels.

The sword is dropped

Between celestial brothers

(The sober and ebullient,

Both to father wild men:

Mirroring and mirrored by the other,

By the birth of an enemy-brother,

A nation.)

The sun-child draws his blessed blade at birth.

Favored child of God, he scythes three cycles

From my side and prospers:

I, stripped of berth and birthright, lance

A star from his exterior

And wander.

God has heard, but God has also

Shunned:

Eli, Elohim, Father of my father,

Lama Sabachthani?

Which God decrees, and scorns what He has ordered?

What God has left, no beauty can redeem.

I blacken my iniquity, and wander.

Below the Stellar Cradles battle nations:

Gabriel and Gibreel draw their arrows,

Samael and Azrael draw swords.

Sun and Moon stand shaking in their fury,

Husband, what a foul thing you have done!

Shall I now watch the blood flow from my son?

17 October

Fall break, hallelujaaaaaaaaaaahhhh. We went to verizon today to get new phones, but apparently we're going to have to order them, which means they'll take longer to get here. bahh humbug.

But other than stressing my ears off about college, i'm happy. Life is, in the words of Salman Rushdie, subkuch ticktock hai.

I'm reading his Midnight's Children over the break-- started it today-- we'll see how that goes. So far I'm a fan. (The Satanic Verses was one of those life-altering books.... mmm.)

16 October

Things would be so much easier if I didn't have a migraine.

And if I didn't feel so damnably trapped.

bergen-belsen, 28 May [unedited, not doneeee]

gravel crunches in a multitudinous silence:
all silenced, silenced by a sterile silence,
the silence of a universe, of a God;
and gravel crunches

placid condemnation.
in it crunches bones of moses/asher/miriam
and yeshua, a thousand times yeshua.
life is not here. life is not in the myth
but the moral; elsewhere, where
gravel cannot go, is where life is:
life is elsewhere.
but a platitude cannot efface
the gangrene feet
and bones of beloveds burnt white:

O Kapparot-children,
O blasphemous purification
of that which was already holy.

5 October

I have never felt this muddled, or this perfectly crystalline clear-sighted.

(to quote U2... I still haven't found what I'm looking for. Actually, quite frankly, I'm a little/whole lot hazy on what it is that I'm even looking for.)

I feel like much of my life consists of continual break-ups of marriages-- marriages that occur to me, but so vaguely and distantly that they feel like other people's marriages.