A try at writing letters
Found, when dead, with pen in hand trailing off into an untraceable line. C, slid slightly, from her heavy chair, head back tilted into the air, mouth a small gap, pen on paper, in light grasp, as if both release & certain hold. Surrounding with, in death, her absence, the letters, in hundreds that surround her; the letters that verge, in piles, into where she be, as she has seeped into their ink or parts of paper where they cannot reach. Pointless traces of mutal-entanglement. C had sent letters to all kinds of friends. Her letters are not stories, ponderings, accounts; her letters are practices at single letters of a minimally shifting alphabet. C had not known precisely where to start, she started where she did not remember having had begun. Does also not recall when she stopped making sense. Starts creating, instead of paragraphs & sentences from letters; starts creating, letters & lines from letters. Copy-book schoolbook between-two-lines-letters; tightrope-trapeze line letters, electric wire safety-line letters. She swoops into a language she does not know. She begins with letters Roman alphabet; ends with partings of the, from the, page, the squiggle, hardly signalling a trace; or bold; or wildly patterned. Somewhere between the fully cogent epistle & instances of random seeming squiggle, C cleaves a speed enmeshed with sensible & possibilities for sensible. C plays with variations infinitely present in the alphabet that slowly becoming alphabet, become anew another alphabet. A tendency, as if infected by a fictional disease; concocted, yet one that people somehow believe. C is infected by her alphabets & in turn traces them into process of decay. C writes her letters into ruin, collapses her K into a ruin, doodles H’s into whispers, scrawls her C into a squiggle. The changes are not planned but neither are they abrupt or random. C writes outward; shifting overlapping seas of ripples, varying in minimal degree, affecting minimally, each other. Inversely, she is surrounded with, much of her room is buried under, piles of received, unopened letters; with more than unwound majuscules & minuscules. Her letters received remain unread. Her letters received have proper complex sentences, the paragraphs the arguments; & questions. C’s corners are padded by these unread letters, big patches of her floor are carpeted with letters. Why you write but no reply? Why you no reply? C, slid position, slightly outward, reckons negative, sunken into about to have sunken into. C’s correspondents smell already soon, a stink of absence, a correspondent phantom pain of amputeetered vacillation, vanishing of morphogenerating letters. C found, when dead, with pen hand trailing an untraceable line; her mouth a lovely grimace; its outline forming possibilities of letters, any number of,
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A try at breaking & piling, where C piles the objects of each room into the middle of each room
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Beginning finally when it was just about, to begin, too late, she could not not begin no more, C stacks her hopes against the odds, grinds her odds into a frenzy. Moving methodically yet without outline, without drawing board C enters a destructive tract, with firm & moment movements, her breathing easy, even, her eyes open unblinking; or shut & to corners wildly pulsating. Breaks what crushes, shatters, rips apart. Slashes with a knife, what is too tough for her skin-and-bone hands, hammers with a pounding. Mattress slash, the feathered room, heavy pile of wardrobe MDF boards, clothes torn hand by hand, curtain stripped from rails & ripped apart. Kitchen space a cloud of spice and herbal trace, a pile of spices, pans, pots, glass, cutlery & cups. C moves from edges of her living room concentrically more centrally. Turns over dinner table, hammers into table paws; pulls down curtain down, quarters the four chairs; vivisects & autopsies & guts two sofas; topples, onto top of the pile, in the middle of the room, her one bookcase facing her one other bookcase; topples onto middle pile her other bookcase facing no longer her first bookcase; rips slightly at wallpaper, dawdles indecisively, strays unwound, uncertainly, meanders into bathroom room, hangs herself, wet towel, for some time over an edge of a bathtub; locks the door and waits for an appointment to arise, a visitor to come and knock; C sits onto a closed toilet manually folding certain pleats into her pants’ pleats, presses with her hands and rubs direct down. Presses, rubs. Unbuttons up & rebuttons down her shirt; uncollars then folds down the collar of her shirt; unties thus reties very perfectly the laces of her shoes; speculates for a moment, had C long hair, she would braid her hair in two; nostalgia for a moment that was never there. C sits straight on the toilet, head high back straight, fingers pointing forward resting on her thighs. C waits to be beamed up; C readies for a visitor to come and knock.
A try at organising things neatly
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C tries to organise the objects in her house. C lays out lines of objects, begins in one room, begins again, until in every room the objects have been laid out line for row. When entering there is a hall, with right a bedroom, left a bathroom, straight ahead a living room and through that on the left a kitchen. Wherein C opens all her cupboard doors, reaches in with both her hands at equal level equal pace, the fingers alternate to grab like tendons then like vices the foodstuffs living on the front row, or in hidden shadows. The best she can is what it looks like when C is done; label-facing spices two rows deep, multi-shaped cartons of teas bricked neatly as a wall, behind which baggy packs of flour, baking soda, sugar. C does not change the Seinfeld wall of cereal, she rearranges condiments, stacks mini-packs of multi-flavoured jam, places on top of peanut butter, peanut butter. Inside her fridge a puddle leaks unevenly to one side. So for her books & bookshelves, sofas chairs & table, desk, C creates the even lines of parallel and equanimity. C fluffs & beats her sofa pillows beats her carpet. Lays her carpet beater in the hall, parallel the sole left / right shoe, the doormat. C meditates on throwing out half-empty variations on a theme of shower gels, instead she hides them in ascending order, behind a bottle full of shampoo & a bottle full of body gel. Three toothbrushes, one unknown, are arranged on an only bathroom shelf, along with two toothpaste tubes, one plastic Gillette razor refill cartridge with one remaining blade. Ten rolls of toilet paper rolls sit in the corner of the bathroom shelf against the wall above the toilet. Before C lies herself onto her floor she opens up her wardrobe door she pulls open the drawers, pulls out her drawers. C folds her shirts and socks and drawers and pants & pieces onto their kind and into piles & piles. Having worked frenzy contra disorder C sits, by hardly denting, in the middle of the middle of the sofa. She thinks about the puddle in her fridge. The puddle & her body, the only objects left uneven in the house. On her desk, C eyes a row of pens, soldiers fatigued, unto death arranged. C lies herself onto her floor precisely alongside carpet lines, with arms straight down, with palms flat on the ground. C slides up her hands up, to where her elbows were, between two lines of carpet, 90° approximately, a strike-a-pose, a doll about to push upright. C’s one eye, lazy, weaves wayward between the straight(ened) lines, a drape threads dark, slant penetrating sunlight with slant grimy shadow. Trying to forget itself, C’s body presses into this rug, emerging and collapsing, nearly, in & out of trembling, unsensed. Regular as quantum clock.
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C edges minimally direction sofa armrest, rests her arm so slightly ever over barely type of sofa armrest, C strokes ever so ever. This feels workable, opportunity like. In the get up & rush out, C brushes her homeroom-plant, hallway-wall, her corner-door, her outside-door, with calves, shins, back-hands, shoulders. but from now, in several attempts, C tries petting, with her physical, in a more certain manner. On a street she turns the sun onto her face & still as a performance artist / mannequin, she stands, next to a lamppost, traversed by sounds of the construction of an urban street scene. C moves from one to one foot to crush precisely with a twist of toes a relinquishing fat moth & when it happens, C stretches out her hand toward, who happens by, a figure & who in that moment stretches, distracted, hurried, out her left arm to free her hand up to her head, to scratch her nose, to hear her phone, pull at her ear. C’s back of right hand brushes along the figure’s left three middle fingers & they exchange barely skin and touch. The figure almost distracted out of her distraction, continues, puzzled about Did something happen just? C’s hand remains for some full seconds suspended, partly, on its way back from fully stretched, uncertain if it had meant to friction against this figure’s fingers. C leans for inhalation into the meeting of her back & line of lamppost, she fondles very carefully her right-side little finger, she strokes, with her left-side middle finger, circles around, the little bone protruding from her elbow, presses ebbing waves against the underside of her right knee, pushes flat her tongue into the oxter of her arm,
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Wormrot & Dirge
Dirge hums for passing Wormrot, Dirge drivels, mournful, Wormrot moves, on. What is a neighbour called who vacates to two blocks down? Dirge sometimes screams in a street in a night (when there are no people around, when it is cold, with thick absence). This settles his one scream into a cold black like the spray of a sneeze drifts into air, like an aerosol of a spray-can dispersed, like a venom of snake into air. Wormrot crawls sometimes on the floor of his house, forgets his eyes of blind spot, becomes all over, the empty marker in his head. Sometimes Dirge screams into Wormrot’s belly, with his face pressed into Wormrot’s belly. Sometimes Wormrot writhes his body into Dirge’s face, writhes his belly or the inside of his thigh, or the cheek of his butt or face into the side or front of Dirge’s face; or his armpit or backside into Dirge’s face. Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge slide obscenely gently into each other. Tend to, Wormrot & Dirge stand on their respective patios, with a lookout across a partway-distance, slant either in or away from their other location. Sometimes when Wormrot remains, parsed, these two blocks from Dirge, Wormrot scribbles on the unsent postcard; sometimes Dirge places, alone, the cups of tea for two onto his coffee table.
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She dances between where she walks, she spurns some looks & several carloads of close calls, forms spurious nocturnal melodies (her body’s), mingles with the objects’ bodies. She walks like falling without falling, nearly horizontal with her surface plaque of asphalt & of cobbled stones, she walks like a distorted soldier, nearly horizontal with her surface stuff of asphalt & of pavement tiles & with legs as straight as planks, each time she moves a leg she bends her trunk more forward, slightly, like a joint each time absurdly out of time. She walks a star an ambush an equation; she walks ‘an animal, a night, a cry, a (wo)man, or all of this at the same time’ (CoBrA); she slivers through an open sunshot day as if it is a night; she manages to stay away from where she is, all right, she wears fatigue & feigns a wipe across the forehead for delay effect. While still underway she has already crossed & circumnavigated all of the way she had set out to trace. For interim, she cups a baby into her mind, writhes her body into her face, makes stories, standing in(to) place. She passes trains that passing her are toy, the people frozen, tiny, model figures; & frozen as the objects are, they, everything, it, also moves. As if secretly toward an open; or openly, toward a secret kind of site. Were you waiting where you are now? asks her friend where, finally, she, dishevelled, found her. Toward her face come mostly synaesthesias of noise, to code / recode / decode / encode. This does not go so well. & before it happens she is gone, or her friend has moved along; it is sensed that she shuffles as she sprints, all the writhing odd cells of her body feel like death metal & rush to protect their idea of her fat veins; such a rush whereof the force, too much is, for her body, whereof she feels a tweak of horror. Yes pulled up (forward at a tilt on toes on tips), yes shuttered up (leaning like a rag doll into the lines of scaffold that transfix her torso itch her soul).
We
Donata Wenders, Saturina (2001)
In the arms of the two, the two rock & rock, in the arms of the two, & there is a space in between all the other space, where, here, all the things sway, it can’t be helped, yes, like a breeze, through a tree, only in that spring that perhaps never took place you were never sure if it did, or is, there in this image in your head & maybe someday it will still will take place, so you thought it, next to where it happened, & sorry because I know, breeze is not allowed, but here it is & it moves, for one moment every moment, like this image of the breeze through a tree, moves, only to the extent that it differs from itself, shivers with difference, cold not with indifference, chill; cold of expanse, of a ripple for the edges, wherever they are perceived, always about to fizzle out & from wherever centre bulge again, I say sorry because I hide myself from you, at once as transparent as see-through as a drawing on a glass plate, I say sorry because I see you & I cannot start outside & close my fist inside of you, I bow my head not to apologise for my body, but for a grace of a bowed head, but for a friction of barely touching skin, one forearm of the right arm along one gentle forearm of the others left arm, but for the curves of bodies that fit well into bows, but for that with my bow I hook into, slightly, your being, I tug at you with sharper than & through the fabric into which I bow, I tug, we do not bow to step out of the way, we fold each other twice & twice, each self away oneself, toward oneself, each self away each other to ward to warn each other, each away toward same time, colliding counter ripple into counter ripple, vibrant matter into vibrant matter, I bow to buzz precisely, sandpaperly, through your surface stuff, you buzz you hesitate & rush within your falling folding, we are torn it does not hurt, it hurts where we are whole, this does not hurt as well this wholeness that is not, this tear where we are separately I & where we are, conjoined as two,
Donata Wenders, By the Rhein, (2000)
She
she is the saddest of her soul, she is not sad like tears or scowl or stone, she is the saddest only very little & only largest, only moment, very slightly, over only all the surface & throughout perimeter. Her body conjures up some tears, it’s funny because she’s sad & her body conjures up some tears. But this is not like billiard balls, her sadness does not cause her tears, her tears are not what made her sad, her sadness is not sad, her tears are tears but are not sad, a shiver takes her body once, so that a tiny tidal wave, & then it’s gone before it’s gone, her head rests back against her seat, her train protests against a curve, a dog shakes, water from its fur, but only once, as if then frozen into time. Her tears are out of open eyes as round as coloured Persian plates, her tears are very wet but hardly trickle down her face, one from one eye, one from one eye, & her others into inside her open eyes, she grips her seat into her fingers, she breathes her breath slow & forceful into the air into her mouth & windpipe, lungs & body blood. She falls apart 1000 times, she feels a fullness of herself pressing against herself, so that she spills over into herself, her air, her tram seat there, the colours of her cosmos, she grips her sides of seat, she figures she is ebb & flow, &/or a piece of Onyx coloured Plexiglas,
Adolf Hoffmeister, Illus. for a 1967 Czech edition of Lautreamont Poesies
She takes her language off
She takes her language off, & then she takes the words off language, her, undresses them, undoes them of their sensible layer of preservative; infuriating image behind transparent something inside/outside. She tramples on their naked bodies, tiny beings, squirming, crisply, beneath her feet, like ants or what? Her words do not at all mind being trampled on, she sits in them, with hands on knees; the broken pieces of her alphabet crawl up her body; rest sometimes on her skin, & disappear into her holes of skin & cavity. She is unsure about her situation. sometimes she gasps & cries, but never with the sense & meaning, always with the burbles & the sighs. Her broken language is her blanket & her itch, it keeps her warm & cools her off & makes her twitch. & for her words & syllables she has become a spacious habitat, no longer throwing them around & pointing them at things like spears & flaccid dicks. Her people, the ones she knows, put her away, but they speak gibberish. They send her to a big square building, in a woods; with white & with around it trees of wood & silver lines. She does no longer find her way out of the woods, her building where she dwells, is made of squares, disappearing, white, into each other; a square building into a door into a floor of square, into a square of tiled squares, into a bathroom square of square glass cabin, into the white square tiles like line the floor & hallway walls, & in the rooms, her room, paper on the wall with squares of white, made from horizontal lines with then a hint of vertical; & when her showerhead is square, but sometimes into the sink or toilet bowl, she hangs her head, she droops into where, here, there are the curves & she, sometimes, she hangs her head & stoops her body, for hours first, then hourly, into a patch of curves,
Butterfly mechanic
A butterfly flaps mechanical wings
Coloured sheets of metal, flimsy but
I mean the butterfly will never wrap its wings
Around its body, if it did it could make itself
Look like a fictitious poppy?
A kid from a heartbreaking novel
Has his moment when he catches the frisbee
Without changing its flight of path without
Pulling it out of the air, his arm and this frisbee
Then join his brain, are his mind
The figures and the people and the dogs
Saunter over the beach exactly the way they are
Supposed to. The kid sees some of them then he sees
Nothing (in the air about to have performed
his frisbee-interception). One of the figures
is a man, a father & to his daughter is explaining
infinity can be trapped in finite spaces
like the curves of a shore of beach. This
daughter is what we call 6 years old she
does not figure about infinity, which only
comes after the stars right? Besides, hearing
her father’s explaining-voice makes her think
of that time when he explained about
making permanent and temporary slides
for her microscope. Permanent means when
you will surely lose it at some point. She thought.
But then there was another moment
and she learnt that permanent means permanent.
Why does he always tell things at the wrong time
& not always like stories, only like stories when
he is trying to be matter-of-fact. There is also a beach
& this time with just the one person who one moment
Strolls (can you stroll on a beach?) another (the next?)
Moment experiences everywhere objects in collision
Not that they changed where they were, they did
But not unusually so, or not more than otherwise.
She felt seeing them all bouncing in to each other.
Each thing in a different way with each different thing
Reaching without finishing their reach,
Falls BJA
BJA rolls from a roof, falls from a bicycle into an Amsterdam canal. The bicycle falls alongside slightly after. BJA bikes into foaming promise waves of absolute vanish. Falls from his tears rolling from his eyes travelling down his cheeks & face. He readies himself & readies himself & readies & hops & wraps his body around a tree. He falls into what from standing becomes a geometrically sideways broken fall. BJA hangs from a tree, hangs tall & lanky from a limb, pulls at the limb of the tree & some limbs on his body. BJA falls from this tree into a water below of the Amsterdam Woods. He drops the light into night, is about to crack closed the remaining light, remain closing the crack of light. He crashes miraculously into a Los Angeles shore. His ship become a mess of lines. He sails again this time into the water away the shore. Into the Atlantic world, disappears away the world. Falls again & falls he miraculously fails, swallowed by the shoreless water. BJA falls a heavy wooden box unto him, covering him etiquettely tea party soliloquy,
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V dances free of thought & with one thought that collects his body into points, his movements into possible bodies. En pointe & jumps of springbok. This is a dancer at the height of his fame. & this is a dance when he stops still. & now gentlemen. Ladies. This little horsie has had enough. Curtsey curtsey curtsey. Off & he runs off exit. The only other time that V danced after that was when he passed a group of street musicians, jumped like a flying fish.
A curious examiner cuts V’s feet open after V dies. Where did the dancer get his dance? But V’s dance was not there in V’s feet. Maybe yes, but nowhere to be seen. Or it had left his feet when he had stopped dancing. In the way that V stopped speaking after he had stopped dancing. A white voice declares him schizomatic, a white coat medicates him the schizodrugs. These schizodrugs that make V swagger to walk. Entangled he remains within the single sentence of his dance. V dangles & clumsily looms over the rolling white slightly speckled linoleum floor.
The more he stops dancing the deeper the fragments’ creases of his body; the more pressed become the folds, his body. The examiner slices into V’s feet; precisely. Once. & once. The body has suffered defeat. V is wearing rags & feathers. If he had been wearing a magnificent costume he would have looked like a sad, disjointed clown. Or a puppet with disarticulated arms & legs & neck, to be imminently animated. Pulled at from simultaneous collapsible directions. The knife clatters with the autopsy table. One clean incision in the sole of each foot from big toe to where the heel begins. When he is done & quiet, the examiner leaves open each bloodless gash; with love & gentle stroke / barely tickle.
Excess of language trumps the writing of concept
“There is no perfect polished rounded whole. It is precisely excess that is the universal part of a whole, like Badiou’s set of all sets, or Ranciere’s part of no part” Zizek claimed during a recent lecture in the Volksbuhne in Berlin, explaining where for him Hegel was not Hegelian enough.
This point of excess is also visible in works of Conceptual poetry whose ostensible genesis is a purely rational concept. Some striking examples Eunoia by Christian Bök, Day & Fidget by Kenneth Goldsmith, Parse by Craig Dworkin, Dies: a sentence by Vanessa Place. Some of these moments of excess are intentional (Parse, Dies: a sentence) semi-intentional (Day, Fidget), or unintended but apparently unavoidable (Eunoia).
Eunoia Christian Bök’s insane Oulipean project containing five chapters of univocalic words (words containing only one vowel). Thus there are chapters for A, E, I, O, U. Additionally, each chapter narrates the same four stories, “a culinary banquet, a prurient debauch, a pastoral tableau and a nautical voyage”. The moments of excess here are 1. the fact that Bök does not use all univocalic words 2. Some words are repeated; 3. That not all “Ys” are discarded. To be fair, the constraints Bök imposed on himself do not specify that all univocalic words must be used, & that none of the words may be repeated, or that all”Ys” must be used. The actual constraints on the wording are: include as many possible words in it as it can, the text must avoid repeating words as much as possible, the letter Y is to be avoided. Now this is speculation that I expect that (& I believe Bök even said as much somewhere but I forget) had it been possible, he would have used all univocalic words & not just most of them (I believe there are only a handful that did not make it into Eunoia). Either way, it is a nice illustration of the squirming of language traversing the writing of pure concept.
Kenneth Goldsmith fully embraces excess in his work often emphasising that he thinks of language as fluid, flowing, mouldable (one can often recognise in his language is beginnings as a sculptor). To pertinent examples are his Day (called in notes on conceptualisms the ur-text of Conceptual writing) & Fidget. Day - the transcription of the complete text of a newspaper (including about 40% of stock quotes), resulting in a 900-page book – is, as Kenneth Goldsmith himself has stated, full of typos (not that he actually typed out the whole book; apparently he scanned most of it). He has even stated in interviews that the book is so teeming with mistakes that they would be impossible to correct (again I forget exactly where, so no source, sorry..).
Fidget is a transcription of one day of all of Goldsmith’s bodily movement, from 10 AM to 11 PM. Excess overtakes it in the last chapter which is printed backwards. Goldsmith explains that the exercise of speaking all of his movements into a recording device was driving him insane:
The exercise becomes harder and harder, the verbal equivalents to physical motion more and more abbreviated. By 6:00 PM, “as a defense my body put itself to sleep.” When Goldsmith awakes and realizes he had another five or six hours to go, he panics:
I went out and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels, walked over to an abandoned loading dock by the West Side highway and drank the entire bottle, all the while continuing my exercise. Needless to say, I got trashed. I found my home and fell asleep by 11:00 PM, never once having stopped my narrative.
Later, when he plays the tapes, Goldsmith finds that in the drunk sequence, his words have become completely slurred and in the last chapter (22:00), quite incomprehensible. So, in a Beckettian move, “I ran the first [sic? not last?] chapter backwards, mirrored it, then reversed every letter.” For example, “Tongue runs across lower lip, moving from right side of mouth to the left following arc of lip,” becomes .pil fo cra gniwollof tfel ot htuom fo edis thgir morf gnivom pil rewol ssorca snur eugnoT.
The sentences from this last chapter were then put into reverse order with the last actions coming first, and the first coming last. The only exception is the very last line of the book, “Eyelids close,” which is printed in standard order, “creating a full circle of closure for the day” (source)
A second example is the unseen excess; the very fact that it is impossible to describe all of one’s bodily movements (in the same way that is impossible to describe all qualities of any object). This is precisely what was driving him crazy. Thirdly, there is the given that Goldsmith apparently felt it necessary to rigorously edit the tapes. Marjorie Perloff: “all unnecessary words such as “the” were removed as were all possible literary and art references. The aim was to make the text “very dry and very descriptive” and “to divorce the action from the surroundings, narrative, and attendant morality.” In other words, excess trumped the writing of concept but was subsequently swept under the carpet.
Finally, two examples of fully intentional use of excess are Parse by Craig Dworkin & Dies: a sentence by Vanessa place. Parse, in true pure conceptual style, was a five-year exercise in tedium.
Parse is a translation of Edwin A. Abbott’s How To Parse: An Attempt to Apply the Principles of Scholarship to English Grammar. First published in 1874, the book played a leading role in the pedagogic debate over whether English should be analyzed as if it were Latin, and thousands of copies were printed as textbooks in the last quarter of the 19th century.
When I first came across the book, I was reminded of a confession by Gertrude Stein (another product of 1874): “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.” And so, of course, I parsed Abbott’s book into its own idiosyncratic system of analysis.” (from K. Silem Mohammed’s blog)
The funny thing is that apparently; “Dworkin occasionally retains an entire phrase or sentence from Abbott without “translating” it, often creating the effect of editorial comment (“plural first person subjective case pronoun used in bad faith to suggest a camaraderie with the reader auxiliary verb adverb” etc.)”. in this case there for the excess is fully intentional part of the work, yet not of the initial concept. As K. Silem Mohammed points out that working seems to be poking fun at the sourcebook & perhaps the whole exercise that he is putting himself through. It reminds me as well of Lucretius’ famous clinamen, the swerve of atoms that causes them to bump into each other & without which there would be no matter.
Finally, Vanessa place employs a baroque/impure conceptualism, namely one that emerges from self-expression & is not based on pure concept. Dies: a sentence is a 50,000 word sentence monologue of a dying man who has lost his legs in the First World War (if I recall correctly). This might more properly be seen as a case of concept intersecting excess.
These are just some examples of the personal, the lyrical subject (the animal trapped in language (Zizek), the whimsical, the unplanned for, emerging through works that are grounded in concept; grounding, in turn, the concept in the real.
A figure & a figurine
A figure on the white square polyethylene bus stop bench sits slumped far forward, deep down, head tucked inward, elbows forearms resting on full upper thigh, frozen waterfall hands turned inward, downward slope, feet soles toes turned inward. His style is of a homeless person, except for three full shopping bags that are new not wasted, full with shiny plastic wrapped, not objects of a mobile home. He could be drunk out of his head, he could have drunk his head into cement, his body lead pillow. Did he get drunk between the place for shopping and the bus stop? He could be blasted with fatigue. From shopping? From some unseemly invisible disease? He can be asking of his mind a question that is causing him to cringe slow motion, slump homeless, slouch turtle curve shell, curl into self making a centre of absence inside inward-turned head, hands, feet, mole on soft bum. He could be a style of Käthe Kollwitz drawing. Victim of what? Parent of whom? Child of whom? He could be ecstatically enmeshed, his mind extended out to the rounded square cobblestones & polyethylene white square, holding his heavy large body.
A figurine, a figured she, stands before the slumpy figure, impotently pulls his left & right-hand, with her right & left hand. She pauses, tugs at his left hand with her right left hand. She pauses, she tugs, she yanks she jerks, with however only part a mind, her other parts of mind are in this moment terror & dumb face of her deadlocked mind. The figure he, sluggish, heavy, square, does never react. The figurette, the figure she, pushes into his shoulders, pushes with part a mind, part a heart, soul & the figured he rises, back, then falls back. She joins him, too sits, finds her square seat, overflowing & blank-eyed middle-distance, hazy fatigue distance, into the dusk not quite of the not quite evening. She places her left hand on his left hand, stares, she lifts his left hand with her both hands, he is busily unconscious out, he will have created a centre of absence which is inward turned head, hands, feet, secure. She sits mute scream, honey bunch, plaster shock, fat & soft,
Animals sick with language
Sick with language Robert pushes open, his window, into the wonder world, quietly asks the world to stop prosing, How are your words today Robert? Robert mumbles in his mumble, Robert can write smaller than language. Robert can write in between language, Meaning surges unintended through him,
