This is what constitutes the stuff of experience: my swollen belly, covered in a layer of grime. A solipsism, a surety in that solid, goo stuff. I have no explanation other than the evidence—bloodletting goes back to my mother’s mother’s mother’s day. I hurt, but in meaningful ways.
It’s all part of the general underwhelming reveal. That was a callback to another poem I’ve written. Living in the psychological, reverberating with repetition as if to say I have nothing new and interesting to share. I’m adorned with history, palimpsest of pain on wrist as if to convince you to love me. This might all be some perverse longing for rejection. Cutting means I’m living with this warped omnipotence, meaning I’m living the truest life, and the saddest one.
I have this fantasy where you tell me you love her more than me, where you point out all my flaws and highlight all her ahs. Self-flagellating anthropomorphized self-hatred. I’m a dung beetle burrowing into soil. I’m not even worthy of wormhood. I’m a fucking beetle. Which means I’ve got at least a little spunk.
Dad’s dad’s dad was a poet. What is it about the poetic analytic that feels like the best medium through which to experiencethe world? Poetry is cutting is poetry is hurting. Is feeling. Is being in a sensorium, butterfly wings dotting the scenery. A poem shapes the significance of the universe! I feel quantumly entangled with you, but you are far away. So is the other guy. So is the dead one. I have loved thrice, and you are the third…
In the Quran, poetry is referred to as ‘the language of the birds’. Right now, cackawing, beak slit open dripping blood and semen and dirt and salt. “True poetry participates in this “cleansing” of the perceptual faculties by sweeping aside the cobwebs occluding the hidden passages connecting all things, polishing phenomena to reflective translucence, granting us an experience of the One in everything and everything in each one—the universality of things in their particularity, and their particularity in their universality.” Poetry means there is a God.
What I have to end on:
1. Engage in the poetic analytic
2. Take my vitamin D
3. Tell him how I feel
4. Coffee tomorrow morning
5. Remember to brush teeth
6. Pain that gets performed is still pain