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This is a collage poem composed for my current creative writing workshop “Intense Life Writing” as part of EMU’s creative writing MA program; it is comprised of my own handwritten language taken from three separate notebooks (including personal/diaristic notes, class/general notes, and text message transcripts), cut up and re-sculpted as a series of abstract self-portraits. Influenced by writings of Frank O’Hara, Arthur Rimbaud, George Bataille, Hans-Jost Frey, Amy Berkowitz, Marie Buck, Wayne Koestenbaum, Aimé Césaire, and Rob Halpern.
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Ars Bathetica (in praise of lowness)
_____ [ 1 ] _______________
…kneeling at my desk – not sitting – palm of my foot fitting inside
my jaw, my tongue in the kitchen sink. I function best in short bursts,
psychosis: pear, apple, cherry, lilac – pushing a ghost thru my wrist
into language: another diaper brimming with shit
_____ [ 2 ] _______________
We move like cormorants in transit: a kind of wind
clashing & permeating with dead clouds; raccoons
reckoning: why carry weight? Dark chocolate
chunk, nib of brie, cherries, melatonin &
Valerian root. Turquoise gums rotting beneath heavy
layers of rejected skin, ruptured by six tiny teeth, still
half-submerged in soft gums, pissing venom, vicious stink
of trash preceding language – not voiceless, but infans
_____ [ 3 ] _______________
Paralysis: children with red eyes
imitating asteroid bones, weightless
as purple whales, baleen brushing against
rival teeth, dry teeth blazing thru memoirs,
blueberries, baby blood – a memory of pain
do you want to shower with me?)
– a fire truck outside the library, filled
with furniture, filled with soft bras, with
(has all the up & down drained you too?)
_____ [ 4 ] _______________
A jarring present tense: Roo tumbles –
her red tricycle, rusted, squeaky;
soft smirk of gravel, sound
(two hands like false teeth)
while gray-blue socks engulf the sky
_____ [ 5 ] _______________
…my spine eroding, burdened as a brick: filled
with crayons, sea shells & precious trash, distended
with severed limbs & a massive lot full of wood chips:
tool-shed full of carrots & oranges, ice cream flavors
as bodies (skin beyond skin, melting), fear of
sleep debt, warts on my feet – I only exist as shelves
under tension, born lifting heavy objects: underbelly
injuring identity – half-feral at best (is half the
_____ [ 6 ] _______________
A woman scientist preheats
the bisected head of a dolphin
(a tall & tender meat shell, hypnotized:
chemical preservation, microwaved
as its body slumps in defeat) –
her face & nose constantly molting (shed
but also retained), filled with
reproductive shame & prehistoric snowfall,
interrupted by a waking child
_____ [ 7 ] _______________
flossing & brushing, shoving
a fax machine thru an 8th story glass wall
into your backyard. What is more real
than trash? Am I that guy that did the
shooting? Something to look forward to
in 2017: an absence of closure – me climbing
evergreens, smelling thick sap – letting
language take on my pain, sent by mail
to my own child. What is truly
a limit? We eat chemicals (“things”
are not “getting better”) and by 9pm
I'm trying to head home for the night.
Mom's always fine (right?). Yet tinnitus rings again,
signals that lack of closure with my father, though he isn't
even dead yet. Known for his mustache, something
so unkempt, like pain, like language, like being
asked to smile for a photograph.
_____ [ 8 ] _______________
Life at sea is wearing me down.
60 years old & this world does not need more
of me, more of the trash-man's harsh
caress, more of the compactor's heavy
kiss, more shitting in public. Horizon
spell: 60 degrees, the dryness of knees, my body
mouth-breathing, no mediator between mind-pain
& body-pain – no burritos to chase the pain away,
only dollar-store fruit salad & tinnitus: an entrance,
a bridge, a siren, a beam of light, a lexicon
for the gray areas of language I'm beginning to ride;
chase sequences thru that vague space
between the ears where the brain suffocates
the ears: tinnitus bursting, stabbing moods, killing
with the physical weight of tones,
self breaking self's will.
What parts of me are even
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