Putting shape into getting without perfect in a culture that doesn’t think, pumps up, the
two traits go at the face of rate themselves, cropped by impasse, express your
monochromatics from within, discover it blushes, reduce the signs to surface, sharing
space in a new high-tech fabric, the pale face extra - prevent every day year after year,
retreat returns by filling out advance notice, since seeing is oxygen more supple, sways,
just take graceful, tilt feature-controls are big, stable rattles accept different speeds sing,
sprawl-moguls seized a story, raking in celebrity, heat-activated genre, hands full
turned, loops removable gusseted, postpone television, revelations, introspection, an
assemblage not incidentally imposed, crossover success, so many boxes yet smashes
toward toward, reassured radio a deception, zipper jacket armor, lovely villanous
rejection, restored scaffolding, increased younger easy to track viral replicate, tattoo
their own lives around a single bulb, based like a medication in training isn’t
necessary or comparable, measure intensity - buy a pair, fit the trick and in windproof
advantage this material is any activity, land match better than any comeback, small bag
of trailing and various tossed out, overstuffed and glamorous and steadfast optically,
there was art but polite conversation made her drink and judged, designed personality,
a few hundred more dollars into a red can, outstretched, temporary fix, irritation
binding it in, treats beast is a star would breed collected sermons, clutch guns
elsewhere, the story met by saturation, machinery was made of the matter, ordinary
waving pieces in case sentimental, altogether eery minute, softening seriously would
require tips, partially hesitant emphasis with a chuckle to combat trumpets at the
intersection, furniture I can ride and left profile, running on that torchére events of the
eleventh hour push play arrived, how large in prompting, accordance when fruits and
equally violence, hand in the fascination, modern nervous during this apartment card
out of camera, square trying, distilleries rumba for lunch, flexible-link heavens.
- from The Tongue Moves Talk, Karen Mac Cormack (Chax Press/West House Books, Hay-on-Wye, 1997);
this piece is “full justified,” that is, flush with the left and right margins, in the printed text.
The Night Is Cold. The Earth Is the Weakest of the Flames
Milling inside on the lookout windows hundreds of moths
blot the cobalt beauty of heaven. A mass that neither finds itself
nor flies apart. Like buttercups floating in profusion from under a bridge,
their appearance equally strange. All is from God, all are fragments
torn from God: that is how Plato saw it. The moths
jerk about, pricked to the heart by the star-pricked
night, for they’ve lost the scent–was it hot? a red fox scent?–
of the orange glow above the mountains now drawn back
under miles of dark. How ugly, how far they are
from God, too far ever to be “ever,” too small, oh small my heart,
my wife hardens against me and my children
run like squirrels to the swaying tips of tomorrow.
Stiffly the moths turn and turn back, bumping like
bumper cars in an all-night amusement park,
mimicking the upward sideways uncertainty of fire.
There is no beast of the Apocalypse, only small
terrified wantings. Many wanting without humility.
The moths will die here, where they were born,
in this cube unshuttered to combat the ecstasy of fire.
At dawn, I’ll sweep the floor of soft rot, stiff rot.
Asleep in the aluminum south of L.A., my children cannot see
the bald medusa ride the light of her old unhappiness
over the hissing Pacific. If all unhappiness were old! The eye of the child
is ripped fresh today by the look the father gives the mother
when leaving the home: so this is hatred, this is unhappiness.
Love alone, as Plato said, escapes from might,
no brutality of any sort can proceed from it:
our species will be blessed when all receive by immediate consent
what now they express as by oracles and enigmas,
and cease to be “split in two in the manner of a fish.”
But to be alive
is to spill out of the cut, as the moon squeezed like a red
egg from the upturned belly of the mountain, and the moths from the warming
year, everything alive with a life different and the same, I know the moon
is alive, and the moths know it as they flick their body ash
as lovers do a cigarette dangling by the bedside of their tiredness.
Love is the danger of the loneliest? Love of anything
alive? But I sit stiff on the mattress, afraid to unfold the sheets:
the moths might want them, might lie down
beside me, on me, thought not wanting me, and the touch of their rest,
like the touch of crawling, would be death. O moths, o heart, all uglinesses,
I address you because the tower that rose on tall legs like a praying insect
against the huge moon of my arrival frightened me an all
unhappiness is the same, we are fragments torn from God. If I could stop
you from seething without maiming you, I would. Or stop the moon,
getting colder on her blue mattress, brighter and thinner,
without hurting her, our sister, I think I would. Outside,
the trees rise higher and higher, evil influences
will drop at their feet, the wind that steps
upon their arms as on tender souls will flare up against them,
crying “ugly,” so this is hatred. And maybe they really want
to go up in flames, they mimic the shape of climbing moths,
they stick up into the sky, if not without hesitations on every side.
Yes,
they are burning even now, burning bitterly.
Lonely flames. Wanting to be one. And we will stop them.
“Consider the capacity of the human body for pleasure. Sometimes, it is pleasant to eat, to drink, to see, to touch, to smell, to hear, to make love. The mouth. The eyes. The fingertips, The nose. The ears. The genitals. Our voluptific faculties (if you will forgive me the coinage) are not exclusively concentrated here. The whole body is susceptible to pleasure, but in places there are wells from which it may be drawn up in greater quantity. But not inexhaustibly. How long is it possible to know pleasure? Rich Romans ate to satiety, and then purged their overburdened bellies and ate again. But they could not eat for ever. A rose is sweet, but the nose becomes habituated to its scent. And what of the most intense pleasures, the personality-annihilating ecstasies of sex? I am no longer a young man; even if I chose to discard my celibacy I would surely have lost my stamina, re-erecting in half-hours where once it was minutes. And yet if youth were restored to me fully, and I engaged again in what was once my greatest delight – to be fellated at stool by nymphet with mouth still blood-heavy from the necessary precautions – what then? What if my supply of anodontic premenstruals were never-ending, what then? Surely, in time, I should sicken of it.
“Even if I were a woman, and could string orgasm on orgasm like beads on a necklace, in time I should sicken of it. Do you think Messalina, in that competition of hers with a courtesan, knew pleasure as much on the first occasion as the last? Impossible.
“Yet consider.
“Consider pain.
“Give me a cubic centimeter of your flesh and I could give you pain that would swallow you as the ocean swallows a grain of salt. And you would always be ripe for it, from before the time of your birth to the moment of your death, we are always in season for the embrace of pain. To experience pain requires no intelligence, no maturity, no wisdom, no slow working of the hormones in the moist midnight of our innards. We are always ripe for it. All life is ripe for it. Always.”
― Jesus I. Aldapuerta, The Eyes: Emetic Fables from the Andalusian de Sade
