given birth to another wild hybrid
like yourself. I’m following you to your
heights: I’m the only intellectual
Justice says—she’s worked in peep shows—
You’ll never figure me out; but
you owe my baby, and you owe me.
This lady was justice at the beginning: do you know the little song, that the lady of the final order may or may not suffer your spirits dense with blood and the rush of killing with your hands, which is natural, you say. I may not let you in here, she says, not into my endless day, after they hang you for their own crimes as well, condemned in their sadistic courts. Distinctions are not of interest: further I don’t know where you will go. But I’m justice, not any of you, an abstraction live with bloody hair from my hybrid issue at the cleft of the return I sing. Oh Mom I love you when there’s blood on your hair and you come at me railing. I entered everywhere as dispassion, now become redheaded from judging the foul acts of your hands. I’ve got bloody hair so you can love me.
No world is intact
and no one cares about you.
I leaned down over
don’t care about, I care about
you
I leaned down over the
world in portrayal
of carefulness, answering
something you couldn’t say.
Walking or fallen and you
were supposed
to give therapy to me—
me leaning down
brushing with painted feathers
to the left of chance your operatic,
broken
book.
Can you decipher where we are if it’s to be communal; or in the privacy of this symbol, be sorry. Then where is your power? The symbol to me is pink and spreads over the walls, comprised of large irregularly round spots for the force of whatever I’ve concluded was real. I can’t transform what I don’t believe in; wherever it is I’ve been everyone was happy except me, because they understood the language of the forms or thought they did. Essentially I decipher an unscrupulous funerary urn full of your parts but not all of them, only the ones that you’re used to—you think I’m arranging those to you the symbols of where you were. I am dressed in a certain glass predicament: that no one covers me, because I’m the marabout with a thousand teeth and vast hair; and you found magic humorous, but you died of it for you were confounded by one of your own parts, an illogic of syntax? There is a whole woman somewhere, but I have no interest in that. She would symbolize a community whereas I have tricked you so far into a dream standing where there is no light at all, and I have accepted some very expensive blood.
THE BOOK OF DEAD
Medea ran with her children
She fled with them leaving the house where one must
accept the elaborate head in a box with its
silver and turquoise ornamentation as one’s own
civilization. This severed thought will do you good
No we are leaving you. Though it was reported
she killed her children and left alone since that story
took care of all of them. Medea entrusted herself with
the remnants of her culture, in an old box. What was her
culture? You say that it was a dream, leading you on
I am the most destructive person alive because I
can’t bear the lies in your heart. Every murder attributed to her
had no victim but feelings, was an assault on the sanctity of your
language covering one with the white shit of pigeons in an airshaft.
I’ll take you quickly to the ghouls, we’re everywhere. Or are we art; or shattered cultures. Or, individual victims. Our paint’s coming off us, dark wormholed relics, lost poems, broken torsos beloved of museums even before they are bombed. Old corpses.
Aren’t you going to tell me about Medea? Yes. And some others. Your version? Maybe that’s it. But I have to tell you about ghouls too, I just do. She’s a ghoul. Anyone who’s still around, before and after conquest, the ongoing activity, is a ghoul. Is anyone not a ghoul?
Medea … but you’ll want to know conventional things. You will want to be assured, for example, that she killed Creusa, the daughter of Creon, by sending her a poisoned dress on her wedding day. Though I’ve already said that she didn’t.
You don’t know what you want to know, you say, but Creusa’s part of the story. Then I say, Do you really believe in poison dresses?
Because I want to be accorded … what’s left of me. The remnants of my culture, perhaps my personal culture. Medea is here. She knows it isn’t that blue head in its silver headdress hair.
One of us—myself—says: It’s my statue—that means stature, that the conquerors possess now. And my best poetry’s destroyed (if it’s the future— who knows what time it is?) What do I care? Form has to be earned. I earned the form of my poems.
Who are the conquerors, you ask? Don’t you know?
I still have these cultural remnants, hidden, Medea’s box. Now I am Medea, about whom there are only rumors, alone again. (Children grown; on their own.) No I’m the poet too.
There is a place inside me where I hold another language close. I’m the only one who knows it. But no one wants to be such a foreigner. In all their combinations the words in my language form a statue—statute—I know the language of one.
The weight of passion is it. What is it for, to pass through? Keep passing through? I am the only language I can understand.
In the heart of almost any conqueror word, I pay for what I’m not. The parts of my body are mirrors, which fasten my soul to the earth’s. But I have another soul, and still I’m a ghoul. In most respects I’m a foreigner.
Here is an example of a conqueror love song:
You stood on the ground I wanted to own
I overcame you binding you to me
I found you, love, where I wanted to be
I wanted to own you and the earth of you
I rip up the names of your ancestors and call you me
(Fill in name of country.)
To decipher Medea I go with her, as you have come here to do.
They say she founded Media: western Iran and South Azerbaijan. There are no Median records. The Medes spoke an Iranian language akin to old Persian, and one reads the Assyrian and Greek sources. Ruled Persia, captured Ninevah, united with Persia, became part of the Parthian kingdom. Later ruled by the Romans. Oh aren’t you comforted by these hard facts?
How do you found a country. How do you engender a people? I think I am founding something ghoulish now.
Every bit of matter—is it matter?—is unique. What one doesn’t always know is where its borders lie. But if I know the approximate borders of a spirit, speaking to it, there may be transformation: we may both be changed.
This is magic whereby I become something else and die for the moment not being a conqueror. I am a founder not a conqueror.
What do our souls expect from us in these times? That we found something, despite everything. As Dido, too, founded a city. Conquered by Rome. Conquered by posterity. But one says to any Rome, the ghouls are never conquered.
And ghouls are amassing everywhere.
In that old story Medea took out all of someone’s father’s blood (I can’t bear to say the name) and gave his father other blood, did it for him. I used mashed plants to make new blood, rejuvenate your father. Why do that, rejuvenate the father, that power, the dynasty, why on earth? Why would you believe that?
Nothing is unchangeable except for a myth—let’s change that.
Medea would never rejuvenate that father. They’re all perfectly capable of rejuvenating themselves, over and over. It’s what they do.
Her hair flying, some man said. And, Everything she did she did for him and why believe that everything, medieval writers don’t. They sing that she was abandoned having left her home and culture for him for him, they—the medievals—don’t believe she killed her chil
dren. Or the others.
No one really believes in her power, I assure you. She is only allowed it as an adjunct to her passion. She can’t just have it. No woman is as yet allowed that.
It is a different door, it only has the frame of it, walk through. You are walking through to a very different culture.
It feels like I’ve been here before. No, been here awhile.
Somehow the light here is dreadful. I still don’t know if it’s light. This is surely another culture.
This is a culture where they don’t have much light. At least not in Dead. They are in Dead but sometimes refer to Day; in Day would be found so-called light and the usual colors, but the spectrum isn’t brilliant in Dead. Except for red; they do use that concept in Dead. Is this going too fast for you? You may want me to keep talking about Medea; I have to keep being myself; I don’t know where I’m going, but I do know where I’ve gone. I’m here in Dead. Where else would ghouls be? And there has to be red, for blood.
I am a ghoul because I’ve gone on for too long, been revived too many times.
I don’t want to be here, in this history, as I can’t stop believing it now. It’s becoming one of my documents and would be whatever I said, everything I’ve said that’s disappeared or been ripped up is one. When I face Judgment, she has the whole transcript, the weight of my heart. I’ve never done a thing but I’ve said so much that I’m words, heart is words and there’s nothing else to judge me by. Judgment is a word—she knows this, I can’t stop this failure from happening, it just gets truer and truer whatever I say. That’s the culture I’ve entered, always entered. Whatever you say is true in that moment, no lies except for everything, and a consent to go on. Leave me and go on lying, Judgment said.
This world is as convincing as the last lies everyone believed. It’s as convincing as Day.
In Dead I’m allowed to believe what I please. In contradistinction to Day’s lies there are the silver-red fabrications of Dead. Scary I the ghoul. I need to eat a blood-sac tonight in order to continue, as Judgment said I could. Haven’t I told you about her? Or that this is a book of crime? Everything I write down will become entangled in these lies. What else would you believe? You walked through the door too.
This is the part about the blood-sac. I don’t know if I want to live, but I don’t know I feel like that. Until I swallow the blood-sac and suddenly want to be alive. In Dead I am told to swallow a blood-sac in order to live; it looks like the liver of a duck. I swallow it, I go on, am even reborn. Ghouls don’t really die. That’s one of the rules of Dead.
Medea (aren’t you relieved that I’ve mentioned her again?), Medea is in Dead with me. Here she doesn’t have to live in the standard versions of her own existence. The standard myth: did Medea kill all those people? We say yes. Am I dead? You’re a ghoul. You used to be alive, now you’re almost mythic. Who killed me? For I was dead until I swallowed the blood-sac. No one killed you. Pardon me but I know otherwise; you’re deluded by the fact that I may appear as a head alone or a torso alone, you think I’m shattered art. No I’ve gone too fast again, I know. I look like pieced-together fragments of art, art history. I can’t help it. That’s just looks. Superficial.
Who would have wanted to murder me? Who would want to now? I am a maimed mythological figure—statue—alone in a motel. This is the moreor-less truth of me and I don’t mean Medea.
I am living in the Palms Motel, telling my fortune. I am living in a tawdry heap of boards called the Palms Motel.
The body was discovered before my eyes. I stood there awhile surveying the death which was mine. Why doesn’t anyone understand that I own it? My murderer doesn’t, even though I’m in pieces like this: the artifice of the Iranian-type head and the more-like-Greek torso. Also, there’s my heart there. Alongside, in Dead. The color red is around me.
So I had been murdered again. What else is new except some words? Dead is full of “again’s. How many times has it been? How can I connect with each murder? If you look at that shade of red, it becomes more intense, talking to you, making the assumption of connection: I’m your blood.
In Day even hummingbirds vibrate in unchanging colors. If you write in Day you are bound to colors. As if they were fixed. Whereas in Dead events seem sometimes to refer to the fixed, to the assumptions of Day, but you can pass through so much here so quickly, in all your bodies alive and defunct. Where else would you start to drown and suddenly be in a new body? Where else would you see the meagerness of your own expression as a corpse? Where else might you be a torso, beating at your own window?
Of course there are other colors than red in Dead, but it’s often too dark to see them. Or just too weird. In Dead you’re sometimes incomplete in presentation—hey, your body’s melting! You’re not interested in color in that situation. In Day you can’t pull away from the continuity of colors, giving you a sense of completeness: they call that time. It leads to identity.
I write from Dead and all I’m sure of is that I continue, no matter what body I’m in. I am I perceiving, even if what I perceive is, according to the rules of Day, unfixed. Life here is hard to describe, and I am always looking for other, would I have to say, language?
Medea is a ghoul who describes nature to us, or to me, truly. Because she understands magic. She belongs to Dead; Dido does too, whose doings I will also refer to. They are both founders of our human fantasy. Maat, the Egyptian, by judging me amuses me. I think nothing whatsoever of their husbands/fathers and may never name them. Unless they show up in Dead to bother us.
I’m writing this as if I were inventing it, but it keeps getting truer and truer. I the murdered in Dead have no interest now in what anyone else has written. I’m not in touch and have no intention of touching.
In Dead form changes, genre changes. The reality is that it can’t be kept track of. I watched myself be cut up. The body was discovered before my eyes. Then Dark Ray stood near my corpse. The Coroner. After that I was literally a new form.
The Indians. But I could be saying the Medes, the Etruscans, the Carthaginians, etc, except that in Day the Indians are alive. The Indians’ task in Day is to rejuvenate their cultures via gambling since Fortuna has been so unkind to them. In Dead Dido may lecture to them on Fortune or Fate, but probably not in her own language. Would it be Latin or English? What would she lecture on in Phoenician? What would they say back in their languages, so many of which have disappeared? But maybe not in Dead. In Day one is only a Theory of Man; the Indians’ languages are buried in boxes beneath the people’s casinos. In Dead everything may be alive after all.
Medea though ghoulish is magical and rests on the point of all transformation so beware: you can’t hold on near her, that’s why she is so reviled.
All the documentation of the death by poison dress would tend to make you believe in death by poison dress. The authors—Euripides, Ovid—believe in it so profoundly one accepts the event and almost doesn’t ask, Can I learn to do this too? I, myself, don’t want to kill anyone but I’m interested in how this process unfolds as I poison the pages you’re reading. I don’t want you to burn up and die like Creusa: I want you to understand I can affect your physical process by writing. I’m not contradicting what I previously said: I’m not going to touch you. My hands don’t stick out of the page; and I don’t want to make you cry. I want to demonstrate that this—the world we live in—is imagined, and transmutable in more ways than we are used to discussing.
Why kill anyone? There are much more radical things to do.
I need to write in verse for a moment
effecting a temporary change. Can you
feel it? I’d always rather write a poem.
But I’m shaky, lacking in control. The murder
makes me nervous, this talk of my own death. No,
it’s more that I’m afraid prose won’t go deep enough.
It can’t solve the murder this time; because it didn’t pose
it, the deathly situation, in the first place
&n
bsp; Poetry tells me I’m dead; prose pretends I’m not.
And yet I go on in prose.
In Dead, voices have begun to speak to me in old languages: it sounded like Latin last time. In English a man’s voice said, “The prisons are fragile.” All the prisons at this time are fragile, that is, the prisons of form. He said as well, “Move on,” but I translate that as Use the fragility for change.
Solve my murder or perhaps the murder of Creusa, you ask?
Dark Ray: I a professional suggest that Creusa’s murder was solved thousands of years ago. And I don’t believe that you’re dead. You always rejuvenate after I’ve dissected you.
I: But we don’t know that Creusa was murdered… You must learn to read more of the languages inside me, not just English. There’s something on my liver. I don’t think it’s old Iranian but rather a form of hybrid poetry, that you could decipher if anyone could. I’ve often resorted to new forms of expression; in Dead they all call to me as if neglected. Each like a ghoul, an experiential equation, alive only to remember itself. Head, torso, love, a certain shape of column of words.
Perplexing, Dark Ray says, a coroner whose job is to read the inside of my body.
If I wrote down that
there’s a lot of love in me,
Medea would pack up
and leave. You must
understand we can’t
do love, she’d say. It’s
too late. Think of me as
a dead language. (Alive!)
What of the murder?
Where’s the corpse?
From coroner’s report (inner text):
This very beautiful body, in the heart of the old language
beneath the black seams of her spirit, pockets
of Latin-like words: and baccili to be analyzed,
squirming. She is: head with feminized hair under
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 3
