nods.
I had cut my wrist
cooking
I had cut it in five
places
Fucked up trying to
cook
only to cook.
This cut is too deep so
I’m crying
Do you know this feeling?
‘Don’t you have ordinary
feelings?’
We are locating other
feelings—all the
unrecorded ones—and
building this city of them.
For we are each singular
cadavers; never were what
was said of us.
DO YOU HEAR ME?
All the assassins of
my power
were mobilized that day—
they wanted the beauty
of the blood that
she lay dead in, didn’t they?
If not, why did they
cause it
the war in her home town?
There is a lovely hissing
when you speak.
My aggravated pimp
would never have let me
talk to you
in life, but now that
I’m here, he
can’t beat me. The rules
are different.
Do you have a sex when
you’re dead?
But I’m a ghoul, she said
She was eating in front of
the poster
of her eating. She was
gnawing the
meat from the knucklebones
for my gris-gris
my most precious gris-gris.
WOMAN IN FRONT OF POSTER OF HERSELF
Said I shouldn’t.
Fingering me.
Everything I did.
A litter of chewed knucklebones
I’ve spread them out over the
rectangular floor as regularly as
I can; so I can account for them.
Her hands are crossed over
her breasts and each holds
a feather; her face has no features
Have I come to beg
What do I wish—to be
judged?
Is it an accumulation
of what I’ve said, that
counts, that I’m counting
is it all alphabet and abacus
everything rhymed?
You still don’t have a face.
Suddenly she has the face of a
cat.
No that’s a different
goddess.
I tell you this
bloodthirsty
jaguar. . .
I haven’t any idea what my word is, I
mean fault. Is it a word or an act. The
whole thrill is ripping me apart
Inside these
words there’s nothing but a pumping
bloodsoaked. . .
but clearly, everything I said, did,
was a long shot
We didn’t hear a word
What have you ever heard?
Now I’m here—black-caped in a
chair. Animal staring at me
I sink into your disaffected
ambiance to name.
What emotional
charges
have been laid on me from
earliest times
and my own
earliest
resulting in the bone strewn carpet
I had to grow the dice
of accounting to your love; for
you made me speak to you
lovingly; or did I do that naturally
oh just, bloodthirsty face
who doesn’t have to understand.
I don’t know who I’m speaking to
is pushing me
Judgment maybe it’s when being
fragile I
hallucinate you best
I don’t want to use my name!
“Where I was born we girls ran
free. and named ourselves,”
Justice says.
She may kill me,
it depends on whether she’s hungry
MILLIONS OF US
Purportedly a chain of civilians, soldiers, voices lice they were called. It is sometimes sufficient to beg Lice creeping over one, kill them with a chemical; then there are lice-ghosts everywhere. Glints of pearly nails. The light of my beloved will keep me from noticing. Trailer to keep her in; he asked me if I knew her ‘auction name.’ Walked over the scorch; what are values when there’s nothing here? The wing of a dead soul grows into all the lace you see through, foreigner, lice-ridden article of divestment. Splendid vices pouring outcomes over the eager cash flow promotions. So many of the dead came to me that their transparencies covered my visage, I’m too near you. Don’t you want to see? We came from faraway camps, forsaking the human because it broke our bodies into pieces for the torturer’s pet, who propositions you. There is always a slant on it. The trees must go down; or light affects your eyes badly. We pleaded for an adjustment, before we’d recognizably died. You told me you were a heart, but you were guarding a tower. You said you were a failure, but you helped destroy us. Wings all over me, stuck to my skin, there’s no point to it why are you here when there’s nothing? We just don’t believe it.
Now not no never you. I wasn’t you. You have to talk to me my name is irretrievable. No one letting you go because you are prized for not existing except as a body, now not. No I don’t exist, alighting and ghoulishly begging you for a drop of your blood, a morsel of your flesh. Yes take some of me, though there are so many others with flesh. But they’re too rich to give. I know they will never let you in, you beautiful kids who haunt the corridors extending through the invisible world, so you can find your way. So you can see past the smoke of disastrous fear acting out of dreams: it creeps everywhere. See how it took them over, for they had no mind to stand against any fantasy the instigators chose. Had no minds at all. When I was little, no one told me I’d have to suffer. Who can be a child? And the ghoul patiently explains how the wing of a word can extend till the barrier is made, so they can’t see us. If you say beauty, that will be ignored, and we can hide. It was his name a long time ago, before the auctions began. Her face then was large and younger. She can be lice or ghoul. I want that, I don’t want action. But I will have to live off bits of you.
The new definition of witch is one who lets them eat you, if they have to. Because you keep regenerating. Oh that’s such an oldy, and all that flying. Sometimes they do—the man who showed me a few things sits all day. The teaching is to let them come as far as inside you even, empty enough; I can hear them and render affection Why, if there’s nothing? Is this nothing? But you are destroyed We shake all the time. You remind me of someone else I knew. The wing is inscribed, for involute. Not to beg in the offering of primal services, we have come here. No one would let us tell anything but our bodily humiliations; had to do differently, not for redemption, because we are more than redemption. I am my maker. The shape formed by the bits of mirror glued on is unimportant. They’re inside my chest and stomach, and they glitter in there. Then if light disattaches, comes up to be spoken, you can see and you can hear. This is true because each of you has this too. Has all the bright pieces inside: there was nothing else left to be. Then I say it, like these pages, or how they would love me for hosting them. The earliest people feared them, and subsequent ones deny the dead. Why would I be afraid of all the people dead and martyred? I thought you were talking about words. You knew I wasn’t.
Dido who had to be delivered from the wrong story: I want you to know I’m no longer left over. What about our library, nothing good left there? I want to read the fashion of when you were old a long time ago. Gothic roses in the type; I’m an ancient Had read every the book of before they arrested me. I had crossed the black plain, I had held tears it was abrupt to be walked in a herd pushing us, wherever we went to be s
hot, or executed in the earlier style. It is a timeless death placed next to the most beat-up books. Only a book can love me now. We’re reading without real eyes; I’ve read everything too, or in the tradition of telling it is repeated within you what we did. We must have been trying to make something as we are now, but why. You have the ear for it. The light wants you to reply, asking if a shore had been attained or if the language were Dutch or Swahili I didn’t know. It is how you raised the ground, like raising a child every word that comes out of my mouth torn I’m responsible to The wind foul pieces here tries to turn me from tenderness, the way they killed us in the center of the city, that night. The bodies floated in the river while I looked for other souls and saw my face water damaged a new texture and how can I see? Potential returning within its white petals and central whorl.
He couldn’t believe someone would hate and betray. I told him, but he refused to believe it; then I left the room. This lace has to be made. Treason said the ghoul that peculiar invention betrayal, how primal was that? In Hesiod after the light, after chaos and lover. Said the armless woman, said the one cut open, said the smallpoxed the strewn children their bodies woven into the page so I could find what they thought, even if babies only cry. Those are the bodies when I was no longer alive but uplifted butterfly of lace with an empty length to bifurcate my symmetry. No I don’t believe the lies of the live. I am a spot of light in order to find out, hanging on because it wasn’t revealed in death. I know what happened to me, she said; bleeding I lay there unblessed. Do I want a blessing now, or a god to rebuild me? We have gone beyond god or new lives, or death, or tribes. I am working on this lace light at present; I accept the drop of sacrificial blood to propitiate me. One piece of you at a time is all I need. I am letting you feed, I say, because I know this has always been. You’ve been telling me for years We needed you, if no one else did. We have this project to change our silence into the beautiful city of a voice.
ALONG A SPECTRAL TRAIL
I am speaking to know the
weight
of a passion
Whose voice
Its
Can I identify
the worth of my
passions?
I hurt you, you hurt me
wasn’t nothing but a
lace argument
who’d care?
wasn’t like a whole field
of bodies.
Whose passion did they
satisfy dead?
Not even evolved past the
fetal stage.
why fucking dress it up
I can identify you by
your blood.
Isn’t that excellent
Or a little spit.
That’s wonderful
You’ll find out who I
really am
throw me some raw meat
maybe you’ll make love
to me honey
it’s the luck of the word
though:
what’s your name
who’s your daddy
I know what I do
I compel you to confront the
force of my words
to carry it wherever you walk
It’s the only way I can have
something.
Do you need something
Or else a woman has nothing.
Men have become addicted to
spying on fetuses, lodged in a tank,
through special glasses which give
them and the fetuses black bead eyes.
The men—scientists—keep trying not
to do it again, and then do. There
is a tag sentence, for the tank of fetuses,
taken from computer usage: “This is
only the range of experience.”
Evolution
took
the passway to the
side
signifying violence
Stuck in being
smart enough
to have a calculator for
the Holocaust.
Evolved into the computer.
“This is only the range of
experience.”
I found the deer’s body; had I
killed it?
I had to eat, the first time
I killed it.
I stabbed the lovely animal
myself. The deer
sang, ‘When the mass of the
moment is opposite, love
lies back along a
spectral trail.’
We need for all of you to
be more beautiful.
We’re asking for that
is that a lot
because I can’t sew this
if you’re just still ugly.
Pariah pattern lace I like.
He detested the canker I
couldn’t help
conscripted particles
they herd us into
idea. It’s an awful bad arrangement
You can sing of it. Your lips took
place once
My lips took place
once.
Take place now
NO TO ANGEL
I started to dream awake
It was beautiful—as I
began
to chant an old poem
on the edge
of dream
Slip past the border. I have
always been
this poet.
Night
gold
calling me to know
multiples of now.
To hurt the political
Or would you
Come off the
chair sir. Ask the chairman
to come off . . .
You have gone past your
dead lover’s marker.
He’ll
stay same
who’s sane (same old
joke—
ancient Baghdadian pa) . . .
Skimming over dreams.
Walking the way
long way to go
. . . a lot of things
I badly wanted not to be
like.
There was an angel I didn’t
care for . . .
have never
trusted angels.
I found one of her white
cylindrical hairs
dyed black
finally knew
she wasn’t relevant.
Songs and chants by the
beauty-making
ghouls
to us is given a drop of
your live beauty, to
feed us, who are the poetry.
I remember he caught a pigeon
and stuck it for a few drops of
blood. To sprinkle on the
ground, there in that dream.
It was
in another lifetime.
As beautiful as
a raven, a fire, a
fawn
the word ‘treason’ takes
credit for achieving us.
We have betrayed all your
religions
in order to
be alive, after our deaths, in
this space
it is lace counter to scheme.
The first thing, in the
beginning, was the lie.
The motel for
making sense
is where I
go.
Everyone busy with dead
hands/voices/senses
Dead sense swells.
Whatever you want that
isn’t a thing,
you can have.
No god. that’s what I want.
Cloister of pearlized shafts
(arrow luster)
amid a lighter green.
Figment
puts hand center of my chest
to say, ‘there is a formal
condition to
your body. Aren’t figment.’
Clustering moments,
But you know when a
moment
is
Seeing it through.
IN MOTEL/HANGAR/MOCK HOUSE
You,
trying to keep your pieces
in place.
You believe in your pieces
as
pieces;
but you want to stay in
control
theorizing about them
without falling to pieces.
It doesn’t matter,
asshole, doesn’t
matter.
You can’t lose you, you’ll never
You are
an eye, an asshole.
The most violently founded
of us
weeping to make shelter
for
himself. in the center
of the convulsion
there.
You asshole,
cut-glass eye.
If you touch yourself
right now you’ll
Songs and Stories of the Ghouls Page 12
