i.
“You made me love myself”
I say
though not to you
because you’re never here
to hear my words.
I store it instead
in the ossuary for words,
for my words to you,
for the ones that never grew
strong enough like the bones they should have been
to give a skeletal rendition
to this thing we call –
or rather that I call –
us.
ii.
I perpetuate this perfunctory business
of making these words for you,
out of air and flecks of sunshine
that float around my room in bits of solar radiation,
because I need to extract these words
through the slats of my ribs,
and have no choice
but to curve my existence
along the circumference of your
gravitational tug.
iii.
I store these words on paper,
file them away in neat rolls
(rolled because the only place I have
to store them is a Payless shoebox).
They coil in fetal positions;
words half-baked, premature,
and wrong
in some fundamental way,
because I realize that the truth of it is
I have never actually written
a love letter –
to you or anyone else –
and I then become obsessed with understanding how.
iv.
It makes no sense to me
to deconstruct along the feral cracks
of feeling
to quote platitudes exaggerated
to a cosmic scale
while in the meantime
our circumstellar selves rotate
around the star of our burning immediacy.
There is no way to trap that emphatic necessity for nowness
itching raw red skin
beneath which cells fight the fever infecting humanity
because it turns out we were never
supposed to feel this way.
v.
Imbued with biology for feeling sensations
but not for feeling
and even then the feel is obsessive in its need
and gored by the horn of some mythological beast
leaking roses and moonlight from the wound.
How to transfer, then, that acquisition
of a caught ephemeral thing
to paper with the tired keys
of a punch-drunk typewriter.
vi.
I try and bind that feeling to my fingers
so that the only way that it can escape is
through the ends of the mechanized alphabet letters
where it is pinned, pressed, stained
against the inked ribbon
to leave its mark forever
before it leaves to mutate
and infect again
and scoff at all the clever antibodies that finally allowed
for an army of white blood to conquer,
biding their time before they wash said blood red again
with blushes and overflowing arteries
and the rush of orgasm.
vii.
No, the feeling flies,
unbound, never quite managing
to be spoken of with truth, just platitudes
from amourous tongue lips and fingertips
and breaths spoken into displaced pillowcases
in the sleepy haze
of the thumping pulse of release.
These moments are real,
but they are moments
and anyone who thinks that moments justify truths
has to learn that reality cannot rest on abstraction
from a time that can never be preserved
or even proven.
viii.
I sit in front of my yellow paper
curled into the protective lip of my typewriter
and I imagine it as being the thing to expel my words
a separate being from myself
speaking these words
that aren’t actually
- I swear they’re not -
my own.
A mechanical scapegoat
that gives my soul absolution
from this writing, this art that I can’t help but which fires
down my bloodstream like arrows or cannons shot from embrasures
to break down the flesh of my body from the inside out
with these words
all these words
that die before they reach their destination
because I destroy them even as I create them:
filicidal desperation
to save me from your eyes
your bitter twisted flash of judgment
knocking in my teeth as I smile
as if you’d smashed in the true source from which my words had come
spuming madness in the form of a carefully crafted alphabet,
along the paragraphed lines that aren’t love letters
but rather the breakdown of their inherent theory
as if they were a science
and I their pitiable moon-bleached lab technician
growing specimens in agar
and prodding the Petri dishes for authentic poetry
finding only the petulant bacteria
and mould that grows on disused emotion
and stagnant ossuaries of words.
ix.
My crumbling carpal bones find themselves
failing to find what it is they strive to pry from my mind
since they can’t even pinpoint if it exists
and all the while trying to understand the form of love letters
and their purpose
because in the end,
I decide, and so do they,
love letters don’t make anyone happy,
but rather entomb a feeling that should never be contaminated
with perpetuity.
5 comments:
Marta! This isn't a real comment, I just wanted to say that I will try to comment lengthily and smartly on this, but it'll take a while. I need to reread this and think about it, but I will comment. I just wanted you to know I was working on it! More to come...
Marta,
This poem was fascinating and enthralling and incredibly well done, because it manipulated me as a reader. I was filled with expectations and assumptions as I began reading, and these were then warped, played upon, dismissed... Of course, it is a poem about poetry and writing itself, yet it pretends to be otherwise, which is the best kind of writing, in my opinion.
Initially, I thought, this is too wordy. But then, of course, that's the point. It's a poem about words, and so it should be at times, wordy. Furthermore, it ties back to this fascinating concept of an ossuary for words. I imagine stacks and stacks of them, all dead and dusty. Beautiful. It works well, this concept, because you don't tell the reader too much about it, you point towards it, offer it tentatively, let us ponder upon it if we want to.
Naturally, initially I also thought it was a love poem, which struck me as unusual coming from you (I wonder why!). But it is, of course, really a poem about writing, about communicating, about putting words on things... And not just in the self-conscious sense of writing poetry, but in interpersonal communication — putting words to emotions. In this, your poem succeeds magnificently.
I like how the bones become a recurring motif: the carpal bones, the skeletal rendition, the ribs... Words are the skeleton of writing, the thing with which you write, yet it's also frail (the crumbling carpal bones). I would have expected more consistency with this theme, however. It starts strong, and gets picked up at the end, but meanwhile everything gets more biological: the blood cells, antibodies, pulse, bacteria, the rush of orgasm described so physiologically with the arteries... Is it an attempt to "flesh out" the story of these two lovers? Perhaps it's a way of explaining their relationship on biological terms, a male and a female human mating, this concept of getting to the core of things... It mostly confused me, I found the imagery clashing.
The thing that I found clashed the most, however, was the references to "solar radiation", "gravitational tug", "circumstellar selves"... It makes everything too big, too cosmic. That's probably what you wanted — to have this relationship expressed from the minute to the infinite, but for me that's trying to encompass too many things. Dealing with macrocosms and microcosms is fine, but in this case you were headed more for a scientific thematic, and that would be trying to talk about too many sciences. My advice would be to concentrate on one science, or one branch of science...
The final paragraph is great. It's perfect. It undermines everything that was written before, and yet it makes it all so clear, explains the doubts and confusion. And you're right, of course, love letters are fucking ridiculous — they're more about celebrating yourself than celebrating the one you're writing it to.
I don't know if any of this make sense of is actually helpful. I didn't actually refer to specific lines and things for editing, I'm sorry about that... You've created something rather complex — I feel like it needs to be worked on as a whole, as opposed to bit by bit, because if you cut something off somewhere it might destroy an effect that blooms later on, if you see what I mean. Good luck!
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