outskirts #3

there, back against a frisian horse,
waiting for the Body to sieve through
my limbs

in clots & clabber, redeemed
under or the sun. green, ripe &
stillborn? it hasn't come yet

but this, my voice's pristine anticipates,
when you say answer, when-you just say a where,
it is welling, porous as it is, it yields to coat me
in my entirety: a welcome abuse out of a shared will to be only
if in each other galvanized, convulsively overlapping in

morganatic resentment, cowering to encircle
even More; & Choke & Plug, selflessly insufficient,
conditional to resignation with regal disdain
the rest & the center disavowed

without an elsewhere or a need for one, it cries unquenched
at the same time as it douses & weans
the Great Fire's flames from us, still there,
branded into an "I": survived for.

henceforth in

smuggling Brimming thresholds
in prairies, lowercased outside the nouns
until further is enough enough to

reach you beyond your Self,
kiss-chase your marrow illegible
& dent your shuddering crucible
into my throat, right
here

outskirts #2

there, back against a frisian horse,
waiting for the Body to sieve through
my limbs

in clots & clabber, redeemed
under or the sun. green, ripe &
stillborn? it hasn't come yet

but this, my voice's pristine anticipates
when you say answer when you just say a where
it is welling, porous as it is it gives in in coating me
in my entirety an abuse out of a shared will to be only
if in each other galvanized

in happy resentment, cowering to fawn
conditional to resignation with disdain
to the rest unendowed

without an elsewhere or a need for one, it cries quenching
at the same time as it douses & weans
the great fire flames from us, still there,
branded into one: survived for;

saved lowercased outside the nouns

#1

i have to forget that you learnt something else when you first saw this word. Still, you react however and that is o.k.

Poetical Metonymy

If you are a simile
are you like a metaphor?

2.
They once came together and she showed him to me. I was, as I am always, with my arms wide open and quite cold. They walked around the garden behind the old church and visited the others. I think I saw them kiss. After they left that day I did not see them for a while. She came once more. Then, he started coming more often. He looked at me as if I were to blush. And I did. With his every-other-days he made me feel as if I could move every time he came by, looking at me. I was her favorite and he knew this, until somewhere in the garden she became as still as the rest of us.

Inútil Paisagem

Dime "pra que?", Elis.

Mas pra que
Pra que tanto céu
Pra que tanto mar,
Pra que
De que serve esta onda que quebra
E o vento da tarde
De que serve a tarde
Inútil paisagem
Pode ser
Que não venhas mais
Que não voltes nunca mais
De que servem as flores que nascem
Pelo caminho
Se o meu caminho
Sozinho é nada
É nada
É nada

nourishment

as I fed from your only limbs
I taste milk and
remember you are
the mother I made
and killed dry

Esta noche

EN ESTA NOCHE, EN ESTE MUNDO

A Martha Isabel Moia

en esta noche en este mundo
las palabras del sueño de la infancia de la muerte
nunca es eso lo que uno quiere decir
la lengua natal castra
la lengua es un órgano de conocimiento
del fracaso de todo poema
castrado por su propia lengua
que es el órgano de la re-creación
del re-conocimiento
pero no el de la resurrección
de algo a modo de negación
de mi horizonte de maldoror con su perro
y nada es promesa
entre lo decible
que equivale a mentir
(todo lo que se puede decir es mentira)
el resto es silencio
sólo que el silencio no existe

no
palabras
no hacen el amor

hacen la ausencia
si digo agua ¿beberé?
si digo pan ¿comeré?

en esta noche en este mundo
extraordinario silencio el de esta noche
lo que pasa con el alma es que no se ve
lo que pasa con la mente es que no se ve
lo que pasa con el espíritu es que no se ve
¿de dónde viene esta conspiración de invisbilidades?
ninguna palabra es visible

sombras
recintos viscosos donde se oculta
la piedra de la locura
corredores negros
los he corrido todos
¡oh quédate un poco más entre nosotros!

mi persona está herida
mi primera persona del singular

escribo como quien con un cuchillo alzado en la oscuridad
escribo como estoy diciendo
la sinceridad absoluta continuaría siendo
lo imposible
¡oh quédate un poco más entre nosotros!

los deterioros de las palabras
deshabitando el palacio del lenguaje
el conocimiento entre las piernas
¿qué hiciste del don del sexo?
oh mis muertos
me los comí me atraganté
no puedo más de no poder

palabras embozadas
todo se desliza
hacia la negra licuefacción

y el perro del maldoror
en esta noche en este mundo
donde todo es posible
salvo
el poema

hablo
sabiendo que no se trata de eso
siempre no se trata de eso
oh ayúdame a escribir el poema más prescindible
el que no sirva ni para
ser inservible
ayúdame a escribir palabras
en esta noche en este mundo

The City

You said, "I will go to another land, I will go to another sea.
Another city will be found, better than this.
Every effort of mine is condemned by fate;
and my heart is -- like a corpse -- buried.
How long in this wasteland will my mind remain.
Wherever I turn my eyes, wherever I may look
I see the black ruins of my life here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and wasted."

New lands you will not find, you will not find other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam the same
streets. And you will age in the same neighborhoods;
in these same houses you will grow gray.
Always you will arrive in this city. To another land -- do not hope --
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have ruined your life here
in this little corner, you have destroyed it in the whole world.

(Konstantinos Kavafis)

Travelogue - Berkeley/San Francisco

From July 23rd to August 3rd of 2008

Orfeus´ Last Words

I needed something to write about...
so I looked back and she gave it to me.

Inland

Photo: Janina Daria Witkowski

On Dancing

Sometimes more than often
there isn't much one can do other
than dance for one's life

Our Daily Barthes

The code is a . . . mirage of structures; we know only its departures and returns; the units which have resulted from it (those we inventory) are themselves, always, ventures out of the text, the mark [or] sign of a virtual digression toward the remainder of a catalogue; they are so many fragments of something that has always been already seen, done, experienced; the code is the wake of that already.

-Roland Barthes

Memory Map

Always already is the legend
That eggs to ignore its own scaffolding
Of adverbs of manner,
Place, certainty and lack thereof thereafter,
Of degree and of Time, always already is

My tether, this then future
its shape transit shaped,
falls from the when it was made
Ensconced in the names
On shift; often rarely chosen
In the scarcity of a lifespan’s souvenirs

(-"I've been...")

Here after there for
Before

("the current resident")

Soon to celebrate the sacrifice
Of tomorrow in service
Of Yesterday’s today

Always already; The void and its wake:
an evicted address not so forgotten
as to be for giving never,
the lesser, that life thereafter not seen not
withstanding...

Subtracting One
another other to be
having been

survived for.

The road and the route

True gift

you will never truly understand a person until you understand her lies

-Richard L. Pryll Jr.

Birthday confessions

Afterall, I was born in a basement.

Two maps

Peacetime map
about behind from on toward above below in on top of under across beneath in front of onto underneath after beside inside out of until against between instead of outside of up along by into over upon among down like past with you around during near since within me at except of through without before for off to

Wartime map
about behind from on toward above below in on top of under across beneath in front of onto underneath after beside inside out of until against between instead of outside of me up along by into over upon among down like past with around during near since within at except of through without you before for off to

Thanks. For pardoning my belated

…one cannot apologize for anything essential…
-Hermann Hesse

While living in X, as soon as I had learned a few ways to and reasons for saying thanks in this my new place, I was encountered with some peculiar contexts in which gratitude or its haunt was called upon. I remember. I was finished with work for that then day at my new job, when a woman that happened to be also working that evening there with me said –“Thanks for the day”; in such a way as a good-bye, almost as if “day” requested an uppercase “d”. All I could come up with in my translating mind was –“Likewise”. It was the tomorrow of my present yesterdays and I kept sporadically hearing this phrase at the end of days there after; like new words tend to do. And I knew that when gratitude meets custom there might be a lot left to be desired in the gesture, but still, I enjoyed the voicings I felt came from both language’s forebears and the acceptance thereof in service of more meaning; in tone and delivery perhaps. Now knowing the natural end of most things I came upon another thank. As it appeared, when more than one spend time together, afterwards when seeing each other again wherever that may be, the following phrase (roughly my translation) is employed: -Thanks for the last (time). I thought of a world where a second tryst would be nearer to a miracle than the cue for a quotidian expression. That “last” sounded so fatal to me; perhaps in this their past, the awareness of the cherished and unrepeatable was somehow more acutely accented by this little ritual. The Time came to leave with me. And I left in a rush, probably angry at the noun but blaming the sentence that punctuated me here. And when I left X out a frozen window pane, I realized I had forgotten to say thanks. Thanks for the day it had left me with. It was too late, X was offended (possibly beyond my repair) and with such an essential reason as ingratitude, I cannot rebuke. On one particular day in the middle of my stay in X's capitalized town, I once truly thanked a man for his generosity, and he did not say “you’re welcome” nor “it was nothing”. He said, as if forgiving the common place –“Thank you” emphasizing the “you” just so it did not sound the same as mine but making it clear that it was the best and only thing to say; like a mirror’s answer. I never saw him or his native X again. When and if I do I will know just what to say before and after my apologies.

"ahí"

...al menos se le concede que estuvo
porque la omnipresencia del ausente
solo se da cuando fue presente
su presencia se volvió ausencia
cuando devino a la eternidad...
-Superaquello

The city is elsewhere today.

Gifting (The Boon)

Better no prayer | than too big an offering,
By thy getting measure thy gift;
Better is none | than too big a sacrifice,
. . . . . . . . . .

-Hávamal, 146

There is no one without lacking; wherein

There is too much of Always’ apostrophe,

Often more than Never; one, maybe with any

Is expected to come

With no choice but

To be had;

Guilt’s guest of guests

Once again in there

Anew in need and in thrift,

Of the host only out-of-doors, threshheld

Alone at home bearing invitations

To be giving

Back

don't if yes

reciprocated and unattended
growing indefinitely
if it were the chance to be
so much more than
the hypothesis behind
a law so anecdotal
it is doubted
by the exceptions that rule
the aim of being anything
more than its devices
like a firework or a story
in a story read over the phone
a tunnel
painted in the heaviest ink
possible like a law so said
and so assumed that passes
for a "yes"; the "yes"
that closes the condition
into a surrender and its
recurrent predisposition
to accept the mystery that follows
to be followed after and behind the name
that happens to be there hiding illiteracy;
perhaps the recognition of shared solitude
and the admiration for another's way to fold pain
however neatly into this nakedness

-"...again at the same time as..."

Truth's truth is
not without
fiction being

the cease fire of
deceased words
that in between
you and I we had

coming
in order of
redisappearance
such a cast in within
little crutches quoted

is bound to play
as hinges will on
a hotter day

the same of
which we've
become starring
the relentless role
of shadows shingled and
besieged by buttons of

orphaned corners of

the eyelets

looking for another
the other verb that "to look" is not
for an epaulet uncharted in its wait
which has gone around the world
the times that these then words
will have lost (as they usually do) without gain
without you
estranged

Again at the same time as you read this sentence. I am
here only in the measure of my absence and your rereading;
so strong. Every again

on this somewhat
silver platter I am at
wait for the war
on handicapped cue

for example:
a generous thief
only steals in the past
gives in the present
and misses the future
as the word mouthed
now is?

once
you read me
my line out-loud
you will have already said(:)
yours irrevocably; -"yours
i-rre-vo-ca-bly"

mine;
our "mine"
and so much more

Decoyer

I am cold
and from a
distance I might
look decorating
the unavoidable
in your education
the explicits that will kill
you any moment now
as long as you let go with
a report followed by a thud
or some another
mournful onomatopoeia

your eye is breaking
your (The) fall
for falling's sake
this is the only thing I am allowed to see and complete.

you venture calling
me by a name so warm
reused and cauterized
but now we will be just as cold
but with pretext
with inside elsewhere
me and you once
one mannequin at a time
we start to talk

GONE

Whenever I already left for
With the same weight I
must've had coming
all pendulum like

I follow a brass section
making its shift out of the ceiling
of my mouth while standing
on the Concomitant Kick Drum

I'm alone and in good company
I'm going there
I am-go-ing-there
like a seasoned secret
self propelled
and somewhat Motionless
I grow

I grow, grow, grow
until I'm back
in view of
my redeparture

"there"

-A traitor's map.*



* "She knew that language is only a map of man’s thoughts, feelings, and memories . . . “Like all maps,” she thought, “language is a picture of what is to be represented but reduced hundreds of thousands of times. A vastly miniaturized picture of human feelings, thoughts, and memories. On that map seas are not salt, rivers do not flow, mountains are flat, and snow is not cold. Instead of hurricanes and storms only a tiny cluster of winds is drawn . . .”

-Milorad Pavic

Gluggi

The first of mine is

Staying in outside

I shiver the windows higher

Roofing their heads under my throat

I hear a name or a lie lapping

Around me like peninsula

I fashion your frame with my eyelids

Knowing you’re only another name for

Window weather

THULE

Almost always never again

Inasmuch as nevertheless

I never loved you so

As when you said goodbye

Coasting the distance between

Your first, second and third

Person

I came to a full stop.