bloodstream

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”   ― Rainer Maria Rilke

I am still completely unaware of my blood type. I could be walking around with vowels or consonants; how much does it matter? We trace ghosts with the palm of our tongue and drip excess taste buds onto street corners that later get stomped into the concrete. There are more questions than there are answers, so I crush my calluses into each upturned inquiry. Some wonderings are better left unsolved. To live everything is to breathe into each moment. Tomorrow matters much less than today. Here is far more interesting than two weeks ago. And when you find yourself building stories with some stranger, remind yourself that none of us really are visitors anymore. We’ve all just been waiting for more doors to open and the magic of curious humans to walk on in.

“like the bone of some prehistoric animal on the beach”

“‘Sometimes I have this dream,’ the young man in the wheelchair said. His voice had a strange echo to it, as if it were rising up from the bottom of a cavernous hole. ‘There’s a sharp knife stabbed into the soft part of my head, where the memories lie. It’s stuck deep down inside. It doesn’t hurt or weigh me down– it’s just stuck there. And I’m standing off to one side, looking at this like it’s happening to someone else. I want someone to pull the knife out, but no one knows it’s stuck inside my head. I think about plucking it out myself, but I can’t reach my hands inside my head. It’s the strangest thing. I can stab myself, but I can’t reach the knife to pull it out. And then everything starts to disappear. I start to fade away, too. Only, the knife is always there– the the very end. Like the bone of some prehistoric animal on the beach. That’s the kind of dream I have,’ he said.” 

—-Haruki Murakami (from The Hunting Knife in Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman)

 

There is something less threatening when it repeats. When it echoes pink from its blade. When Warhol calls it art and not weaponry. Cast iron can replace analyst for hippocampus sharpener. Where does this persistence derive. Chins carry the most tremble and they house dreams as well as meals for teeth. There is a cherry tree on left hip and gang of macintosh on the right. Blood is less threatening when metaphor’d into fruit montages. What separates memory from me or memo or rome of nucleus. Literature. Long distance love affair with book musk and October audit. Instrumental collapse. Awake.

how to seek asylum from the clots in which we are made from

Dear Kazim,

Several years ago, I dripped some of my cells onto a manuscript of poetry for a class I was taking called ‘The Long Poem’ . The title of the collection, on blood and the tantrums of memory, traced several disordered blocks of thought that gathered from the language of blood’s memory. It didn’t feel like a choice when I cut open my arm again in order to drip my body’s paint onto the cover. I marveled at how dark my cells were and how they splattered into various shapes like maraschino moons.  My lover at that time didn’t understand why I would harm myself in this way. I tried to explain that these poems derived from my body, so why shouldn’t I honor these pages with the freed plasma from within.

Kazim, you wanted to know what lives between the inhale and exhale. I’d like to answer you that I think it may be love. Or I think it might be strength. No, it must be hunger. We are vehicles; we are animals; we are mechanisms for history. We are meant to repeat the patterns of breath control in order to make room for translation. So we translate and we reconfigure and we analyze and we grow.

This earth is one giant waiting room, Kazim! We take our tickets and wait in and out of patience. We begin as strangers, then remove our clothes and climb inside each other’s wombs and crevices in order to understand our selves better. I am finding myself through these humans I find shelter in. They remind me that these poems are breathing for me and through me and with me. I just want it to be my turn, Kazim. But…as I wait, I find that the adventures continue. If I left, I would never have met your words, nor the human who introduced me to them.

The clots unsnarl. I drip my cells onto each city block. I search out my next sanctuary and poem my through each nanosecond I breathe in.

 

 

beyond the view of what can be swallowed

There is too much to take in right now, so you must remove some things. Who needs both lungs. The air breathes against you enough to make some room in body. Tree slopes toward shoulder and itches hip, which is exposed because clothes can be alarming and nudity is where you began. Some of these teeth can go. Remember remember remember when you pulled some out that day because loose means lucky available and ready. Sometimes a tiny twist is enough to exit away some roots. You are being selfish. You don’t need all that skin. Cut some away and lay it over water—a raft for the birds too tired for heights. There are some bones that exist for breaking. Brake those off like shared fortune. Wrapped around the skeleton are poems. Read them out loud. Let them go too. Give away blood to the highest bidder, even if all you get is twenty dollars, some eye rolls and an encore. Someone has taken your cells home for the night. Be grateful they have air-conditioning and a question-marked tongue. Peel off layers of words—weight of water-logged driftwood.  How many hers do you still love. There are two hims now. Here is a handkerchief to wash the soot away. Stay far enough from the flames of this bonfire because sparks are promiscuous and looking to take you too.

 

how to perform without performing

Sometimes you need to fall against concrete and feel a little blood eek out of a knuckle to let the audience know you are about to say something.

Sometimes you need to speak out a word one hundred times, articulating its rhythm differently with each exhale, pace as though that step is erasing the one before it to let the audience know something is about to happen.

First, a memory.

*

I am audience in a sea of audience. Human with shaved skin from scalp to toes, pushes out an operatic gasp of moments, which ends in the auctioning off of this Human’s blood. Body sits in upholstered chair with a needle lunged beneath skin. Audience watches as blood gathers into a syringe. There is silence. Cough. Cell phone heart beat. Cough. Sneeze. Silence still. Fidget. Cough. Whisper. When enough blood exits and gathers, Human walks closer to the audience and breaks the wall between us all. For over an hour this Human talks through us. Now, at us. The bidding begins at $5.

But be aware, blurted Hairless Blood-lost Human. In Europe, someone paid two hundred dollars for this plasma.

Americans have less or they want more for less or or or but someone left that night with forty dollars missing from his pocket and a vial of blood.

*

Last night, Poets gathered. Many who first met in a small mountain town in Colorado where meditation is encouraged and flags wave and bowing replaces hand shakes and the chai is like liquid crack and and and

Last night, a man handed out index cards. Tasks for each Poet. And one by one, these Poets performed without performing.

Microphones are really just skinny radios playing out the songs and scratched up sonnets from our heads, leaked out of lipsticked mouths and chapped mouths and scholarly mouths. Repeat a word and see what happens when you remove a syllable or chant out its antonym. Cover body with lost poems, left by another, wallpapering the ground. Nudity is not always necessary to reveal the bare. Look closely at the furrows of a forehead; they reveal far more than tits can.

*

So I am learning a new instrument called tambourine purchased for three dollars at Brooklyn stoop sale. And I allow it to gather up the shake in my body. And there is no such thing as a stage when audience gathers from every direction and sometimes schedules and silences need to be interrupted by the musical accompaniment of a typewriter or holiday-themed harmony.

What do you mean you are a performance artist? How do you perform art?

To perform without performing is to connect with the blur/ the unsketch’d/ the disarray of ideas in your head. Sometimes poems can be silent and all you need to do is act out the chaos that hid in each stanza. So this time I did not need my paper. And this time I followed the trance of emotions inside me. And this time I felt even further that this is what it means to be alive.

replace leftovers with newovers

a collaged cut-up:

A name inside the book: I had forgotten I could hang onto the hook curled into its beginning. Just dangle. (Her) love just dangles. When upside down, blood spells out solutions.

*

It is only upon closer inspection that one notices there are no teeth in her smile. So her face collapses like that building. So her cheeks have nowhere else to go but inward. So her chin hides beneath her nose, which collects wrinkles like childhood secrets

*

If one lifts one’s skirt, it is to show one’s memory. I keep my calendars between my legs. There is a holiday behind my knee and you may find a semi-molded mammal beneath all that hair. Don’t you want to ask what that lump is? Don’t you want to know why I must call it something else to survive its history?

*

Embodying both the earth and the violence of its everyday breathing pattern. It’s arms are floatation devices. When the earth coughs out catastrophe, be closest to its palms; they will save.

*

There are no women who carry my blood. Each one has left due to diagnosis, border patrol, madness, sexual deviance, long-distance, diet, fatigue, loss of appetite, loss of sexual drive, disgust, disappointment, distrust…(or are these just the symptoms?)

————–
*well, aren’t these all just symptoms?

“my uterus is in love with yours”

how to love bloat/ pink creased stain/ rorschach
interpretation of womanhood/ mash
pain against sex act/ what it means to bleed art/
her body is a museum
of modern expressionism

On a Sunday evening when Autumn arrives in leaf exhales and wind-blown winces, a uterus discharges an outburst. There is pain far deeper than knuckle crack or papercut or chosen bout of starvation. There is a shift of weight as stained sheet gathers beneath distended body. “How about some hot cocoa? Shortbread?” There is a monster of pain pulling ribs away from each other. An invisible hammer lunges toward each vertebrae. Hair is no longer curled or red; it is gathered by ghosts and torn away from rooted home. Boil water and funnel into bottle in the shape of plastic kidney. Press against belly. Burn away the waft of agony. There is wisdom in blood dripping into silicone menstrual cup suctioned between legs. There is a bully hidden inside the drips which drop onto grey lace underwear staining away its sex quotient.

that time.

There was that first encounter with a honeysuckle. Beyond my backyard in small suburban New Jersey. My appetite was choosier then, yet when she told me it was edible, I let my tongue extend through my parted lips, and dig at its yellow powder. I really wanted it to taste like honey like sweetness like strawberry pie interrupted with brown sugar. Instead, it was more like a subtle whisper of nothingness. She smiled at me with painted mouth, dyed from the golden dust. I wanted to kiss her then because that is what friends do. They kiss each other. They compare hip size and knock all their teeth together to create a thunderstorm of bruising. The only thing I kissed that day was the flower.

There was that time a severed tree pressed its anger into me. Lunch was on its way toward completion on deserted patch of earth where water grew nearby. I tripped into its splintered curve and felt my blood awaken and pour out. There was that woman who rescued my fear of injury; she taught me about fascia. Held me as I limped. There is something about having skin tear that makes you want to marry another.

the behavior of memory

I am searching for a break in the sky, some kind of knotted root with a long extension that I can grab onto. And although I am afraid of heights, I think I’m ready to be pulled up into the atmosphere and just dangle for awhile.

Here is the thing about memory. It arrives like a phone call.
Sometimes we remain too long and we run out of things to say or explain.
Sometimes the connection is so bad, you have no idea who is calling.
Sometimes, it is just a wrong number.

Here is what I remember:
There was a kiss between a pair of lips from New Jersey and ones who have lived in too many places to construct a formal mailbox. The rain was strong, though not enough to keep the drag queens and hustlers away from their favorite stomping ground. You pressed a ring onto a finger that never felt that kind of weight before. We walked several blocks to Greece and savored their cuisine. There was a zipper sewed into the sky that day, and some rebellious punk got hold of its end and unhinged the metal teeth. Cue: monsoon.

Here is what I remember:
Someone somewhere once told me that to remove the itch from mosquito bites, take finger with prominent nail, criss cross indentation into welt and this imprint will heal the discomfort. As I’ve gotten older, the bites have become bigger, louder, redder, and unlike most friends and lovers, they tend to stick around. My pale skin has been replaced by these violations. How much blood have they removed and am I better for it? Perhaps mosquitoes are meant to take some of our cells away to prohibit the overflow bubbling up in our bodies.

Here is what I remember:
A pounding thrust of body climbing up staircase with slurred tongue and teeth replaced by fumbling pills. I am going to workshop this memory and add in a crash of ambulance into childhood home. Shattered windows flying into exposed limbs and suddenly my family grows see-through. I will also add in a radio, plugged into purple-painted wall playing Whitney Houston’s, I Have Nothing. The walls fall down like flimsy velvet curtain and there is a realization that it is all just a music video stuck inside a family portrait of tragedy.

can’t run from myself/there’s nowhere to hide……….

Here is what I remember:
Love is a rerun of disappointments and I am traveling inside the warped images of myself. A woman kisses me with microwaved tongue: small and pre-heated. My organs search for the bright rainbow in my heart to grow neon again. Then, someone grabs onto my hip, presses their ghostly face against mine, whispers in my ear:
you removed that rhythmic contraption years ago.

dear organ of offspring and gesticulation

Oh…..uterus,

Last night, you inserted a dream inside my head. You stole the how, but I received news from another that I had impregnated her. She was angry and I didn’t know how to soothe her. I felt excited by my body’s ability to shoot magic dust into her, allowing cells to form into another human.

Outside of my dream, I don’t want to think of my body having/producing sperm. I want to think of it as glittery blood/cum/gender-empowered ejaculate that has no other name to compare it to. When I awoke, my body felt as though it was a giant hemorrhage. I dipped my fingers into my cunt, thinking they’d be dyed red. I prepared myself for a bed covered in blood, covered in menstruation. However, there was nothing.

For the past three days, uterus, you have been kicking me, bullying my insides and I want to know why.

I press heated towel against you.
I drink enough water to drown you.
I finger myself until orgasms distract you.
I even exercise in order to sweat you away.

Dear Uterus,

You are persistent like love
like my appetite
like my addictions.

All i want to do is poem and you press me further into bed and steal away my motivation for words.