the person to whom i have been writing is a person who rejected me. i have written to somebody's back. i am in the living room of my new apartment. he is sleeping on the couch. baby is in the bed. i do not want sexuality to be a thing that i write about. sexuality is a girl giving parts of herself to the public. i do not want to write about that. i do not know to whom i want to write.

he is sleeping on the couch. he is the person i met out there. we went inside each other and into the locked rooms and underground rooms. our apartment is not like that, it is not a big mansion with cold wings and its windows, if broken by a neighborhood boy, would be repaired by the maintenance man. i know that there isn't any writing without anger, and yet, i do not balance the laptop onto my knees because i am mad.

i do not understand what it means to be far from a place that is immediately before you, the streets and neighborhoods could be outside my window with a splicing away of 3,000 miles, two months, and a few unforgivable statements. i loved you, and i was clumsy. you pretended to love me, and you were poised.

he took me to each room and showed me what was in it. there were dogs, there was a shovel, there were teenage thighs. there was an abandonment that rippled through each love affair. (you can not pretend that a sin sins only once.)

we should have been alone for that.

i have heard you call my friends weird. it is something you learned in school, red lipstick, a snarl. you say that my life isn't special. it is like the girl who said i would never be happy, having learned this, i suppose, from making me cry. you are not the original abandonment. you are not even a love affair.

don't care how you die, so long as you die thin. to be free, to never work, to smoke cigarettes in the park and drink like teenage hemingways, before the war, yet certain that we already understood it. you tell me to open my eyes to the ones i have hurt. i do not understand it. i needed to get out of there. my belongings are in the dump. i do not even have a picture of you.

postpartum

i am sitting on the bed and looking out the window and listening to sad music like a teenager. my mother keeps finding sneaky ways to shame me for drinking beer since i'm breastfeeding. i need to move out but am terrified of the darkness and emptiness of the big house i applied for, its ancient fireplaces and hardwood floors. i have been googling articles about postpartum depression in hope of some insightful sentence that will lift me out of my shit and instead get about.com articles that publish sentences like, "support from your family and friends can help," and "you may have a higher chance of postpartum depression if you have a poor relationship with your husband, boyfriend, or significant other or are unmarried." dicks. these articles are written by hack writers for $15/pop and help no one. when i was pregnant, i worried that my sadness leaked into her through the umbilical cord along with pesticides and preservatives and the wine that i drank then regretted and felt like an asshole for drinking. david would come home and smoke pot obsessively and play his guitar in the kitchen with woody, and i would lie in the bed like a marooned whale watching forensic files and law and order. katie would come over, i would glare at her and her beauty and fashion and the way that she laughed all the time, she was my best friend but i didn't realize it and now i'm here in atlanta without her. i guess that this blog is my sewage drain, because i don't have another outlet other than to send creepy emails about how sad i am to the friends i alienated. i know that someone will read this who shouldn't, a concerned family member or something, where are all the girls with new babies, and how do they deal with this.

"i am not a fun person" yields 5,120 google search results.

it is a bruised but thinking
a wail from inside body
or whale, swallowed
still not sure
when there were garbage cans
the lids would splatter
metal sounds
flashing and jarring
we use plastic now,
soundless and deathless

**

Can’t convulse it into being/ forgot its smell and its teeth
Have taken my tongue from the guts
And have nullified my grief
I am waiting for it though
And am thick in the duty of my nothingness, my forgetting.

i want to be

sick in new fashions,
want amputation. obscure beating pulses.
trash accumulates in the compost,
soiling plants. ennui spreads,
a swollen culture,
disease eats well in hot places

hand gun

i think about myself like a raft and i think about water
panic is a rash, it is order confirmations and quiet vomit
in the company bathroom. she says that yoga
is an escape from sorrow
which is an escape from everything other than itself

i might be finished writing poems.

which sux.
drawing though.

s&m

the death-wish is a wish. the death-wish affirms life. the life is the death. being and going. sweat on a cardigan. sirens call from the edges of cliffs that hedge against the water like water of memory, the beach you would run on in the morning and the holy broadening or breaking. impulse control, shattered lamp, blood and fingers, holy, what is bared, control, abuse and fatalism.

google results

Results 1 - 10 of about 6,710,000,000 for no
Results 1 - 10 of about 1,450,000,000 for love
Results 1 - 10 of about 664,000,000 for yes
Results 1 - 10 of about 612,000,000 for sex
Results 1 - 10 of about 476,000,000 for death
Results 1 - 10 of about 463,000,000 for god
Results 1 - 10 of about 226,000,000 for television
Results 1 - 10 of about 226,000,000 for gay
Results 1 - 10 of about 75,300,000 for happiness
Results 1 - 10 of about 37,700,000 for enthusiasm
Results 1 - 10 of about 18,400,000 for sadness
Results 1 - 10 of about 10,100,000 for boredom

hell-themed

there were birds in the trees at the airport
i noticed them
you noticed them
i touched your hair
small-bone creature

too much coffee

i am shivering and sweating and my heart is beating too fast.

my face went numb and my neck went numb.

now only one side of my neck is numb and i am eating a salad very slowly and reading about the enneagram.

*
*

an update:

one month later.

my neck is still numb.

po@-0i9ghotpink.

no longer sadly
no longer seeing ghosts

forfeiting security for something i remember to be valuable though i have forgotten what it is.

i received a bill in the mail this weekend for $17,400. this is for a 2007 hospital visit that lasted three days. mostly: the pulling of blood, monitoring of levels, dripping of IV's.

charcoal vomit.

i am not going to pay this bill. i may frame it.

do not need to see.

the question of terror.

your sins are the sins of the world.

you are in them and of them.



private words in a private book on the very softest paper i have

***

intimacy detached from libido:

the toddler kiss

***

ennui: bordem of the soul.

***

rx gobble

projection screen

the audience knows

we can have it all

***

twilight pleases

nothing hours

***

refrigerator garden:

limp funks and magnets, the garfields,

the dangerous grass

***

i can trace your departure in ink

i can get away fast

rhetoric and music beyond meaning

"life has to be given meaning because of the obvious fact that is has no meaning." -henry miller

"everything is meaningless." -king solomon

what exists beyond meaning?

is it possible to examine beyond meaning?

options:

talk about what it does. (the scissors cut.)
talk about how it appears. ("scissors appear in classrooms. lesbian scissoring on southpark is a way to demean lesbians. a subaltern community in a developing country may be confused by scissors.")
talk about how it looks, how it feels, the sound it makes. ("the scissors have a black handle and tape crud at the end of them.")
talk about what abstract constructs it implies. ("scissors cut, which could make them useful, violent or both.")
assign value. ("these scissors cut well." "these scissors are shite.")

but are any of these methods rhetorical?

what is rhetoric?

mucklebauer:

"the search for meaning, without actually expecting to find it."

what separates rhetoric from discourse?

is that a meaning question?

discourse:
1. To speak or write formally and at length. See Synonyms at speak.
2. To engage in conversation or discussion; converse

rhetoric:

1.
a. The art or study of using language effectively and persuasively.
b. A treatise or book discussing this art.
2. Skill in using language effectively and persuasively.
3.
a. A style of speaking or writing, especially the language of a particular subject: fiery political rhetoric.
b. Language that is elaborate, pretentious, insincere, or intellectually vacuous: His offers of compromise were mere rhetoric.
4. Verbal communication; discourse.


rhetoric can be discussed outside of what it is:

talk about what it does. (elucidate [locke]. persuade [socrates]. seduce [baudrillard]. perform [derrida].)
talk about how it appears. ("it appeared in greece among sophists." "it is pernicious--in the courtroom and on the bus.")
talk about how it looks, how it feels, the sound it makes. ("effective rhetoric can be invisible." "hemingway uses simple words the way that bullets are simple." )
talk about what abstract constructs it implies. ("many people think of rhetoric in terms of lawyers being evil. or they use it to talk about satan, like how he wants to convince you of things."
assign value. ("nietzsche's deconstruction of good and evil is persuasive.")

music can be discussed outside of what it is as well--i would also be personally compelled to strike value assignment as well.


talk about what it does. ("justice gives people the desire to party/be wild/take drugs/have sex.")
talk about how it appears. ("justice was relevant to core music followers and trendsetters a few years ago, and is now relevant to the mainstream but trite to core music followers and trendsetters.")
talk about how it looks, how it feels, the sound it makes. ("slide guitar has bell-like quality." )
talk about what abstract constructs it implies. ("garage sound and lo-fi production imply a diy value, which responds to the grind and falseness of capitalist culture."
assign value. ("pitchfork gives music a 6.8")

in order to make rhetoric about music effective, one must decide why it matters. where the nerves are and how to reach them. nervy. short. passionate.

find its pain and find its relevance are good strategies.

don't define it.
to define music is to play justice at a party.
definition is played.

all of it

it's friday but i do not feel the sun from the weekend, i feel the gap from the weekend, weekend widens into a zombie eclipse,

i want my lips to be kissed because it is a habit to want it
all passion dies
but death is not always passionate

the flourescent sitting journey,
open mouth,
eating spiders as we sleep
on a mattress with the cover unfolded,
padding exposed,
that corner could be all of it.

WE WANTED TO SAY SOMETHING BUT THERE WASN'T ANYTHING.