A couple of new poems from November

Bluets by Maggie Nelson, a book report

Maggie Nelson confesses on the first page of her book Bluets that she had fallen in love with a color. The color blue. It is my recent pleasure of discovering for myself this lovely title. I already loved the color myself…but then again I’m rather polyamorous and insatiable when it comes to color. 

Unassuming at less than a hundred pages, this book resists classification. In it Nelson describes what her relationship is like with the color, and what it is not. It is prose, poetry, social commentary, memoir of loss, and a treatise on desire both explicit and productive. It’s this last one that intrigues me the most as I believe it does for the author.  After all, in her second statement she tells us not to “make the mistake that all desire is yearning”.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari had decades ago made seemless the link between desire and production.   Desire being an dress of creation that hangs on the somatic rack.  I particularly liked this aspect of their work. Dispensing with the old notion of desire as a matter of yearning for what you lack, they set desire up as a necessity between our basic humanities, which is the need to create. To produce. In other words, meaning and worth are derived from the intimate connections of our hands being in the thick of it.  I for one get a satisfying kick from kneading dough.  I definitely can imagine a potter thinking the same about throwing clay. For how many academics have called the text a body and the body a book to be written upon? And really, how many chefs wouldn’t relish the opportunity to create something so sublime that people want to put in their mouth?

I suspect not many. 

But aren’t we already in the thick of it?   Are we not in the forest and we just need to see the trees with our own hands. Wood. Wood to build with. To fuck with.

At 57 I still get hard thinking on certain turns of phrase, passages of modulated color, and happy accidents of sound. I lick my lips yearning for the right combination between composition and color. Between substance and matter, the worm of thought loitering around my hands, arthritic as they are….and yet I still have a most private moment therewith. 

But Nelson takes us way past mere surface appearances. She takes us into the substance, about three feet down the rabbit hole from where we all sprang from sin, oh Mother Mary, that is…Jesus in a blue robe.  And more frankly, she points out that Jesus in the mandorla (an almond shaped patch of blue) is most certainly standing in for the vagina.  “Blue pussy” is her word from her mischievous mind. She drops it there for us then backs away as if it’s a hot potato. Allowing the teenager in us to smirk and giggle. 

I can lick my lips in anticipation for the moments in my life when work and play are indistinguishable from one another.  Isn’t that what I desire?

For Maggie Nelson it also seems to be so, that sweet spot, that art into life nexus. A sexy nexus with only just enough matter omitted so the reader spackles the gaps and crevices for themselves. For instance, I’ve never really thought of the blue veins on a cock as anything other than an unfortunate side effect of an erection, a obscene protrusion not unlike a bodybuilder’s stretched skin over rigid gangways of blood. But her reverence for the color makes it seem almost that which makes the penis beautiful. And according to her, she unapologetically wants it inside of her. 

So is it the cock or the blue of the vein that she desires? The color that is the seed or the timber of an oak? Or maybe she experiences the muscle memory of being fucked. Or maybe these are not unique dynamics, but rather all adjacent and multiple facets of desire and production.  Maybe her act of creation is the remembering and not even necessarily the fucking. But then again, it is Maggie Nelson the writer, writing as an act of creation, after and beyond the fact of fucking. 

You see, Nelson repeatedly sets us up for what seems like clever answers, but then turns us around with a reassessment, creating a fugue of observations, only after having just the possibility of finding what it is she wants  From perspective to perspective. For example. She lets us know that staring at blue, ever deeper, one eventually comes to indigo, then further still into true darkness. However, elsewhere she reminds us that screwing up your closed eyes with your fists brings light and colored shapes, from the lidded darkness to the light. In fact she ends the book stating she must have always been looking for the light. But I find her confidence in that statement less than absolute, which is where I think she wants us to land. Snatching away the quandary, owning it, then proposing it is in fact the journey. 

Bluets at boredom books

Blue Balls
Tempera
Circa 2000

                                                                           

Who hates poetry but still fucking writes it?

I admit it. I don’t really read poetry very often. And ironically I also admit to being a poet.  It’s hard to own. You know? To fess up. To tell folks that you are that which is useless, poverty stricken, and particularly impractical.

It’s also hard to admit to being a texter. Especially at my age it is most unhip to choose to use your device for the written word over the spoken. As if the text was degenerate, a sacrilege! In fact I’ve been accused and taken to the mat over texting. Taken to task because my texting is somehow too verbose, a substandard mode of communication,…an annoyance at best and a bona fide wrong turn for our humanity at worst.  Ignorant and deviant.

Meanwhile…

There are so many people that just love to talk on their phones. It seems to be a dynamic of the FOMO, to feel the ever immanent nervous urge to call or receive. To happily give over actual minutes of your life,  I commend these people who just aren’t as stingy as myself and find themselves with quanta of time they’re ready to void.

But it’s still not for me  

Nevermind that these same folks wouldn’t make the same virtue signaling parallels between a book and downloadable spoken media, AKA books-on-tape. People tend not to see the irony in favoring aural over written communication.

I get it. The cradle of the tech world of cell phones played to youth over the aged. Of course the children went for it.  After all, it was easy, and more importantly, immediate. So we got imojis along with lots of shortcuts like IDK, FWIW, WTF, and my personal fave, IRL. 

On dating apps (at least for my age and gender) I hear a lot of “let’s not waste time texting” and “we should go straight to talking on the phone”, as if hearing a voice is going to tell you more than a carefully constructed paragraph. I don’t know about you but I’d rather go from the text (which is a body of work) to the pheromonal experience of two bodies in the same room hotboxing each other, even texting each other…and altogether skipping the digital image, which is, BTW, nonsensically unscented and unpoetic.  

😉

Now when I text I almost always stop to correct my grammar and my punctuation.  But more importantly, and I say this in earnest, I always want to write my message with words that will stick to your ribs, become puns, turns of phrases,…poetics.  Bodies/texts.  Words thick and of substance.

Thick. Substance. Bodies. Smells. Sexting. Desire meeting production on desire’s terms. Doing it on the piano.

At this point if you have come to the conclusion that most of my poems are about sex or the sex adjacent, then you would be correct.

Here are some to poke at. Even if you’re not excited about poetry, I do hope you’re excited. 

————————————————————————————————-

Owning It

a terrible gaze

blushes my mask

because I was caught

looking 

to see         you        but I want

to see         into you

my boy eyes fixed

to the ground             seeking

your bodied mind        the thing

of thingness 

chaste    and misshapen 

sheepish foot searching out

a pebble amongst stone   with

my hands crowding my back pockets 

scar the line            this

view and no further 

I say     I want to see 

inside you               and are you

the skin I blow upon

or    but the hairs of your 

borders facing all directions

 

may that I kiss it          I would

set to a redefinition          a

raiment of little wood

carved from desire 

so          don’t spare me

the reveal of your breath 

a penny thrown and returned 

as boulder 

placed boldly where

the dancing headless scheme

in the periphery            I want

to see you

but still need mystery to

wrestle

———————————————————————————————

untitled 

dove-tailed hiccup in

time between my head

and my feet

which are too fast

to know 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

The New Aural 

erect clunk of chopstick 

on tin can

ghosts gather this sound

collecting pieces of non math 

arithmetic stomping 

guttering and sputtering 

two whistles versus 

two whistles struck 

glides as reeds buzz

and scream            the largest 

instrument          the quietest

a flutter of hands and hips

to imply a decoration in

time                or something 

less solid

__________________________________________________________________________________________

untitled 

whispers across hairs

in collusion with Eros 

daring flights and rations 

upon a dimpled beach

steeling up for  launch

scheming       thieving 

the many singular holes   breached 

on a wet day’s  dark  thought 

stealing toward dusky sand

ablaze and quiet for the 

neighbors 

___________________________________________________________________________________________

September third twenty twenty three

I think

I saw you on the sidewalk 

moving happy like

a cat

tuxedo styled and vamping 

and then like smoke you weren’t there

I was late for work

so I booked it

wordless 

________________________________________________________________________________________

Who’d You Think I Am

you left me with 

me and my old hands

spooning the dog

in your dank silence

yawning at 5:00 am 

and I’m wondering where to wash

see     you’ve seen my rage 

the one you invented 

I’m tattooed over with man

mistakes       disbelieving

my ally status   just you    just

wait to see the summer me

you said    I won’t    so go

I wouldn’t     because I’m 

bathing in the summer ash

of the ol’ swim hole

_____________________________________________________________

untitled 

I half hear Blueberry    panting in

   wet earth as I nap      his nails click

I draw up     a paperboy satchel 

with the Sunday burden 

the real reason I was

                told to dig         wasn’t 

the ditch            but the shovel         so

I resolved to be           you see

come a painter            my onus

                            was punted 

for the safe point

since I couldn’t         read music 

Coyote          eats my ego in 

                  the aerosol          night 

     keeping my rabble occupied 

      and          under-aroused

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Don’t Lock the Door

i’m surprised you remember that

night you took forever to cum

in Seattle after Paul and his balloon

trick after all you 

said you were too high

but thankfully I jerked myself off

and you said that was pretty hot

_________________________________________________________________________________________

Climbing the Loop

it starts along

my sewing machine leg

in fits wrapped around 

a cheap prosthetic  betrayed

a taut rope’s 

cracked whisper 

as it approaches the limit

hefting me          the burden thing

alighting upon a shelf

this stone vessel on stone tongue 

vast and granite and tome 

I graffiti with a stone blade

carving desire-a tinted 

faint tear          warp

coal colored hairs

wormed cypher under

the skin of all things

I blow the chiseled crumbs

over the edge as dust

beckons in spooled light 

I puff up again

______________________________________________________________

…and two untitled haikus 

you were seen on fire

so furry and oh so wet

fumbling with matches 

resting lens is off

watching my dog dig and twirl

crevice filled with tongue 

__________________________________________________________________________________end.