better to listen

“get a new skin
try one” — pain

before pleasure
living in alien

furs. choosing
for the first time

because you
are not

what

you once
thought

you
were

“The path is writing and writing is a body and a body is bodies (the grove of trees). Just as meaning appears beyond writing, as though it were the destination, the end of the road (an end that ceases to be an end the moment we arrive there, a meaning that vanishes the moment we state it), so the body first appears to our eye as a perfect totality, and yet it too proves to be intangible: the body is always somewhere beyond the body. On touching it, it divides itself (like a text) into portions that are momentary sensations: a sensation that is a perception of a thigh, an earlobe, a nipple, a fingernail, a warm patch of groin, the hollow in the throat like the beginning of a twilight. The body that we embrace is a river of metamorphoses, a continual division, a flowing of visions, a quartered body whose pieces scatter, disperse, come back together again with the intensity of a flash of lightning hurtling toward a white black white fixity. A fixity that is destroyed in another black white black flash; the body is the place marking the disappearance of the body. Reconcilitation with the body culminates in the annihilation of the body (the meaning). Every body is a language that vanishes at the moment of absolute plenitude; on reaching the state of incandescence, every language reveals itself to be an unintelligible body. The word is a disincarnation of the world in search of its meaning; and an incarnation: a destruction of meaning, a return to the body. Poetry is corporeal: the reverse of names.”

Octavio Paz, The Monkey Grammarian, Chapter 26

via Hokai Sobol, “Path Writing Body.”

will
it be
“me” who will

miss
you, or
the flesh still

pliant
for what
it never contained?

“mature”
hands.

seem to
articulate
something

but

it’s not clear

the “largest
organ” thins
toward trans
lucence

but

will probably
never
achieve it.

will opacity
clothe me
to the end?

this worn
flesh
will not
say

what is soft
in these tendons

& bone scaffold

tightly set hinges

at the jaw, in
finger joints

(the instruction
is, continually,
get soft, soft)

but something
springs up; this
is not fem, is it?

or is

it? we like to play
it tight, hard,

“we like to do it
rough,” she sang

rolling it around

and around

i’m looking
in the mirror.

“you’re like a geisha”
she said, “don’t take
this the wrong way”

what way is
that? thinking

how soft movements
can kill…

the way my jaw
clicks you’d think
it spring-loaded

oh the resistance
powering this hinge
be ware all ye
who enter here

the pink is not quite
pink, but an organ
having chords
glissandos
rhythm

a touch tone
button

muscle can dance, tick, tick,
can shift up down point

toes. can in sensate though
deeply tired, knowing it

where the skin breaks a
bruise to surface spreading

something hurts / let go / he
says “intensely” a freedom

the mouth opens, ticks
wrists like crickets / i say

much too heavy for this
thin frame. a frequency

muscle through fat, blood
through epidermis, is a

feeling, i like it, is a city
she said, opening her mouth

now thrusting hands back
mimicking wings now

one shoulder leads, chin
points up one sky; polish

with palms / vocally
he tells portends what

might come. to keep this
rigor from setting in

[based on a poem written in As-Is.]

attempting a poem
with tired fingers

what might you,
flesh, dictate into

my recorder? mind
like “rusty antennae”

picking up signals
from far away

heard through fuzz
one interprets

with faulty tools

what sounds
what silence

one last thing before. and then the last thing, before. is just before
and then what will. seemingly what will, and it would and it will, and
before that will happen, just that one last thing before. and then,
be fore it can, before anything else, it must. but first, and foremost,
and any case, just then, before what happens, but first, just, now.