1
irreverence of being a baby
amniotic fluid sonic bubble & blood
i find you forget you
the heart’s action & breathing
i keep forgetting you
makes spontaneous gesture possible
but you remember me
our conference about breastfeeding
i lose you feel sad
come to recognise
radical alienation from our
body / use you as not-me
utterly dependently falling for
ever morbid & bad
blockbuster Oedipal bad
met by ordinary devotion
my anti-interpretive delinquent mood
my dirty mirthful
queer as pregnancy itself
2
no such thing as reproduction
only acts of production
inching toward the state he
thinks we’re all girls
writing echoes uncannily
shot through w/ darkness
don’t have to be disappointments
came from the fluid world
still clouding thru memes
the me & the not-me rage
that what is good is always being
destroyed for feeling real as she comes
to know me as real / just
another human animal among us
flying anuses / speeding vaginas
having been gathered together
held w/out a point / a lack
no memory save the sense
3
our body grew stranger experienced
surges of heat ghosts
who proclaim w/out these sheets
we would be invisible
spinning in the murk of cells
are programmed to unfurl & you can’t
reverse this helix of hope & fear it’s dark
we develop even in utero
in response to a flow of projections
reflections that ricochet
loose & hot in our house
made from stuffed-up stars we materials
may never leave this world recycling our
many whats made from wheres unwittingly
backed into a paradox paranoid-tending
we tend to bend in order
to develop & diss eminate
there is nothing you can throw at us
that we cannot metabolise
4
another form of paranoid i
slash them out //
edit myself
into gendered baggage sorry
for the confusion
sorry for whatever sorry
there are many speakers
who allow themselves the tremblings the lovers
& exes that make up
the mood half-dressed & staring
juts out of focus
you glimpse something radishingly intimate
a window my danger
a cloud my suffering
sunlight my nihilism
sex my abject ions
nine-tenths of the words i’ve stolen
are free but there’s no escaping
toxic material / the self
w/out sympathetic attachments
is either a fliction
or a lunar tic perhaps
it laced my ilk
5
the subtlefugue of my life’s
intervals of sun followed
by veils of red light
no real night will aspire to contain my shit
shadow on a wall
w/out a will to power we purr
or flee & demur / shift & refuse / write
slick amphibious
amorphing shapes of self
specular pleasure
in drag as thief or murderer
become our own stalker start smoking
again / difference happens
when the pleasure’s not only taken but
openly displaced in fragments
make a portal swing open
6
preserving the radical radishes
i have a bad habit of deeming myself lost
a little spooked by text
do you want to be right or
d’you wanna connect
i started leaving my charms at home
which asked too much to rent
the aim is not to answer questions
it’s to get out / get out of it
the air was hot
pro-Babel & shooting white eggs
bulbous beautiful
tears sprouted
ready to burst
we could be fucking the specific forces
that mobilise & crouch
behind us on this piled endangered planet
tiny being in difficulty
proposing an
alternat
ive
7
albeit stripped of pronouns
structurally vulnerable to being
hated or resented by somone
frothing in cargo
shorts i acquiesce into
participating in a belief system
that litotes its den
omination as metaphysical
that overestimates the maturity of adults
& fields unwanted //
monologues from
a cab driver //
just as ice has
no coordinates
a bloom of drops rose
indifferent to my doubts my
snowball self does not
wanna rep //
resent
8
people are in/different from each
other at the infinity pool
plural & specific
at deep play in the makeshift
Wolf Man’s memory of his parents’ encounter
& the girl having the feathers sewn onto her butt
easy to get juiced up
your brain doesn’t easily switch
not the same thing as in an ontological either/or
succumbs to the temptation to master
any gender any sentient being
no longer able to rip or delve into subversion
their light towers flooding
with titular features
think of how freaked
some people get
that the anus has tons of nerves
needs to be able to discriminate by feel
between solid / liquid / gas
part of mainstream domesticity
our studio w/ orange shaft lavender shadow
inviting more night storms to come
bash at the reality of my fantasy
protected by a force field
right to be free
9
not on my way in any way anywhere
a feeling of & a feeling of but
& a feeling of bi
you didn’t get the meme shel
lacking over their version of reality
genitalia of all stripes are all
slimy & pendulous & repulsive / / / what
even smell of a-holes beyond wanting or
being wanted
ashamed & undaunted i refuse to
engage in terms for ums like you
because of all the triangulation
my dirty secret has always been that
this is of course about me
for another by virtue of another
the shit stays messy
for the loosening that needs to happen
in order to speak a windswept kind
of edible twilight becoming animal
becoming molecular a thick bank of
rainbow above got sober
before i got wireless
10
words change depending on who speaks
the wings each flies w/
letting an individual fuck take
precedence over a categorical one
our unwitting collaboration
which i emerge from abandoned
to admit or omit every appearance of May
gender be more than just colour
collapse w/ all his gear on
in a paroxysm of will she know i’m good
on gleaming dark wood
floors me
(we look happy
now that there are
children in my life
it was our mountain
along w/ a sun cloud & two birds)
or will she mistake me
for an evil twin in triangle skirt
as a means of making peace w/ a
bummer i feel a loose sense
our flickering nature
/ nurture
11
i roll my eyes from the floor
“feeling real” is so moving
twenty-four hours a day soaked
in the immediate awareness of your sex
i rework the traps the happiness police patrol
give the state the flip
someone once policed your mouth
exploring slivers of light
filtered thru the paradigm we baffled
w/ ardour
you survive what i do to you
such ordinary self-serving we inter
lope & enter whatever shit
storm comes on sure
we can play Baby Bear
speech impediment games but these recalcitrant
mispronunciations get cold feet
in the epic line of frothy lunatics
their GOD HATES
(fill in the blank) signs
bewildered at the nature of today
crowded & contrary
the winternet promised
cheap gothic mandates
on a beach w/ a peach faux finish
[‘Argo Notes’ is ostensibly collaged from The Argonauts (2015), by Maggie Nelson]
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