this section is very much a work in progress
Poetry:
Theses.
Look, I know the calm autoeroticism of my radio/piano-wire isn’t particularly well-to-do, but I need you to understand that the exclusive disjunction of my morbidly industrial speaker-cone has reached nearly four o’ clock in the morning.
When I was in tenth grade, I received a rather unfortunate piece of writing advice.
That is to say—I chopped up my fingernail with bowstring wax the other evening and I don’t imagine you’d want to forget it.
My English teacher, who surely meant well, explained that poetry is language condensed.
We are the truest enemies, you and I—a daughter of Molech and a son estranged.
Nothing more than raw signification.
Abracadabra, she said, walking under the step ladder; gleefully damning herself to a Thalassa of misfortune.
If you want to say something—she told us—write an essay.
I still wonder how she’s doing, the mythologized image of my unattainable desire’s object. An attraction likely requited, but one which would surely burn down the barnyard, so to speak.
And so, I did.
You talk as though we are severed. As though meaning were anathema to me.
Essay after essay, point after point, I tried to tell them—to tell you—how it feels.
A thousand wellsprings of blood-warm pathos will never approach my icy, masochistic, self-indulgence.
But I could never figure out the reason for any of it.
Well, if a rose is without ‘why,’ perhaps a thornbush is without ‘whither.’
And so, I quit writing, quit thinking, quit feeling.
But it didn’t work out, did it?
It hasn’t yet, no.