no.

hope street
for peter

"For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at
odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the
fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has
trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to
its foundations."

In 2012
I sat beneath a tree
in the backyard
of some undead suburb
with the ethics in my lap
vibing on percocet
and subtle tremolo
eyeing out the luminous greens
full shapely leaves
zephyr on my skin
in pantheist reverie
a loving modality
to feel so ungodly
near my god-tree
to feel our substance rattle
in the blood stream
drugs dissolving
through my feet
my grass
my soil
through root
and earth
and mantle
finding channels
in the fatty cushion
of the cell
where I was living
with the ethics in my lap
I couldn't read such nonsense in my narcotic stupor,
not past the cause or substance or freedom of two pages
and so all I did was read
as a mystic with a tome beneath the geometric godlight,
smiling with my god mouth
hovering in the joyful zone of imbricated signals
where meaning and non-meaning joined in lovely dancing
so that I found myself a Jacobi believing in no god
ubiquitous and empty
in a thinking chair
chewing on some tough meat
with no teeth
‘cause all my teeth were missing
as some gods took them late one night on north hope
when Pete and I were sodded and happy and hugging
and then I bit some mirthless rock screaming why to godless visage

I’ll never dream again.

Pete and I lay in dry piss and blood

on a salty unlit street
wetted with too many tears,
the fullness of silence and faithless laughter
escaping ourselves to find ourselves again
in a mirror
showing monsters with a gaping gash,
vermillion splinters,
an empty mouth with a banshee cry,
I could’ve been a bad guy like a bellowing joker,
could’ve killed,
could’ve murdered,
could’ve choked and shanked,
would’ve smiled in the eyes of perpetrating madness,
would’ve loved it as a god giving justice
to weigh the living and the dead
This was my Hegelian bloodbath,

my absolute lord facing death and giving over,

with peter, such an angel,

breathing wisdom in my ear,
offering forgiveness to the butchers from the street,
a forgiveness of indifference because we knew just what we were and
how and when and what the world was doing,

Peter knew this well and won me over then on arbor street where we
would sit and talk for hours as aging figures and sometimes stare in
silence where dismemberment occurs

the ensuing days were poetic in their affect and philosophic in their
expression

coping with surfeiting thought and impossible thinking,

like white noise,
we were working through our days with tea cups and Macherey,
juggling Hegel and Spinoza with disjunctive force,
so that the refutation of the first hides, objectively, in the second,
itself anachronistic against the logic of all order

once there was Baruch

and then there was a Georg
after which Spinoza was better suited of the two

and I’m thankful for this thought, my substance and my drug

no history beginning teleological and true,

just our modal being
and the absolute fracture
where knowledge is foreclosure
so forget the ground you walk on because it isn’t there
That’s what we did

And that’s how I found myself in a hospital at 5am on no ground to

speak of,
scatting gibberish
speaking tongues,
spouting jokes,
loving morphine,
sobbing in a stranger’s arms,
tracing all my nascent scars,
learning the scope of familial love,
catching z’s,
waking in a sterile dream,
my father crying and a simpering nurse,
my sister paralyzed and a busted bed,
my mother stoic and –

oh my god
peter wasn’t there

we were alone,
me with my fucked-up face
and he with his bruis-ed brain,
the ICU must’ve been structured like a story or a poem
and as metaphorical beings we came to represent the weight of
meaning’s violence,
the (non)relation of exteriority and internal bleeding,

or so I’d like to think

this was the accrual of thought over such a timeless plane and the
endless quanta of whirlpool circulations

so that when finally I forded city traffic and found my way back home
amidst plush amniotic couches and waves of luke-warm air filling
crooked nostrils,
there,
in that egg of a home
I became a poet,

or so I’d like to think

though I wasn’t really writing

rather bonded by memorial fleeing

and the tremor in every fibre of my being,
hearing spectral floorboards while watching TV,
afraid to be alone in a normalizing terror,
so when the rhythms became static in my percocetic daydream,
love became a feeling,
subterranean and buzzing,
I was happy in my grave,
found peace to be alone,
found a smile like a Buddah,
butchered and elated,
found a fountain in some pills coupling love’s prescription,
found phone calls and messages pouring in from all god’s children,
found fibrous clouds and pillows in pixelated nothing
somewhere in my body where no body could be found,
sensing, in that space, newly animating structures,
so much time spent listening to a deifying silence,
(to my favorite song)
sitting beneath the tree,
to pray wordlessly an atomic thrum on my follicular ear drum
(one of peter’s favorite things),
to let this chasm grow into a canyon
to hear the purest being as an echo sweep across a nearby prairie
replete with Hegel’s flowers
disappearing in the bursting-forth of fully blossomed quiet
in the happiest days of no life at all
I think it was my first or second day back when Sara came to visit.

Compelled by something like guilt,

and not quite longing,

she rushed to see me in a red Jeep we used to share and upon arriving
fought back tears while I stood stolid in the summer air, sort of happy,
yet estranged by all this feeling - delighted that she came.
We walked down bird-song streets and listened to unfolding stories
against a setting sun with summer leaving, speaking without speaking,
a silent wish for understanding.

At some point in our journey, amidst the plush late-summer green,

there appeared a hushed vista of arborescent twilight,
so that all the world-historical drama we had suffered,
lifted as a mist and we were finally living such easy forgiveness in each
other’s dreams.
Just a short afternoon on suburban lawns and she was gone…

Not much later Charlotte came to visit.

And brought with her such rapture,

we laughed as no one laughed at the trauma of a smile,
made a cop-comedy wherein I played myself desiring revenge all
decked out in shitty blue threads and lipstick
eyeing up the camera uncannily performing my confessions
which were real
and made us bellow at the fact of my undoing,
so much so that every take was ruined by relentless corpsing,
as our belly’s ached with joy,
we knew we couldn’t share the fruits of summer filming

because,
fuck,
people wouldn’t get it.
We hoped to finish shooting for a fundraiser Charlotte organized to fill
my empty mouth where I discovered the meaning of agape and such
miraculous consolation to drape me in that bare notion of divine
communal loving with transcendental death condensing in my mouth

to sprout five nervous teeth

like little Jean-Luc Nancys
contemplating fracture and the whole condition of their being,
the impossible community
made possible
by a fissure in my masticating soul,
the prison of my body
abolished
so that I sat naked on a barstool,
and all I could muster for months was the silence of ecstasy and a
flamed tongue,

because,
god,
what more could I say

to develop a world with an overbite

and coterie of lovers
to finger the nut
until it opens
to whet the palette
to limn the space
where we first fell in love
to hold butterflies in cups and brimming over
our phosphorescent joy,
with sun glow worms after newly fallen rain,
so warm
catching the bus with my brother,
always laughing alone in our ear phones
under a polysemic sunrise
gliding down 1970s suburban streets,
neighborhood boys so boyish
and me in a density of shyness
with a secret propensity for acting out,
for screaming and crying

I cried so much on blacktops

just a dainty balloon
punctured by the softest kick
and harshest kiss,
30 blows to kill me
with my secret open envy
of Peter
so young and genial,
his genius was his kindness
and his knack for
crafting games
lunging ever-forward
into the perpetuity
of sheepish bleets
and all the unconscionable sounds
he emitted in his ecstasy

we walked the playground

beneath a forgiving sun,
in our socratic imaginarium
dreaming of philosophy
before we knew its name
and all the ferrel creatures
we would come to know
like josh and john and gabe
and all the rest who loved,
though, loving, never knew me
in the hot tub
to sputter out such awkward
love poems,
josh,
so shy yet beaming,
enjoyed those little games,
such a devilish smile under starlight
fantasizing normative living
dreaming of a shared complex
to fend off the complicating fissure
of a body that scars,
wears thin,
changes mind as being,
that we would marry and perpetuate
the sphere of reproduction,
alienating relations
waging war on freedom
in a hot tub
on polyurethane
and suburban wishing

the froth bubbled over

plummeting
through time
and severing cracks
in our world
as children
to fight god and make god known
in our uncritical grandeur
we felt so
utterly serene
so sinful
that the future could be so simple
as being over there
in a somewhere
along the axis
of linear living
but god we couldn’t know
that we would behold
our Euclidean daydream
dying
on salted rocks
and bleeding gums
we never saw it coming

Such cruel philosophical languor in the months that followed our pain
and childhood,
delving always into that mire of a text,
still remembering Pete’s suggestion to read some french guy as a
means to cope with adolescent fervor –
the anxiety in freedom and so on.
This all preceded the onset of Spinoza
and the problematizing function of god and nature,
mind and mud,
thinking and things,
the whole scene of zeros and ones,

and that’s more or less where I am now,

Writing some notes on the impossibility of a method…

Reading Macherey I stumble onto a curious passage:

Abstraction is not that which diverts us from the immediate; quite the
contrary, it is what traps us there.

This leads to some unformed thinking about beginnings

and method as methodos
which means path,
but a path with no beginning
reaching back through infinite beginnings,
a path in multiple dimensions
to fumble sideways,
fly over canopies,
swing through trees,
at one moment here,
another moment there,
a method born of dreaming,
out of the substantial void of yearning,
of striving,
and that perplexing word,
conatus,
with all its politicizing power,
bending toward no telos yet bending still
in the direction of a world unknown,
yet to be created.

This is the more geometrico of a poetical souvenir,

the every which way of writing trauma
without a map
or compass toward true north of some desire,
toward everything and nothing,
toward the question and the answer,
toward the question in the answer,
toward the absence of towardness
in our mise en abyme of knowing nothing yet loving something still,
toward the backward motion of inanimate living,
the death drive in Baruch’s backyard where he daren’t go,
playing with the dog in his grave,
o god how I miss him,
though dead he must remain.

So a method without method is the structure of a feeling,

a mood forgotten and begotten
reconstructed in a language
made of images so true,
though never truly real.

This note, a palimpsest of forgotten letters…

Is so goddamn serious…

Let the former life

whither and burn it all down…

Down…

Into that nether region
Of smiling corpses
Beneath a carapace
Of mossy bark
So warm
As a hibernating ghost
A body fraying
At no edges
An impossible one
Numerous, many
In a spectral city

Where nothing is sacred

And everything’s funny

So fucking funny

Isn’t it?

Like the eternal fart joke

That ever I’ve become
The basest of humors
the darkest of shit
Like when I realized at a young age,
on zoloft,
that pills only made my shit smell funny

and so too
in 2012
did I realize that percocets made my soul lighter
and my feces wetter
and ripping ass became more poignant
so that I was able to rewrite those medieval handbooks,
stating that the four humors consist,
now in the ever present joke of my life,
of blood,
shit,
wet shit
and farts,
the airy substance that’s come to define my innermost self
if ever there were such a thing,
and there isn’t nor could be,
except for the fact that I feel I’m always finding it,
something like a self,
in you
out there
in the scatology of this world,
always abiding the lesser me’s
making room for something greater
I could never be.
And so we try...
 To give flesh to thought
To make thought pungent
To wail on being
And meaning
to make it tender
Elastic
Supple
To chew on some nonsense
Like concrete
Replacing some teeth
And subjectivity
Like a pac-man
Searching
For silly similes
To explain
Dread as necessity
And life as always living

To feel our substance rattle

In the blood stream
Drugs dissolving
Through our feet
Our grass
Our soil
Through root
And earth
And mantle
Finding channels
In the fatty cushion
Of the cell
Where we are living
With the ethics in our lap