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your red lines
(Ji, look! No
your red lines
you say: life is not a crossword puzzle
(as I remove your outer garments with words
and other stripping agents. gentle.
no need to dissolve all of the pigments
that convey your mystery.)
I disagree; life is difficult to figure out and
life is full of emptiness and
life runs through you in the red lines,
and death to your heart through the blue.
I am tracing your veins as though I am holding a pen.
the newspaper tells me about children starving in africa.
I say: but it’s a lie.
(it’s not news; it’s true, but not news)
you say: death comes to us all. and death runs under your skin.
summer heat and sex and you are
red all over.
and we drink coffee in bed
and there are old black words on
your new white sheets.
you paint yourself with the star of david and
you present yourself as canvas and
you say: how does this make you feel?
I say: in these gold specks I see you need
a bright exterior intervention,
and in these red lines I see you living in your own
(chronically creative)
way, and in these thumbprints
I see that someone else has been here before
and in this patch of shadow I see
nothing at all.
you say: how does this make you feel?
I am not comfortable with these modes of analysis;
I am reaching for the familiar. for example:
I am scored with inked red lines that
exist in parallel and never
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - overlap,
mementos from an editor more ruthless
than yourself. you refuse to annotate
the margins of this love; refuse to acknowledge
the margins
at all.
(but I require boundaries in black and white
with clearly defined spaces
and clues to direct the words that fall between.)
for me to learn your language, for me to speak of
sinopia
& sanguine
& sienna
will require a compromise.
there is more to life than your emotion,
there are dryer words than you know,
there are children starving in africa
and the star in your nativity can be split into a series of lines:
hydrogen - blue. methane - red.
for me to recognise the meaning inherent in your form,
you must submit to this refraction;
you must be prepared to pick up a pen
and underline my faults.
you say: what’s black and white and
read all over?
I say: that’s an old one.
I say: but it’s a lie.
(the lie is: you are far from
textual in your context –
all I get is ink smudged on my thumbs,
all the better to press against your skin,
leaving a bruise with whorls
of newsprint.
art, worth nothing like a thousand words.)
the lie is that I have never read you
cover to cover.
instead I put my thumb against your shoulder and
align myself with your blood and
turn you straight over, turn straight over to
the crossword page.
no subject
(2) No hands! amd you're flying!
(3) I'm not sure I can express just how impressed/moved by this I am in the fifteen minutes I have to get dressed and haul myself out the door. However, very briefly, what gets to me the most is not just the originality, not just the cleverness, not just the fucking beautiful words in their fucking beautiful arrangements, but how immediate it all feels -- as if you had collapsed the reader/writer distance and were speaking directly to me, à la Caravaggio puncturing the picture plane with St. Matthew's hand.
(4) *prints*
no subject
(2) *clings* WAS SCARY. WAS SO SCARY.
(3) :))))) Articulated validation! Thank you.
no subject
you must be prepared to pick up a pen and underline my faults and the last stanza are going to stay with me for quite a while.
no subject
First off, I love it. I love it because I recognise the protagonist and the lover both, the thought that it has to be emotion and that it hasn't. The world needs a grander poetry of ideas, because emotion is not the rawest thing there is. And it is amazing that you have that pinned here in the poem.
It is funny, because there are two things I love about this poem: the idea and the illusory structure, that is almost there but not quite. And they don't intersect, actually.
there is more to life than your emotion,
there are dryer words than you know,
there are children starving in africa
and the star in your nativity can be split into a series of lines:
hydrogen - blue. methane - red.
for me to recognise the meaning inherent in your form,
you must submit to this refraction;
This stanza is the best: it is both rhyme and rhythm if that makes sense -- it simultaneously expresses itself through what you say and through the thumping, careful, repetition of the lines (broken by the dashes. I am a whore for your thoughtful dashes.) The other ones don't always make it on both counts. art, worth nothing like a thousand words.) expresses the idea exactly but is too long after the one word, par example.
Anyway, yes. It's wonderful.
no subject
And I agree that that line is too long. And there are a few things I want to add - I think it needs tweaking a bit.