we need new forms. new modes of speech.
sean bonney
0.
i think poetry is dead. or at least, she’s taking her lasts breath in a garbage dump somewhere, having been dropped by her peers who never really loved her. she’s laying on a bed made out of overpriced notebooks, macbooks and chose an iced latte for her last drink. in fact, she’s being executed. who put her there? look in the mirror then you see. think you’re not guilty?
honey, we all are.
1.
i’m sitting in the coffee shop, tired and hungover from a much too high dose of ketamine i induced into my nose yesterday right before i went to bed. waking up from a ket comedown in the middle of the night does something to your body. you’re alerted and disoriented, it’s 1.07am. i hear my roommates steps rumbling in the next room, i hear someone scream outside, i drift back into sleep. i try to gather the last words left to me, having left the rest of them with you last night, trying to make sense of this pain that i described to my therapist as ever-growing. i looked out on madison avenue while crying in their office. she looks like my teacher. she wants me to bring this up in the conversation next time. but i never do.
2.
i believe i’m close to rimbaud’s derangement. i tell myself that story, don’t know what the plot line will be. i overwhelm myself with drugs and pleasure in the form of excitement and sex. but i also choose the emotional pain and overstimulation of this world. i choose it wilfully. i don’t go to the coffee shop, i commute; choosing to immerse myself into the lives of others, the smell of the person next to me on the subway, the heavy lifting my legs need to do to get up the stairs, the cig i light the moment i get out of the house. i feel the other’s pain almost as clearly as i do mine, i just never feel their joy. i’m in search of some ecstasy but it rarely comes over me. i imagine it like a flood, coming down a waterfall with grey stones, glistering in the sun underneath the white water, high pressure, limbs in there, death in there. it consumes the stones, blasting away the rock, revealing there’s more rock underneath, just not as grey. that’s what i want to look my ecstasy to look like. that’s what i want in front of my eyes when i fall asleep every night.
3.
the curtain is (an) opening, and we can’t yet comprehend the horrors that await us on the stage. we’re forced to watch, flesh glued to the seats. some people try to stand up, with great force they peel of their skin which remains on the seat, forming the base for another glue, another person. i wish i could hold someone right now, anyone. not be held, but i want to caress your wounds. the curtain is lifted by us.
suicide and self-destruction / is the first way that the shitted-on start showing / anger against the shitters
kathy acker
4.
this world is offering more to us than just tired faces and screaming at each other in traumatized states (with soft words).
no way this is it.
i tell you how much i love this world, then explain to you that my next thought is about killing myself.
she’s glad to have her friends in this tired state.
she’s glad that she’s alive.
she’s glad she hasn’t offed herself yet.
with each passing second she wishes she does.
something hits the ground, she’s snapped out of it.
5.
there is a cloud of opaque smoke coming out of her mouth. she lives inside of herself most of the time, but chooses to come out every once in a while. that’s when the smoke appears. think of it as a bench you can sit on, are not afraid to lay down on; a path to criminality. a criminality in which you can feel safe, safer than in the world you inhabit, safer than your room, safer than your group of friends, safer than your bed. a criminality that defies poetry. your suicide will be criminality.
there, she is alive again. lifting her hands up to the sky, slowly but steadily.
this feeling is our way out of this mess. it’s our way out of a world that is not fit of caring for itself. we all are complicit in this one crime but that’s not the crime i want to talk about here. i am not talking about crime at all, just a common shared criminality of our thoughts, lives and most importantly, actions. the actions that involve excess and radically altering our world.
i wish i could lay my hand on your shoulders, and looking back we’d just see a line of people doing the same for us. but then, looking forward we see our children doing the same. that’s how i imagine the utopia for all of us, born out of criminality that is hard to define, but simultaneously defined through all of our actions in life, however radically life-changing or -ending they might be. the holding we all do each and every day will be rewarded with the coming of the flood.
beware those who speak of other lives but not of the corpses in their mouth, or of the screaming bones upon which they walk.
mary nardini gang
6.
the space of all potential comes from you laying on this bedroom floor. scattered clothes around you. no space but all space. your hands clutching to the carpet that’s been fucked on, trampled on, cried on, broken-up on. all these memories come together to form whatever she’ll do next. whatever form of life there is left to live; which are endless forms. just there for the taking. they don’t have names yet, so it is hard for us to recognize them. holy circle of possibilities forms around your limbs as they are spread out. speak honest and with love, again, please hold your hands, this time only for yourself. see how bloody they are? it’ll be necessary in the healing of other’s wounds. we gazed too long at what we wanted. now it’s disappeared, make it anew. make it whole again. there’s bones at the bottom of the ocean.
7.
coming out of my dream state seeing men working on the porch of the neighbouring house, i take a sip of coffee, and resign; but not giving up hope (as dictionaries would suggest).
we take a swim.
there’s a creek.
there’s a flower, pick it and it’s violence, smell it, and there’s creation.
do you wanna hang out tonight?
i wish to express my gratitude towards the earth that has given me the fists & hands to punch, to raise, to finger another cunt, to type, to cause addiction, to hold, to hold, to hold, so much pain, so much of this, so much of you, and so much of this violence.