Symposium Split

I.
We are sons and daughters on paper and in confession
Naked as children, clothed as whores
You are adored by the women they become--
You love them, in your way.
Laughing in small kitchens disguises the burn
It's almost Spring, I think:
Bodies ripe and splitting
Strings cutting fingertips
Photos traded as communal property--
Touch the paper like you touched me.
You staked your claim, but lately wind frays the flag
Do what you can with tongues obscene with foreign anguish.

II.
Held up, held close
Cut by the same gentle hands and words
Cupped and pooling reflections
Trickling through fingers held too tightly
So tightly that the wounds are no more
Than hints of lines through blurred eyelashes
Held closed until tendons are cut
And muscles slacken
On the count of three:
Rock, paper, scissors--
Steady, tiger.
Hold your breath
Hold me
Until your two-by-fours
Smash my skull from behind
On three:
I won't watch
But I'll expect it.
Come up slowly,
Find a better balance,
Choose one sickness
Over another.
Hide it
To keep it safe.

III.
Paranoia propels whatever you fear into manifestation
In letters of recommendation for human relations
Two-week notices, pink slips, plane tickets
Frailty amuses at first with its shallow breathing
I hold no subject
Delirium was the thing we were after
Backing away as an approach, we take a shine to it
As the culmination of a theme.
Feel the platelets moving over the tongue
And into focus
Claiming arbitrary achievement--
It's still an object, still pretty in a lace dress.
One vertebra,
Then two,
Then four,
Climbing, straightening
Exponentially numb,
Rather stiffly,
Definitely not comfortably.

IV.
Look at me, look at me
Watch me
Are you watching?
Squinting only shields so much
Why a muffin on the radio
Why sunburns
Why attention paid in glances
(not that any form of currency is tangible,
too much of a fetish)?
I remember--the leather in your shoes,
The curl of fingers,
The stirring of your coffee,
Forgetting it on the bench,
Feigning intention.
We've all done it
But what have you done
That makes it different?
Does it hurt?
When you touch it,
Do you hurt?
Does it change
The way you move,
The way you look,
The way you fill your lungs,
Detouring through ribs?
He's been staring for an hour;
There's nothing can be done.

V.
Evening is now an agent of change,
A catalyst without urgency,
Blindly displacing another kind of synthesis,
Hovering between learning and knowing
(A small theft tends to garner the most affection).
Life in a second language;
Decoding anagrams, splitting the atom:
Do both, and live a lie.
Controversy is good for the blood
It bends the joints and presses flesh--
A testimonial collapse of trust.
We are parallels of paragrams,
One word embedded in the other
In your bed.
Autoerotic relationships produce bastards
And mainstream playthings,
More generous than you might at first think.

Wesley Willis Saw Things So Much More Clearly

It's nothing new, but it never ends, either: Political ideals are sold in favor of commerce. The machinery of self-interest operates quite smoothly--our very own weapon of mass destruction, defamation, disillusion. Avarice overthrows continents with necessary agency and welcome ruin. Highwaymen claim a position of exemption from corruption and disinterest, especially dishonor-- for who still would not die for his friend? Soldiers are required to do this, but what of politicians and roommates and parents? The profit-motive corrodes the foundations of our childhood homes and gives way to an implicit cannibalism. Everyone speaks, sure; all incorporate, somewhere in their structure, the voice of reform, or at least the promise that a project of reform is possible. But amidst the incessant chatter, words are swallowed by the noise of too many; they please our taste by abusing it, and it seems we no longer have a last political refuge. Total, rotating irony and our paradigms of revolution give no stable place on which to stand for something different.