478 Identity poems

name address date I cannot remember an eye for an eye then and there my this    is your    se cond    ch ance    to h i s t o r y r e p e a t s i t s s e l f and a tooth for a tooth is a tooth:

They dub thee idler, smiling sneeringly, And why? because, forsooth, so many moons, Here dwelling voiceless by the voiceful sea, Thou hast not set thy thoughts to paltry tunes In song or sonnet. Them these golden noons Oppress not with their beauty; they could prate, Even while a prophet read the solemn runes On which is hanging some imperial fate. How know they, these good gossips, what to thee The ocean and its wanderers may have brought? How know they, in their busy vacancy, With what far aim thy spirit may be fraught? Or that thou dost not bow thee silently Before some great unutterable thought?

pues estoy creando spanglish bi-cultural systems scientific lexicographical inter-textual integrations two expressions existentially wired two dominant languages continentally abrazándose en colloquial combate en las aceras del soil imperio spanglish emerges control pandillaje sobre territorio bi-lingual las novelas mexicanas mixing with radiorocknroll condimented cocina lore immigrant/migrant nasal mispronouncements baraja chismeteos social club hip-hop prieto street salsa corner soul enmixturando spanish pop farándula standard english classroom with computer technicalities spanglish is literally perfect spanglish is ethnically snobbish spanglish is cara-holy inteligencia which u.s. slang do you speak?

A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. — Henry David Thoreau i I didn’t choose the word — it came pouring out of my throat like the water inside a drowned man. I didn’t even push on my stomach. I just lay there, dead (like he told me) & “I” came out. (I’m sorry, Father. “I” wasn’t my fault.) ii (How did “I” feel?) Felt almost alive when I’d get in, like the Trojan horse. I’d sit on the bench (I didn’t look out of the eyeholes so I wouldn’t see the carnage). iii (Is “I” speaking another language?) I said, “I” is dangerous. But at the time I couldn’t tell which one of us was speaking. iv (Why “I”?) “I” was the closest I could get to the one I loved (who I believe was smothered in her playpen). Perhaps she gave birth to “I” before she died. v I deny “I,” & the closer I get, the more “I” keeps receding. vi I found “I” in the bulrushes raised by a dirtiness beyond imagination. I loved “I” like a stinky bed. While I hid in a sentence with a bunch of other words. vii (What is “I”?) A transmission through space? A dismemberment of the spirit? More like opening the chest & throwing the heart out with the gizzards. viii (Translation) Years later “I” came back wanting to be known. Like the unspeakable name of God, I tried my 2 letters, leaving the “O” for breath, like in the Bible, missing. ix I am not the “I” in my poems. “I” is the net I try to pull me in with. x I try to talk with “I,” but “I” doesn’t trust me. “I” says I am slippery by nature. xi I made “I” do what I wasn’t supposed to do, what I didn’t want to do — defend me, stand as an example, stand in for what I was hiding. I treated “I” as if “I” wasn’t human. xii They say that what I write belongs to me, that it is my true experience. They think it validates my endurance. But why pretend? “I” is a kind of terminal survival. xiii I didn’t promise “I” anything & in that way “I” is the one I was most true to.

The ugly duckling remained ugly its whole life but found others as ugly as itself, I guess that’s the message. Smoke rises from the heads in the backyard. Do you think if I hang around here long enough someone will proffer a muffin, one skulking shadow to another? Soon, my shoes will be part of the populous dirt. Have I learned all the wrong lessons, the ones you shouldn’t know until the last dew-clogged lawn is mowed and the sun goes down on the ruined battlements? Why was I given a toy train if not to stage stupendous wrecks? Sure, I can walk by the sea holding a hand with as much melancholy as the next fellow, substituting the cries of slammed waves for the droll adumbrations of distraught skeletons, the day taking on the sheen of a stone removed from the mouth and skipped between the breakers jubilant and sunk.

for John Wieners I cut out the “Heart with Snowflake” Myself but it is not mine, Forget This bloody coat bloody shirt, I Think it is the writing that makes Me sick, The scores and scores of Incidental music, this nosebleed all Spring all wet, I’m positively angry with the Impertinence of it! I’m Sewing up the kinks in this film, I’m Trying to! I’m trying to burn a light Between, There’s a light and I cable my voice on it but it rips when I trace Anything! WORKS ON PAPER, THE SHIP OF DEATH “Oh build it!” Sings the Heart, “My coat would be so bloodied I could wiggle out of my coat!”

Everything has gender in Arabic. History is male. Fiction is female. Dream is male. Wish is female. Feminine words are followed by a circle with two dots over. They call it the tied circle, knotted with wishes which come true only when forgotten or replaced by the wishes of others. In the town of tied wishes, people feel great anticipation because a stranger will arrive today in her feminine sign. Someone says he saw her two dots glittering, refuting another’s vision of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness. So scary, he says,how the moon hides in her red circle

the streets of hell are also paved with fear of contagion I have been swimming in enough barbed-wire waters to know you’re not even safe on the beach it’s not just your “body fluids” it’s the grime of your skin those dirty things you think they are cleaning up the world again I can see the inflammation heartbreak & hunger scurry me down on the road to Damascus I want to be blinded like Saul for the sake of vision not just cause I can’t take it anymore are we talking burnt out here? burnt out is a reason for infection I hope I get the whole disease I am glad to be a speck / a piece of dirt the dark side of the earth they’re trying to clean I want to get in their pores want them to sweat my filth the way a wound hurts before the dope but then come the murderers on the road are we talking burnt out? they go in the camps looking for you cause you are hiding the sores you could be contagious after all in the postapocalypse movies you don’t even exist your survival is not required for history or hollywood in the movie Road Warrior everyone is antisocial on purpose human ties are burnt out & human intercourse is fatiguing & dangerous gratefully no one is traumatized anymore & unfortunately no one goes to school in the movie Blade Runner almost everyone lives 90 stories below almost no one else everyone is antisocial by accident due to overcrowding in L.A. but no one minds & there are still parties to go to everyone white is “off-world” more or less everyone 90 stories down is polymorphous colored more or less no one has attended school in decades in both films everyone dresses with panache which preserves their identities to audiences who know there is no grounds for indentity postworld personally I prefer the people in Titanic even though they got their minds blown when the unbelievable happened they still believed in life they were not burnt out & had grounds for clinging to lifeboats and a certain stylish way of dressing they could not imagine Jim Jensen intoning without horror that the body count goes on that no one needs the news to know what’s going on Beirut is one of the low levels Dante went on about available in ordinary life see the corpses if you will believe at the risk you may see it everywhere every body spreads infection unless you burn it out eyewitness news invites you to wait for the coverage because Jim Jensen is there & history is in the making or you can come skinny-dip in my gene pool the massacres were arbitrary when my people were hunted down the deaths still go on stretching over centuries of shades of brown baptist, moslem, mothers, children, fathers burnt out of homes but living I am not that desperate to be numb & dumb I’m walking 90 stories down I know I survive in some wretched moments of what men do but I am not that desperate I don’t give a shit if this is history in the making it should stop I am still alive I am still happy to be the dirt that can’t be cleaned up scorch my earth & I will grow from history up under the feet of the present burnt out is for the movies in which we don’t exist

came in a pink, orange and white striped metal tube, with a black curlicue border and a splayed gold base.   It came in any number of mod shades: Nippy Beige, Chelsea Pink, Poppycock, Hot Nec- taringo, Pinkadilly, Dicey Peach.   There were several tubes in my mother’s makeup drawer in the bath- room five out of six of us used (my father had his own bathroom, as forbidden as the walk-in closet where his Playboys were hidden under a stack of sweaters on the top shelf).   All the girls at school had Slicker in their purses; I watched them apply The London Look at the beginning and end of each class.   I marveled at what else spilled out: compact, mascara brush, eye shadow, wallet, troll doll, dyed rabbit’s foot, chewing gum, tampon, pink plastic comb.   At home I stared at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and, as my brother pounded on the locked bath- room door, twisted a tube and rubbed, ever so slightly, Slicker on my lips.

Sometimes I want a corset like to harden me or garnish. I think of this stricture—rain language, building—as a corset: an outer ideal mould, I feel the ideal moulding me the ideal is now my surface just so very perfect I know where to buy it and I take it off. I take it off. If all things fall and we are just emperors, serious and accurate and fugitive in such dormant lines of gorgeousness the day is a locksmith dew lies long on the grass and I a rustic ask: what is a surface—and respond only omniscience, the crumpling face as the domestic emotions elucidate themselves a sea of mist exists so strangely side by side the potent mould of anarchy and scorn.