The World Is Everything That Is the Case
0. Invocation
If I am something
I compose an edifice
Firstly, in this
Instead of working I have
Been reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
And laughing my ass off. That I find
It to be the most hilarious thing I’ve
Read in recent memory is surely
Some sort of cosmological-grade
Reaction formation, e.g.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm).
Yeah.
The corollary dysfunction to this appended place
Is my lack of structure so I invoke
And hope to be made better by surrendering this shit will
To a circumference
Conjured by my inept I
So you can see
How badly I’d love to be fucked and forget about it just now
Kathy Acker writes about how as a child she
Wanted to be a pirate but not being a stupid child
Knew this couldn’t be
And also something about gender
And I think about how we sell the content of our
So-called selves online and thieve it back as identity
And probably these are the thoughts
Of an idiot
In a biblical parataxis of begetting
I too was a pirate; marauding the genesis
Of my being a fucking lunatic
Here is a list of terms from my memoir:
Walter Benjamin
Crack
Winnie the Pooh
Sault Ste Marie
Virgin Mary
Seascapes
Benson & Hedges
Snowsuit
Duplex
Illegitimate
Hippocampus
Nietzsche
Resilience
Baudrillard
Jack pine
Sudbury
Auster
I want you
All memory is a kind of death
Smiling
And
Every love poem is
A self-portrait of childhood
Really, maybe
Dwight Yoakam in tan leather pants telling me he’s a thousand miles from nowhere
‘There’s no place I wanna be’
1. The Appearance of Reality in Itself
A fly on my arm with metallic orange thorax and legs that look too long
There for a moment
I can still feel it when it’s gone
It is real and it is a desert
And I’m there but hypnagogically
Ariana Reine’s book Mercury’s cover is reflective silver
Like its liquid namesake I look back
At myself
The door is a jar
The impulse to recycle myself but it’s never enough
WE CAN DO IT—that we are the same in
Suffering fools gladly?
Synaesthesia means
A is red in my mind and the number 1 is white
These are only facts of my excess qualia
And nothing more
How’s that for solipsism
And in answer yes my heart does harbour a holy whore
All that stuff
Inimical
As the perjured self before the days’ tarry of hooks
And indigenous bits
If but for colour
And so also
2 is red in my mind and the letter I is white
2. Neither Nor
The sky opened up onto my stupid face
In the north
I was nineteen and begging for Orion
To relieve me
Of an abject longing for stasis
Marshes sullied
Trenchant pleura
Stuccoed purpose
Beseeched me
In the flagrant errors of any small girl there is
The stuff of fables whether false or guileless
This happened a lot
My mother combing through trash at the landfill I’m twelve
And there were ravens and black bears and an air of death
I sat in the back of the flatbed truck knees to my chest
Reciting ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow …’
From the entrance the gatekeeper smiled without teeth
And winked at me
Fatherless for six years that second winter
In the welfare duplex when the oil heat ran out
I’m seven and then it is twenty years later
I sit in the innocuous green of late summer what use am I
I am the one who is unfolding in full view
For no one
In particular
I rested one foot on the curb, the other
On the roof of the world’s mouth
Than myself
This is
Too large
High beams along the dividing line of the highway
So I take my galvanic bath outdoors
To complicate any transmutable or derelict vowel
If even your forests abandon the crucible of self
And grow weary into a climax of fur
And Manitouwadge, Manitoba, Manitoulin in situ
And it is neither I nor the white of it or you
Who are yellow and black and gold
Orion
I guess
We all should have been born on a Tuesday
3. Careless
One night I dreamt a man cut
Off his foreskin and threw it at me
And then he cut off his testicles and threw them at me.
Gathering them up I said, “uh, should we go to the hospital?”
“No,” he said, indignant. “You’ll have to live with this.
For I have made my covenant with loss.”
There is all that I do not hold in a percept
There is no part I do not give away
There is no holding out for love
Take the ditch
Suddenly the entire
ness
Invented judgement
Timid enclaves
I am your champion
This is after all our inverted stronghold of need
Let it taste you
Is it really necessary for me to say anything what is it necessary for me to say
I don’t know anything I have no referent give it up that largesse all that stuff
In the after of
How can I subsume my design?
I can I do not I who cannot subsume my design?
All creatures here sing or reek of subjectivity
It is the marrow of the shift
It is the marrow of the shift of how the present is never truncated enough for taste
I do not apologize I do not reflect
Only signify with each tenant toward the mammal’s being a percept
If only
The knapsack forsaken the antacid left astray
I can’t carry it all
Singularly
As I repurpose several ungodly stomachs for cud which is to say
Intention
The counteraction is my splendid tile work
The orator unspools from each tendon some ghastly new
We have it in the bag of civilized content
We are in a season a season surrounds us the season is the dominant narrative I had
A dream to this effect
I place my foot in the frame of a vehicle
I place my foot into the frame of a vehicle in motion and become predisposed to loving
Whatever really couldn’t
Care less
