As/Is







4.07.2025


Something Solid: Miscellaneous Sonnets: Frequencies


I.
“We’re at our most bestial when threatened not
with hatred but indifference; what our blood wants
is reaction of some kind.” New Hampshire night,
our own reaction, you pliant, penetrable, laid out beneath me as
flies fidgeted our room, pirouetted moist air, but
we sank beneath bestiality to do just what indifferently
we wanted, beneath our glut of blood, so the summoned
beasts might react with this: ripped limb from limb,
buried in low-lying Virginia swamp marsh, given what
aphorism is only got in extinction, darling, as I quote
what you said at the bar before. In other words, they
hated us. The one-night stand wouldn’t matter if your
brain didn’t have the right words in it: stories, sequences,
slammed-down metaphors of a singed self. Frequencies.

II.
As the world between her legs tightened around
her, what she saw in bed with me was stark: okra,
stamens, roots, all that in nature coalesces in erect
growth; and a shadow father bent, then erect, then
bent again, perverse from amassing wealth in a world
whose submissiveness poisons him. Beneath the sultry,
wooded surface, what I saw was a semi-frightened
animal, along for an all-night ride (gruesomeness of
4 a.m. New Hampshire sun), knife thusly thrusting
into the backs of everyone around her, managing
to have stamina enough against constraint to take
what she was taking. The mattress thumped: above,
an angel was unable to conceal laughter, understanding
it was all in the script, including the garish sun’s leer.








4.03.2025


Livid: The Kanzler Saga: Apparition Poem #1181


 


Just as you couldn’t paint but to vandalize, I had
the instinct to vandalize you, my love. To rough
you up. Because for you there could be no love,
I would assist you in understanding repercussions
could follow from games you thought were fun.
How your green eyes had a problem— you stared
at things too long. That wide-eyed stare, made it
so that (for example) no one could take you seriously
as swish at a first night. Or on First Fridays, as you
tried to swish towards a homing sense you were going
where you wanted to, your simian male friend at your
side. As I said, I wanted to rough you up. You could
never paint to be crisp, only smudged, so that Abby laughed
at how hard you worked to convey retardation (and succeeded).

I could never decide if, behind the wide-eyed stare,
what was there had any genuine innocence. It seemed
to me, to be honest, there was none. Your sense
of complete calculatedness in every respect is why,
how I now kneel before you, my round browns mingling
with your round greens, brown & green smudging each
other to determine advantages, now that the first nights,
First Fridays are all part of a distant past, the time’s come
to choose whether to live or die. I’ve decided to salvage
us. That’s crisp in me. You were crisp about the bed
part of it, for a while, so that I force red into your mix—