More from Equations (Thesis: Julie Hayes)

Time and sex: sex chronology is not linear. Sex and time are both conversant with strange leaps. It is the first day of the first class I will ever teach. Julie looks at me with big round black eyes, soulfully. She has long wavy black hair and her looks are dark, foreboding. We often want what wants us; Julie makes a habit of following me, from the classroom to the subway, from the subway to the Last Drop. As a student, she’s haphazard. What she teaches me is that when someone follows you, they can make you follow them; on the walk home from the Drop, I realize my mind is following her, into her apartment, onto her bed, underneath the sheets, underneath her folds, into her little stomach. But I can’t. So I let her follow me, knowing that this will lead (eventually) to a culminating moment. My hunger is for continuance. Julie wants the thrill of picking up a hot potato and dropping it back into the pot. But these early weeks are all titillation, so that every soulful look to me is the countenance of continuance, has endurance written into it. Is this my wife? Marriages have been initiated in stranger fashions. Julie is as pale as Marie, but much flintier, so I know strife will be a feature of my daily existence, after we are married. I think this as I stand before the class, discoursing on Chaucer, gazing at this little wife of Bath.

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The semester is over, almost. I am making a pact with Satan to get away with this. It is all fine and feisty as I bite the bullet, walk the knife edge, get in touch with my renegade parts. But I never lose sight of the hunger for permanence, which is by no means Julie’s. Her hunger is just to have what cannot be had, so that she can be a special person. Two hungers collide into nakedness, and neither seems to care that they don’t coalesce. We are separate via our separate hungers, and human in our desperate need to pursue them, singularly, and only marginally together. Her apartment is a mess, but with high ceilings, who cares? So we climb into our bed of separate hungers and square off. I learn nothing because I do not see what her hunger is. I think she’s just like me. Of course, she wants what I want. Of course, she thinks, he wants what I want, to do something to make himself a special person. What neither knows is that we’re both not special, we are both (and more than we realize), lusterless in our separate lusts. There is no innocence lost because raw hungers remain innocent until proven otherwise. You can pound away a hunger, but each thrust by no means puts you deeper into the other person. You move deeper into privations of private passions, unexpressed. But Julie looks so young and callow that I don’t notice these things. This, I think, is the beginning; but Julie has already become a special person, and wants a way out. We sleep topless in the May heat.

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Something holds Julie back so that there can’t be too much of this. While I am with her, she controls everything, from my sensations to my destiny. She can bite me off, permanently cripple me, or please me if she wants. As master, she decides how much hunger she will or will not assuage. She uses her hands as well as her mouth, doing little twists like she’s learned to do from Internet porn. It’s delicious, my legs shake from the unbearable nature of the sensations. The problem is, she then freezes, which means she is deliberately effacing my most overwhelming pulses. So I come in her frozen, static mouth, with a sense of intense anti-climax, and I am too bashful to instruct her as to how to do this properly. Yet any woman who brings me to this must be a darling and an angel. Julie, this darling angel, stands on the threshold of womanhood, and her hunger is merely to control. There is no sense of service, and since we are in my apartment there is no sense of comfort for her. What she wants to take home with her is a sense of having bested me. As she gazes at my closed eyes and opened mouth, there is (I imagine now) a sense of bitterly held contempt for my weakness, my humanity. We never fuse our different stupidities, so that I see no depths in those rounded eyes of jet, and she knows that she has now gotten what she wants from me; there is no more specialness.

© Adam Fieled 2011

More from The Argotist Online (poetry archive)

WHAT WE ARE MISSING

Within a rhizomatic structure
having accepted the orchid of immanence
in its sole— one life— present
knots and knots abound & intensify
reflected on the carefully drawn & cut facets
of the transparent topaz,

from apocalypse to resurgence
from maelstroeming downward movements
to enlightened atemporal breaks
an outside timetable diligently recorded
on scraps of paper/ pocketbooks/ agendas,
collected in tel. #/ email addresses,
grants an order or madness,
stress or a safe ground on which to gather
the body without organs

a tired Santa Claus
with a burdensome bag on his shoulders
or a clumsy diver with oxygen bottles,
an astronaut stumbling on the barren surface of the moon
or a Michelin man stuck on the roof of a building,
we think we are thinking
we think we are overlooking towns

bodies and bodies
ants in the traffic
blindly rushing
without perception.

© Anny Ballardini 2006

From The Argotist Online

FLOUNDERING BY THE PREACHING OF THE WORD
(Radio Edit)

I. The Bird That Never Flew

Nothing as sophisticated as a copper clip,
nothing that could be reversed, poor bird:
it was plucked at birth.

Wee bald hatchling, what chance?
What chance did it ever have?
Even the fattest, most languid cat
could’ve trapped it under cruel claw.

What chance? Its caged-bird song
plaintive as foghorns
strained from the Clyde’s forgotten dawn,
melancholy with dull dreams
of washing days and tenement greens.

Oh dearie me. Oh me, oh my!
Puir wee chookie bird couldnae fly.

II. The Bell That Never Rang

Cracked and choked with city soot
this bell is mute,
witless in senile silence:
a belly full of bitter bile.

What use a voice as clear as cymbals
if the heart’s too dark to love?
What use calling up the faithless
to hear the preaching of the word?

III. The Tree That Never Grew

This is no dear green place
but a wasteland
of broken concrete blocks,
with barbed wire strands
blowing like streamers
in the wind.

And this tree is no tree
but a petrified, withered stump,
without branches, without leaves,
its bark, frost-bled,
scored with a cross-hatch
of angry slogans.

The pope
and also, inevitably,
the queen,
and so the acronyms
of these warring tribes
grow, like fungus.

No wonder
this tree never grew.
How could anything flourish
under such leaden skies?

IV. The Fish That Never Swam

Bloody river,
bloody river of this city’s undoing
with your bloody history
of shipbuilding and conquest,
of slavery and theft,
all dressed up
in the tarnished gilt
of imperial majesty:

your dereliction is a plague
visited by the gods
upon all your daughters and sons.

Syphilitic river, no wonder
no fish ever swam
in your poisonous waters.

© Dee Rimbaud 2005

From Eyewear

AMARYLLIS CANADIAN TIRE

Near the return and exchange desk
the sink drain blare of Cash 11, Manager to Cash 11,
bulb-split amraryllises,
petals halogen rusted, garden bulimic,
stand sturdy in clay cups
while the mats at the automatic door grow streamy
with boot tracked snow, slush.

Ski coats shift sibilation,
each down-plump body
maneuvering the card table,
careful not to catch a leaf
above sparkle-glue bijouteries,
outsized flanges and piano hinges.

Amaryllis—
dismissed amid vulcanized rubber
boxing day sale perfume—
an ostentatious widow
price shopping at the discount tire.

© Tammy Armstrong 2006

From Siren's Silence (Volume 2 Number 3)

GIRL IN A BOX

I’m a girl in a box, yup, that’s me, here I sit seven hours a day, five days week in a chemical fog, peering out of the windows of my glass box, my 12-by-12 crystal cage, a caged girl with a painted porcelain face contorted in a Revlon death mask I sculpt daily from cosmetics I shoplifted from Rite-Aid, under my cleopatra sex goddess wig that glints glossy and unreal under the neon lights where I turn and burn into crystal, into a glass mummy who rots the minutes and hours away in the girlie zoo, wrapped in swaddling lacy underthings, moon drunk from the bee-stings that cover my arms, sometimes nodding but mostly awake staring at myself with mascara eyes that smolder in the mirror and day-dreaming under the glare of the red bulb that illuminates my cell, imprisoned by the 24-hour stare of the crimson sun that never sets and follows each orgasm I fake, a sun that mocks me as I pose in the window where I watch each anonymous man tread the wax floors munching on candy bars or smoking cigarettes as they gawk, all of us good girl animals of Al’s Triple XXX theater who smirk and tap on the windows with fat knuckles begging choose me! choose me! Not me. I wait, the queen bee with my dope-sick patience, well-trained, house broken, my mirror me watching, freezing into a wicked wicked witch baby, a white-trash ice-queen, eyeing Dee-dee, the fake redhead cokehead in the booth across from me with basilick eyes as she strikes her syphilitic supermodel pose from better and younger days, beckoning with her yen sigh and spacey eyes, her rolls of fat becoming lazy, voluptuous as she wraps her boa around herself taut like a telephone wire, communicating something nobody will ever hear.

SLAM! the metal door bangs shut on the other side of my box, Italian shoes scuffling on the floor of my crypt, knocking on the window. He chose me. I hear him cursing, fiddling in frustration with the money box in the darkened chamber, shoving a deuce up the slot of the little black box on the other side of the confessional, this little black electronic box that bleeps SESSION and devours the dollars of the hard-working American men, the harvest of truckers and mobsters and lawyers, swallows up all the capitalist secrets and lies of the young white punks, the middle-aged black guys with their SSI checks, the ancient Asian men who tremble when they cum, the cool-ass, cracked Latino men, and your occasional slobbering drunken yuppie couple, in one greedy, democratic gulp, because this is America, dammit, and we’re all free to exploit ourselves as long as we don’t step on somebody else’s turf, but the shutter is sliding up and so much for politics because there he is, standing there, middle-aged causcoid knight with thinning hair, big nose and pervert glasses that hide his x-ray eyes that burn through the glass wall that separates us, his hands stuffed in a green L.L. Bean jacket that his wife probably got him last christmas, trying to smile but obviously scared shitless of me, the whore, flicking my smoke and dropping dirty glitter on the palace floor and believe it or not I’m actually feeling a little sorry for this poor schmuck, this burn-out insurance salesman type who stands there looking a little dumb and a little fat at me, his slum queen, slumming it up at Al’s on this beautiful sunny afternoon.

© Jeanine Campbell 1998

P.F.S.: Symbolists and Hallucinogenics (Part 1)

Nineties heritage, as it could start from State College, works under the aegis of what was being imbibed by the kiddies— not uppers or downers (that much), but hallucinogenics. Many nights in the mid-to-late Nineties, the Nineties revolution in State College was a revolution-in-consciousness around skewered perspectives, visionary trances, and painterly firmaments. State College was and is serviced, in this respective, by something beneath the surface which illuminates the entirety of Happy Valley, and central Pennsylvania— a mystique emanating from Mother Nature herself, around a sense of earth magic resonating from the greener areas in and around State College. Nature breathes there. Hallucinogens heighten the sense of ecstasy and fulsomeness bestowed by greenery on the place.

No joke that, on the syllabus for true Nineties State College hipsters, a place was made for the French Symbolist poets of the nineteenth century— Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Verlaine. Hipsterism, in an era of turmoil, balanced imperatives other than just popular music and parties— reading culture in State College wasn't nothing. Other than the philosophy texts I was studying, up to and including Kant and over to the Deconstructionists (philosophy was my major at PSU, and my philosophy credits did transfer over to Penn), the heaviest lit in my brain were the Symbolists, who took all of our sense of being on trips and navigating mind-scapes and articulated what we couldn't, yet.

So, the lot of us had not just a sense of a soundtrack for our adventures— we had texts which meant something to us, which were also conduits to our personal (and collective) revolutions. The poem from Something Solid, Season in Hell: White Candle takes, and places this set of circumstances on the table for all to see. Rimbaud, in his masterwork, enacts an interior process in text of complete personal revision and revolution of self. My poem takes what was already transformative and makes it do double-time, enumerating not only a personal revolution but a revolution pertaining to the rigors of early marriage. Marriage and Rimbaud are not naturally simpatico; but the Nineties sense of unlikely juxtapositions (including State College's game of class-confounding) take, and make the contingencies which serve the poem resonate to a Symbolistic frequency. Such is one pertinent manifestation of Nineties-ism. Other, similar early work, like Room 510 Atherton Hilton, The dawn broke over our bodies, and Song for Maria, takes Symbolist impulses and radically eroticizes them, working along a vibe axis of enchantment/damnation, searching for a potent voice still youthful, still casual (if passionate), in heaven/hell. If something or someone was supposed to be inhibiting our creativity, they failed.  

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On a more practical note: State College in the 90s was very strange. It should've been that, being an artist and coming from a background steeped in the arts, I would feel uncomfortable and disoriented there. After all, the public associate State College and Penn State with football, Joe Paterno, and little else. Granted, PSU State College is a high-ranking school with several outstanding departments (including continental philosophy, which was my major), but its image or "face to the world" is all about athletics. It's just that I didn't find State College that limiting. There was an active underground scene in the arts in the 90s, which included inspired participants, and which gave the place some real vitality.

I moved to State College in '94 without formalizing any plans to do theater or anything theater related. I had spent the summer of '92 at Carnegie Mellon doing pre-college for acting, but it hadn't led anywhere. What theater at PSU had going that I was intrigued with was a weekly series of plays, written by students and graduate students and produced by them too: Outlaw Playwrights. By the spring of '95, I was actively writing plays, because the outlet to have them produced was there. By the the spring of '99 (I had left a script in late '98 once I'd moved to NYC), I'd had four one-acts produced.

State College had an active indie rock scene, too. Summer in State College in the 90s can't have been that much different than Athens, Georgia in the early 80s. The whole town was slowed down. Everyone involved in State College Indie lived in a room in a house and there were house parties all the time. What State College needed, but never got, was an R.E.M., to be a flagship bearer from State College to the world. There were candidates; the best and most popular candidate was a band of which every member was a local icon. They were musically great and very muscular (and as classicist about musical quality as early R.E.M.) but no one in the band could sing. If this band had had a Michael Stipe, the whole movement in State College would've come to the surface much faster.

People were fucking. To the extent that some arts scenes in America have problems with this, State College didn't. The sexual mores were pretty blase about faithfulness and seriousness, too. This extended even to life on campus; North Halls was considered the "artsy" set of dorms, and I lived there for a long time. The idea of doing pick-up routines, hanging around playing music and smoking pot, and grooving on what you were going to do in the arts when you "grew up" was de rigueur. What was important was that you could live on campus if you were an artist and still not starve to death spiritually. We all absorbed the 90s ethos, which amounted to a more tortured and world-weary version of the 60s. And most of us listened to the same music. Nirvana weren't too big in State College: Smashing Pumpkins, Radiohead, Sonic Youth, Guided by Voices, the Flaming Lips were all massive. I got into Nick Drake and Big Star on the side. Brit-Pop, particularly Blur, was around.

How did we relate to the football shenanigans? We didn't. We simply acted as if they weren't happening. In North Halls, on South Atherton Street, on West College, you could get away from that crap, and really do it, and mean it. Although visiting East Halls was always a fun education on what it meant to live on the dark side of things.

I enjoyed my philosophy classes, and did well in them. They were a handful of other courses I liked. If I often flaked out on Gen Ed requirements, it's because I was a flake in many ways in those days. Philosophy engaged me; other than that, my mind was possessed by the arts. Or  intoxicants. By 1997, they were coffeeshops in State College where, if you knew the right people, you could buy gooballs over the counter. Or smoke a joint openly sitting out in the cafe. Bohemia, and the scandals in it. Bohemia styled, also, in a down-home mode for central Pa.  

The last six months I spent in State College in '98 were the happiest. It was a bacchanal to match anything in Philly, Chicago, NYC or DC. And if no one in the wider world knew or cared that it was happening, we were too young to notice or fret that this was the case. We'd get to that later.