Hardship – Elizabeth Victoria Aldrich
April 4, 2020
gravel-surfing
‘cold hands, warm heart’ that’s what the Succubus told me.
stay with me; be my insufferable witness. this echo of a dream you don’t remember, it was just the long kiss i’m blowing you.
tell me a story, sex is motion
without the comfort of body
or familiar habits, without
the spoken mind, or hardened trust.
(still eyes.)
whirl me around in the dark once and don’t tell me
where to stop
whirl me around in the dark twice and i’ll turn
my insides out whirl me around in the dark thrice and i will show you
what keeps me up at night;
it’s a promise not worth keeping, but worth making
to break,
over and
over again.
(because there is no one else and there never will be.)
x
“what mirror is placed, determining the outcome?”
for 5 days and twice at nighttime i’ve been stretching myself on your unsayable name.
a lot of this untalkable, but not unthinkable; not unsayable. chock full of stupefaciants i can barely enunciate the mental shape of my first and ideal name. still acclimatizing to the drastic and vicious world-contraction; this is an abandonment shelter, an asylum for everyone’s Unwanted Neighbor. (every hospital is a foreign country, really.) sleep with one eye open to confuse the fuck out of everybody. morning sickness?
…rooting through the shambles, i’m erupting all over the place. tropical breeze of a long convalescence? HARDLY. so long! i’ve been in this polite little hellhole for 5? days now, been wrung through the humdrum malaise of the nightmare beaurocratic rigamorale we call The System, haven’t received ONE MINUTE OF ACTUAL THERAPY!!! don’t explain, don’t complain; right? you didn’t hear it from me.
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
INDESCRIBABLE PEACE & CONTENTMENT
oh yes;
repeat it like a mantra! think like a flea! clinging to found sounds, i have been so many pages exhausted bleeding to leave
x
the rapturously vapid
x
let’s be clear about one thing: there is no intimate knowledge to be imparted. i have wrapped up the story. it’s over, go home; good riddance, ravenous world!
there’s nothing more that needs saying–and you probably don’t understand what i’m saying anyway–but that’s cool ’cause i’m still saying it.
x
before we go quick until the still and then before the hereafter then again quick before the still never-thought still have quite still even the Then Before hereafter there are certain seconds of the day, but maybe not;
we are not the quick, we are not the still,
we are not even among the stillborn. they have not fashioned after us yet;
until then we anticipate the epigones. until then we return with swarms and armies, but we don’t invade. we sleep standing. we sleep standing by the phone, waiting for our own consciousness to visit us. a little seeping in of mind, a nightwind to invade or take off, an imperceptible glance. maybe, a shot in the dark.
(just enough to mind.)
x
reticent from the magic word, not the incredulous analogy of god, not nonsense, but metaphor as the shorthand of the gods, i have embraced my own metaphor. i have taken after myself, and so i will return; still knocking……
poetry as a means of placing the Void (the object–the origin, destination, and modifications of nothing), not framing experience or interpreting a new grammar of mentation. poetry: living theory of a salient, indelible and oft-repeating personal-untruth, that truth that is There Is No Truth to be told; this is the quiet essence of sentient distress: so long as we are simply describing, we are prostrate before time, we are not there. (we are not yet there.)
the snare of time has you all, meanwhile i have made my exits.
i have made my exits.
stay with me; be my insufferable witness.
(lucky I, lucky I, i am one of a constellation of lucky stars, sick children, we wish upon Ourselves.)
x
i have found that ignorance (read: lying) is the best policy, surely you agree.
be unsufferable. i will be too.
x
i will always be an untouchable, a firebreather; the unnamed party occupying your thoughts. even when my face has lost its illusions, its resonance and lustre; even when my words come out slurred and i can’t control my shakes, when i have trackmarks on my helplines. i am merely doing the bidding of my future ghost, i am venting my grievances, and i am redressing my shame. i am my world, and this world is one of many; i’m a sotto voce aside in tongues.
(you cannot unhear what i am saying, and i will not raise my falling voice for you.)
x
how can you implement deterrents
when you don’t have a body to practice on
when you don’t have a positive sense; not of self, time, memory, identity, origin
or even common courtesy.
?
stay with me; be my insufferable witness. this echo of a dream you don’t remember, it was just the long kiss i’m blowing you.
i’m afraid it is as simple as it never was as in as it is it’s really is over, that there is nothing left to say.
i’m not obsessed, and it’s one of my main priorities;
to allow deep regret to exculpate my sentimental lack of obsession in what i don’t understand, nor am required to.
if i had the wherewithal for regret !
instead i will lay in bed and smoke cigarettes
pack after pack
and it doesn’t matter who picks my brain next
whatever’s left, you can keep it
my name is my expiry date; expiatory date
every time you call out my name
part of me falls off, it’s brainrot and a plea to be
redeemed
a deal i don’t want any part of!
just take me home, any home, the place you call home
put me in a shoebox
and never say a word, i promise i won’t cry
i breathe too much.
promise.
stay with me; be my insufferable witness. this echo of a dream you don’t remember, it was just the long kiss i’m blowing you.
I wish I never met you. I’m glad I did.
i swallow.
One must know that one is not in order to be able to understand that we are.
–wei wu wei
so there is no me,
impasse
per se, que sera sera
i am not moving, i am movement itself
et cetera, et cetera
and you have no idea how boring it is
how unappetizing it is
to have no desires, except to recover
the end you never had, mint the dream you never dared.
in the ancient civilization of the Indus valley it was a rite of passage to accost strangers and subject them to a litany of bewildering, circular riddles, after which they were promptly sacrificed–regardless of the integrity of their answers. (in this tribulation of courage before certain destruction, ‘faith in god’ is always Good Reasons.)
there is no me
there is no me
there is no participation in any process
observed or non/
teleological or without merit
the eternal return without ever actually arriving
because we get lost and hung-up on the inbetweens
and it’s been ages since i was Instantiated
even late, it’s been forever since i was harvested
starving, an insatiablility with nerves, i was plyed with Seroquel
i am going under
i am going under now
and i am not coming back up
and i will not have any visitors, i will not be presided over,
not even behind my one-way conscience will i have answers.
answers are all i’ve had; all i’ve asked for, all i’ve lived for, hungry or undreamt. or the midmorning abacadraba tripping over that double exposure, the seminal word of ‘No’.
(there is a vault that has yet to be officiated, yet to be made public, articulated.
and i know inside that vault there is no darkness.
the darkness comes before, the darkness that i know
ancient endogenous primordial ventral night, deadly adversary and rescuer
the darkness that will never cross my path because i have become much too much
i have moved beyond the vibration of sound, and even the less tendentious flutterings of certain destiny: that thoughts have equals, that one can displace or supplant another. i live on one thought now: one singular notion, a notion totally empty, with no hope of ever being filled or overturned.)
it is just a brain.
i am just a machine.
doing what i’m told.
don’t tell me.
i’ve already gone to my room.
i am already under the covers.
we are entangled, you and i
unseen beneath
like some secret predator
like some amorphous and all-pervasive, unintelligible
fate!
or threat!
i am going under now
and i am not coming back