October 2011
From "Pole Dancer" by Andrea Gibson
“The key to finding love
is fucking up the pattern on purpose
is skipping a stitch,
is leaving a tiny, tiny hole to let the cold in
and hoping she mends it with your lips.”
Sweet Tooth
You’re clinging to me, hanging on by a tiny thread of festering flesh, and instead of yanking you out, I just keep touching you with the tips of my fingers, gingerly running my tongue over you, tasting your warm, salty rot, and letting you stay. I’m hoping that someday you’ll just fall out on your own, and I won’t have to feel that godawful rip—the one where my skin snaps and you take a little piece of me with you when you go. I don’t want any get-it-over-with tricks, no slammed doors, no swift jerk to get you out quick and leave me with a mouthful of blood. I don’t want a professional poking at me, pumping me full of godknows, and putting me under; I don’t want to wake up hours later, swollen and stinging with a bill to pay. I don’t want my friends trying to help, telling me to tear at you like you were a band-aid, trying to take the matters of my mouth into their hands. I don’t want them icing my wound. I don’t want there to be a wound. I just want to lose you as gently as possible. I just want to wake up one morning to find that you’ve packed up your decay and gone. I don’t care if I swallow you, so long as I can’t feel it. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, just don’t let it hurt.
Play
Lit (or: to the scientist I am not speaking to any more)
Don’t say you didn’t see this coming, Jason.
Don’t say you didn’t realize this would be my reaction
and that you never intended for me to get all worked up,
because if that were true, then you are dumber
than Lenny from Mice and Men, blinder than Oedipus
and Tiresias put together and can feel less
than a Dalton Trumbo character.
You put the Dick in Dickens and the Boo in kowski
and are more Coward-ly then Noël.
But you don’t understand any of these references,
Do you, Jason? Because you ‘don’t read’.
You are a geology major and you once told me
That, ‘Scientists don’t read popular literature,
Cristin, we have more important things to do’.
Well, fuck you.
Be glad you don’t read, Jason,
because maybe you won’t understand this
as I scream it to you on your front lawn,
on Christmas Day, brandishing three hypodermic needles,
a ginsu knife and a letter of permission
from Bret Easton Ellis.
Jason, you are more absurd than Ionesco.
You are more abstract than Joyce,
more inconsistent than Agatha Christie
and more Satanic than Rushdie’s verses.
I can’t believe I used to want to Sappho you, Jason.
I used to want to Pablo Neruda you,
to Anais Nin And Henry Miller you. I used to want
to be O for you, to blow for you in ways
that even Odysseus’ sails couldn’t handle.
But self-imposed illiteracy isn’t a turn-on.
You used to make fun of me being a writer,
saying ‘Scientists cure diseases,
what do writers do?’
But of course, you wouldn’t understand, Jason.
I mean, have you ever gotten an inner thirsting
for Zora Neale Hurston?
Or heard angels herald for you
to read F Scott Fitzgerald?
Have you ever had a beat attack for Jack Kerouac?
The only Morrison you know is Jim, and you think
you’re the noble one?
Go Plath yourself.
Your heart is so dark, that even Joseph Conrad
couldn’t see it, and it is so buried under bullshit
that even Poe’s cops couldn’t hear it.
Your mind is as empty as the libraries in Fahrenheit 451.
Your mind is as empty as Silas Marner’s coffers.
Your mind is as empty as Huckleberry Finn’s wallet.
And some people might say that this poem
is just a pretentious exercise
in seeing how many literary references
I can come up with.
And some people might complain that this poem is,
at its core, shallow, expressing the same emotion again,
and again, and again. (I mean, there are only so many times
you can articulate your contempt for Jason,
before people get bored.)
But you know what, Jason? Those people would be wrong.
Because this is not the poem I am writing to express
my hatred for you.
This poem is the poem I am writing because we aren’t speaking,
and it is making my heart hurt so bad, it is all I
can do just to get up off the floor sometimes.
And this is the poem I am writing instead of writing
the ‘I miss having breakfast with you’ poem, instead of
writing the ‘Let’s walk dogs in our old schoolyard
again’ poem.
Instead of the ‘How are you doing?’ poem, the ‘I miss you’ poem,
the ‘I wish I was making fun of how much you like Garth
Brooks while sitting in front of your parents’ house
in your jeep’ poem, instead of the ‘Holidays are coming around
and you know what that means: SUICIDE!’ poem.
I am writing this so that I can stop wanting to write
the ‘I could fall in love with you again so quickly
if only you would say one more word to me’ poem.
But I am tired of loving you, Jason
cause you don’t love me right.
And if some pretentious-ass poem can stop me
From thinking about the way your laugh sounds,
about the way your skin feels in the rain,
about how I would rather be miserable with you,
then happy with anyone else in the world.
If some pretentious-ass poem can do all that?
Then I am gone with the wind, I am on the road,
I have flown over the fucking cuckoo’s nest,
I am gone, I am gone, I am gone.
I am.
— Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz
“Love, she felt, ought to come at once, with great thunderclaps and flashes of lightning; it was like a storm bursting upon life from the sky, uprooting it, overwhelming the will and sweeping the heart into the abyss. It did not occur to her that the rain forms puddles on a flat roof when drainpipes are clogged, and she would have continued to feel secure if she had not suddenly discovered a crack in the wall.”
—Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Your post on sexuality is interesting. I was wondering where you'd place Asexuality? Is it still an unnecessary label? It seemed like you were thinking from the standpoint that everyone has the same basic sexual needs.
I don’t think that everyone has the same basic sexual needs, I just think that everyone’s needs are subject to change as they grow and change and that sexuality/desire are things that are too complex for labels. That post is sort of old. It was more of a figuring things out, getting ideas out post. I should probably make a more updated one. I understand why people like labels (especially at this point in time when anything deviating from heterosexuality is still seen as taboo by many) because they provide a sense of community and a sense of identity that can really be helpful to someone struggling to understand their sexuality and to understand how they fit in with everyone else. I just hope that eventually people will accept that sexuality is something that can never be understood 100%, and its complexity, its changeability, its mystery, are part of existing as a human that grows, learns, and changes. I don’t think that sexuality is something that can be explained away with a few broad terms, and I don’t like the idea of putting humans (incredibly complex beings) in neat little boxes based on their desires because the nature of desire itself often isn’t something that can be pinned down or explained at all. I also think that the gender binary is bullshit and needs to be changed. People don’t always fit nicely into the categories of male and female, but those labels are still the norm because people are stuck on this incessant need to label others, to try and figure out other people with an easy word or two, when it’s just not possible.