Poem-A-Day #355 : Acid

Acid

Glass

A steady fall

Sound of cue ball
breaking

Steady lights in the eye

Here comes the wave
of flesh

Pop of shoulder

Purple fingers
shaking truth

Poem-A-Day #334 : New Shoes

New Shoes

The website is selling shoes - highlights thinness of the sole
color of variety - daily dance in neon for $60

Imagine toes into them - tightness of new a swaddle across arch
that leather fresh rubber - moment of paper in toe

Putting the shoes on - sock of ground beneath - sudden support

Safety is - a broken pair - foam cracked burned
rounded into parody of a clown

How aches the back in those things - how creeps the body
for $60 made in Americas you too can walk the streets in glowing style

Thinness and feeling renewed - the opening of eyes -

Classic Wasp Trainer - Gola

Poem-A-Day #315 : Romance #201

Romance #201

                    Blah
     Blah
               Blah

Sound of hearts pretending they're disinterested

The music of an anime getting started

I want to tell you I will hold you until you bleed
and that this will make you take your clothes off

The tongue is stupid
                                      yellow
                                                       a lie in a bath of goo

I will tell you a joke and you will laugh it off
and no one will pretend that it isn't a kind of sex

We fall down a well do we get news papers noticing us

Maybe if we profess in front of the temple

Maybe if the notes rupture like bubbles

Poem-A-Day #256 : Migraine

Migraine

                    My head is a burning sigil -

                                        Cloth in a bottle -

     Words form and then spread across the page until they are a smear -

                             Listen to the broken vials of pain meds -

                                                   Light will shatter -

                    Pop all the vessels in the universe -

                                       Cover and run from this -

Poem-A-Day #10 : Fragile

Fragile

      At the counter the man was bleeding had on dark glasses was holding himself in a way to make him invisible but he was clearly there he fumbled his wallet and struggled to see through the swollen eye and finally took his glasses off

      He said he got jumped


      At the counter the man was mumbling incoherent was probably drunk his clothes looked like they slept in a gutter he was picking at a large oozing wound on his arm the skin was turning white around the edges there was a smell of death in the room

      He said he was bitten by a brown recluse


      At the counter the man tried to say 'coffee' but his voice caught in its throat and rattled he managed to order but spilled it on the floor his head was wrapped again and again and again in white gauze his eye was shot through with red his face was purple

      He didn't say anything

Poem-A-Day #3 : bee sting

bee sting

          the red
      shoulder      the shoulder
where the red      hold
my hand I'm scared

          hold the red
      parts of my shoulder      in your hands
cup them      like tea sandwiches
overpriced and crustless

          my hand      slipping
      beneath my shirt
grabbing      at the knot of flesh
the animals keening endlessly

          where the bees
      in winter      go to red shoulder
drive off the edge of it
continue into a field of where

Abreaction

Artists interpretation of visual 'prodrome'.

1.
I get headaches with startling regularity.


2.
Yesterday, as we were getting ready for bed, I turned to J and mentioned that I hadn't had one in over a week.

Not one since I got back to New Mexico after Christmas.

Not one while away for Christmas.

The regularity of my headaches is something I have come to expect. To understand and hate. I get them, I deal as I can. I always have Advil on hand.

I carried a big bottle of those oddly candy-coated brown pills in my bag everywhere in NY. I have one in my cabinet here in NM.

Advil was the first over-the-counter ibuprofen. Introduced in the US in 1984. It was available by prescription from 1974 onwards. Before 1974 it was only available in the UK and Europe. It was discovered by the research wing of Boots in the early 1960s.


3.
Boots was founded in 1849 by John Boot in Nottingham.

In June 2012 Boots announced the purchase of a 45% stake in the company by Walgreens. The plan is to introduce Boots to the US and Walgreens to the UK and China.

The two companies have signed a deal to merge within 3 years. The deal will cost Walgreens $16bn.

Walgreens was founded in 1901 by Charles R. Walgreen, Sr. in Chicago.


4.
The halo, or prodrome, before onset is a well-documented effect. Everyone is a little different. I have strange visual artifacts and a pressure that can only be described as 'skull heaviness'. It is like I can feel the weight of the bone around my brain.

My brain weighs about 3 lbs. with a volume around 1260 cm3. The skull on average weighs about 2.2 lbs.

Science has no answers for what 'causes' migraines. Dodick and Gargus call them 'increased excitability of the cerebral cortex and abnormal control of pain neurons in the trigeminal nucleus of the brainstem.' in their  2008 Scientific American article Why Migraines Strike.

Basically it is your brain loosing control of itself.

Control is the problem.

Migraines make it so I can't go outside, can't read, can't eat. They turn me into a person who sleeps all day. The make me pop pills like candy.

Using the verb 'strike' is appropriate. Migraines feel like they have lives of their own. Depending on the person they will arrive and depart in different ways. I know about a day before when I'm going to get one. After, it feels as if there's a soft spot on the left side of my head.

A fading bruise, the moisture after a kiss.


5.

There is a Walgreens in the background of this photo from VJ Day.

6.
From the OED:

abreaction, n.

Pronunciation: Brit. /ˌabrɪˈakʃn/ , U.S. /ˌæbriˈækʃ(ə)n/

Etymology: < ab- prefix + reaction n., after German †Abreagiren (J. Breuer & S. Freud Studien über Hysterie (1895) iv. 233; now Abreagieren ), use as noun of †abreagiren (see abreact v.). Compare French abréaction (1913). Compareabreact v.

Psychiatry.

Discharge of the emotional energy associated with a psychic trauma that has been forgotten or repressed; the process of bringing such a trauma back to consciousness, esp. as a psychotherapeutic technique; an instance of this.


7.

I awoke with a migraine.

I had none of the usual clues to its arrival. No visual fuckery. No weight on my head.

I felt light-headed yesterday. Felt under the weather.

I thought I was getting the flu.

The last two months have been stressful. A move, unemployment, etc. Perhaps this is just all of that catching up. Filling out the empty spaces where my mind was occupied with a job, with New York's never-endingness.

Perhaps it was just a migraine.

Quick Side Note:
Treehouse has a rundown of the Best In Journals 2012.

Confessions of a Mask

To the left is Yukio Mishima. He is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. Nominated three times for the Nobel. He was an author, poet, playwright, actor, and director.

Mishima was born in 1925 and died in 1970, aged 45.

He was committed to bushido, the samurai code, and fancied himself a modern vision of that tradition. His writing is full of this 'chivalry' code, as well as death and sex.

Due to the following of the code, Mishima was incredibly fit. Which is putting it mildly.

He is remembered for his writing, his obsession with anachronistic concepts of manhood, and his death. He and four other men staged a coup attempt on November 25, 1970. After locking themselves in a government office Mishima delivered a speech to the army below. They mocked him. He went back into the room and committed seppuku, ritual suicide.

The obsession with death played out in his books. Specifically, Confessions of a Mask (1949).

In that book we follow a young boy who feels 'different' from childhood to his early 20s. The book is told as interior monologue. We are given the boys thoughts on life and his friends and family.
Mostly we are told that he loves suffering. The closer to being noble, or pure, the better. He also talks at length of masturbation, his 'habit'. And that he seems to only find working class men attractive. An early scene has him watching a man taking away bails of human waste. The boy becomes obsessed with the man's pants and white shirt. With the stink of work. Of sweaty bodies.

Later the boy finds a painting of Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni and basically falls in love with the image.

Mishima's book is called a novel. It is called an autobiographical novel. But I'm pretty sure it is as close to memoir as you can get. He was known to frequent gay bars, his wife was aware of it. His family sued to stop Jiro Fukushima publishing letters between the two authors of their affair. And there's this photo, part of a set, of Mishima taken before the coup attempt.

I'm not saying that posing as St. Sebastian makes you gay, but it certainly draws a thicker line between the author and his character.

Rumors swirl that the coup was an elaborate performance on Mishima's part. That it had been planned for years as a sort of perfect, beautiful, tragic finale. All through Confessions the character discusses his eventual death. Always at a young age, always dramatic. When it doesn't come, he starts to shut off his emotions. To form the 'mask' of the title.

After a failed visit to a brothel he finds himself at a party staring at the white thigh of a woman:

"...I was struck by the astringent pain that come from staring too long at something. The pain proclaimed: You're not human. You're a being who is incapable of social intercourse. You're nothing but a creature, non-human and somehow strangely pathetic."

Going from the book a portrait rises of a man who created his own cage. Afraid to exist, and concerned with 'correctness' to a degree that he beat bordered on obsessive he became a caricature of a man. Physically fit, adhering to a romantic ideal that never existed, and dying tragically.

The closet as performance. Society as stage.

Suspensory

Suspensory 6/18

There is anger in my shoulder it is floating and the shape of a hand-mirror like a fish or frog it manages to never be caught and like those soft mucus animals the little boy in me wants to smash it to orange pulp