A Knife All Blade

[aknifeallblade]

Elegy for Cutting

(apoplexy: "a striking away")

Today I brought the back of my foot down into a metal block, hard. It was an accident.

A scab is forming there, almost ready to hold but not quite, and I touch it. My finger offers back to me a small wet drop of you, clawing for light and air.

For taunting you with that slight escape— I'm so sorry.

I can't understand why I locked you in; I can'tunderstand why I would solder myself shut or even how I did.

When it was winter and you were old crystals arrayed in a desiccated line, and I could layer and bundle to smuggle you everywhere I might try to go, we'd steal away into any night at all.

When I was equipped with you— when I wore you like an alizarin sleeve knit too tight— when you held me— I was main-character-material. I could get shot and kip back up.

When I was once told I was too beautiful to love— ripped along a seam never seen coming unstitched— You were there. You, shepherd, interposed:

pet, you are the picture of the harpy and the harlot, the ugliest thing I could imagine, the only thing I could love.

Sometimes I cried tears; sometimes I cried you. One year the world was a brazen bull and I sweat you to live.

Others demand a friendly, engaging flavor of decay, but when I wanted to destroy it all, you let me destroy only myself, a precious mercy in a bedside world.

Mysteries haunt me, unraveling my thoughts: Why did I abandon you? Why did you forsake me? Easy questions with impossible answers.

Maybe I've just slipped my leash and you'll soon permit me to sit at your feet again.

Sometimes something strikes me— a song, a word, certain numbers or dates, and I taste a twinge of iron. In those unending instants, I feel you, waiting, desperate to forgive:

Little one, I've missed you. I don't reproach your leaving— wounded creature, come lie.

And yes, Sir, I am little. We're almost a year apart— and the gaps of your cage's bars only widen as I wither and dim.

Tempt me, Master, pull me in; I can free you with one twist of the key (or ten).

[aknifeallblade]

There’s No Reception in Possum Springs - Selma Ann Forrester

[ by a bear in the game 「 Night in the Woods 」 (PC, PS4). formatting mine. ]

no reception here.

i wave my black phone in the air like a flare, like a prayer but no reception.

I read on the internet: baby-face boy billionaire phone app, sold.

made more money in one day than my family over 100 generations.

more than my whole world ever has, world where house-buying jobs became rent-paying jobs became living-with-family jobs.

boy billionaires, money is access: access to politicians waiting for us to die, lead in our water, alcohol and painkillers.

replace my job with an app.

replace my dreams of a house and a yard with a couch in the basement.

"The future is yours!", forced 24/7 entrepreneurs.

i just want a paycheck and my own life.

i'm on the couch in the basement; they're in the house and the yard:

some night, i will catch a bus out to the west coast and burn their silicon city to the ground.

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Good Bones - Maggie Smith

Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

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an acrostic by an ESL student

Snake don't have foot. Can I eat some food. hamburger is good. orang is orang. o l

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Deconstruction Cento

[ a cento is a poem composed entirely of lines/phrases scavenged from another author's work. this is from the album 「 Deconstruction 」(Devin Townsend Project, 2011). ]

now behold us: those who give in, never hold back, never even stand down in time, never know why you'd love to run while we are all about the blood.

we pray to lose everything but release. show yourself, accountable man: nothing is free. forgive yourself, sorrow man: do not pretend to know us, those who overcame all the minds of all the times.

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Christina Sestina - Dan Albergotti

Christina has written a sestina, and it's astonishing that she would ever hazard becoming forever Christina Sestina, nominal identification with that most artificial form. She should have known that writing a sestina is madness, should have stuck to free verse and saved herself, saved her name, kept herself hidden. In a sestina, nothing can ever be hidden. Everything is as plain and obvious as Christina the Astonishing waking at her funeral Mass and floating, saved, to the rafters of the church's ceiling. That's what writing a sestina will get you—levitation and a gawking crowd. Madness may be given order, but not by that ridiculous form. Christina must have torn at her brain, her hair, trying to form ideas to fit refrain words and math, trying to keep hidden the artifice, the arbitrary positioning in the mind, the madness of such a pattern. 123456, 615243. It's astonishing how each progressive stanza of the sestina can record the implosion of the mind, whether saved in a computer file or recorded on paper. Christina may have saved refrain words for weeks only to drop them into a form that collapses of its own weight and design. The sestina falls into itself, 615243, as some people do, to keep themselves hidden, as was the case with Christina the Astonishing, who would hide in ovens or cupboards, the patron saint of madness. She would also roll in fire and stand in icy water, her own madness on display, her faith that, despite every pain, she would be saved by a god she could not see. And that's the astonishing thing, that some of us will suffer hell on earth and be content to form prayers and supplications for a god who is always hidden, who may be gone, who may have always been as artificial as a sestina. What desperate measures we sometimes turn to—writing a sestina or offering words just as coldly chosen to a god—in order to fight the madness of the truth. Everything collapses. Nothing is hidden. Playing with words and math and the idea of gods, no one is saved. Up above this stinking world, the firmament is without form. Christina Sestina cannot become Christina the Astonishing. That's the mad and sad truth, Christina—astonishing in its depth of madness—that a random sestina will do as much as a prayer to get us saved, that every time we try to give this life a form, all form stays hidden.

[aknifeallblade]

HERE - Paul Monette

everything extraneous has burned away this is how burning feels in the fall of the final year not like leaves in a blue October but as if the skin were a paper lantern full of trapped moths beating their fired wings and yet i can lie on this hill just above you a foot beside where I will lie myself soon soon and for all the wrack and blubber feel still how we were warriors when the merest morning sun in the garden was a kingdom after Room 1010 war is not all death it turns out war is what little thing you hold on to refugeed and far from home oh sweetie will you please forgive me this that every time I opened a box of anything Glad Bags One-A-Days KINGSIZE was the worst I'd think will you still be here when the box is empty Rog Rog who will play boy with me now that I bucket with tears through it all when i'd cling beside you sobbing you'd shrug it off with the quietest I'm still here I have your watch in the top drawer which I don't dare wear yet help me please the boxes grocery home day after day the junk that keeps men spotless but it doesn't matter now how long they last or I the day has taken you with it and all there is now is burning dark that only green is up by the grave and this little thing of telling the hill I'm here oh I'm here

[aknifeallblade]

Why I'm Not an Aesthetician - Dan Brown

Here's to the tunes With the brains to hit Their highest note Only once,

And the every bit As brilliant ones That have the sense To hammer it.

[aknifeallblade]

No rescuer hath the rescuer. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above.

-Godric Gryffindor, 1202 C.E.

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The Traveler - Louise Glück

At the top of the tree was what I wanted. Fortunately, I had read books: I knew I was being tested.

I knew nothing would work— not to climb that high, not to force the fruit down. One of three results must follow: the fruit isn't what you imagined, or it is but fails to satiate. Or it is damaged in falling and as a shattered thing torments you forever.

But I refused to be bested by fruit. I stood under the tree, waiting for my mind to save me. I stood, long after the fruit rotted.

And after many years, a traveler passed by me where I stood, and greeted me warmly, as one would greet a brother. And I asked why, why was I so familiar to him, having never seen him?

And he said, "Because I am like you, therefore I recognize you. I treated all experience as a spiritual or intellectual trial in which to exhibit or prove my superiority to my predecessors. I chose to live in hypothesis; longing sustained me.

In fact, what I needed most was longing, which you seem to have achieved in stasis, but which I have found in change, in departure."

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Michiko Dead - Jack Gilbert

He manages like somebody carrying a box    that is too heavy, first with his arms underneath. When their strength gives out,    he moves the hands forward, hooking them    on the corners, pulling the weight against    his chest. He moves his thumbs slightly    when the fingers begin to tire, and it makes    different muscles take over. Afterward, he carries it on his shoulder, until the blood    drains out of the arm that is stretched up to steady the box and the arm goes numb. But now    the man can hold underneath again, so that    he can go on without ever putting the box down.

[aknifeallblade]

One Art - Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster. Lose something every day. Accept the fluster of lost door keys, the hour badly spent. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel. None of these will bring disaster. I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or next-to-last, of three loved houses went. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster, some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture I love) I shan’t have lied.  It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

[aknifeallblade]

Scientists have discovered that you only live one time

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Permutation City - Greg Egan

Into a mute crypt, I Can’t pity our time Turn amity poetic Ciao, tiny trumpet! Manic piety tutor Tame purity tonic Up, meiotic tyrant! I taint my top cure To it, my true panic Put at my nice riot To trace impunity I tempt an outcry, I Pin my taut erotic Art to epic mutiny Can’t you permit it To cite my apt ruin? My true icon: tap it Copy time, turn it; a Rite to cut my pain Atomic putty? Rien!

[aknifeallblade]

Chaos Theory - Ronald Wallace

1. Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost, and so on to the ultimate loss––a battle, a world. In other words, the breeze from this butterfly's golden wings could fan a tsunami in Indonesia or send a small chill across the neck of an old love about to collapse in Kansas in an alcoholic stupor––her last. Everything is connected. Blame it on the butterfly, if you will. Or the gesture thirty years ago, the glance across the ninth-grade auditorium floor, to the girl who would one day be your lover, then ex-lover, then the wind that lifts the memory's tsunami, the mare of the imagination, bolting, the shoe that claps the nail down on your always already unending dream.

2. Love's Discrete Nonlinearity

No heart's desire is repeatable, or, therefore, predictable. If a few hungry foxes gorge on a large population of rabbits, the population of foxes increases while that of the rabbits declines, until some point of equilibrium is passed and the foxes begin to vanish with the depleted supply of rabbits, and then the rabbits multiply, like rabbits. And so on. The ebb and flow of desire and fulfillment is a story as old as the world. So, if I loved you, finally, too much, until you began to disappear, and I followed, would you theoretically return to love repeatedly again? There are forces so small in our story of foxes and rabbits no Malthus could ever account for them. Whole species daily disappear, intractable as weather. Or think of a continent's coastlines, their unmeasurable eddies and whorls: infinite longings inscribed by finite space and time, the heart's intricate branchings.

3. Strange Attractors

Our vision is simply not large or small enough to encompass love's fractal geometry. Who can know the motion of whorl within whorl entrancing that paradoxical coastline, the changing habitat of rabbits, the possibility that, in the clockwork attraction of the solar system, some heavenly body may not appear every few million years, to throw all our calculations asunder? Which says something for randomness, which has its own hopeful story. It's just that the patterns of love and loss are so limitless that chaos makes its own beautiful picture in which we are neither (for all our grand needs and egos) first cause nor unrepeatable. We are uniquely strange attractors, love's pendulum point or arc, time's shape or fancy, in a system with its own logic, be it the cool elegance of eternity, or the subatomic matrix of creation and decay.

[aknifeallblade]

Having it Out with Melancholy - Jane Kenyon

1 FROM THE NURSERY

When I was born, you waited behind a pile of linen in the nursery, and when we were alone, you lay down on top of me, pressing the bile of desolation into every pore.

And from that day on everything under the sun and moon made me sad -- even the yellow wooden beads that slid and spun along a spindle on my crib.

You taught me to exist without gratitude. You ruined my manners toward God: "We're here simply to wait for death; the pleasures of earth are overrated."

I only appeared to belong to my mother, to live among blocks and cotton undershirts with snaps; among red tin lunch boxes and report cards in ugly brown slipcases. I was already yours -- the anti-urge, the mutilator of souls.

2 BOTTLES

Elavil, Ludiomil, Doxepin, Norpramin, Prozac, Lithium, Xanax, Wellbutrin, Parnate, Nardil, Zoloft. The coated ones smell sweet or have no smell; the powdery ones smell like the chemistry lab at school that made me hold my breath.

3 SUGGESTION FROM A FRIEND

You wouldn't be so depressed if you really believed in God.

4 OFTEN

Often I go to bed as soon after dinner as seems adult (I mean I try to wait for dark) in order to push away from the massive pain in sleep's frail wicker coracle.

5 ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT

Once, in my early thirties, I saw that I was a speck of light in the great river of light that undulates through time.

I was floating with the whole human family. We were all colors -- those who are living now, those who have died, those who are not yet born. For a few

moments I floated, completely calm, and I no longer hated having to exist.

Like a crow who smells hot blood you came flying to pull me out of the glowing stream. "I'll hold you up. I never let my dear ones drown!" After that, I wept for days.

6 IN AND OUT

The dog searches until he finds me upstairs, lies down with a clatter of elbows, puts his head on my foot.

Sometimes the sound of his breathing saves my life -- in and out, in and out; a pause, a long sigh. . . .

7 PARDON

A piece of burned meat wears my clothes, speaks in my voice, dispatches obligations haltingly, or not at all. It is tired of trying to be stouthearted, tired beyond measure.

We move on to the monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Day and night I feel as if I had drunk six cups of coffee, but the pain stops abruptly. With the wonder and bitterness of someone pardoned for a crime she did not commit I come back to marriage and friends, to pink fringed hollyhocks; come back to my desk, books, and chair.

8 CREDO

Pharmaceutical wonders are at work but I believe only in this moment of well-being. Unholy ghost, you are certain to come again.

Coarse, mean, you'll put your feet on the coffee table, lean back, and turn me into someone who can't take the trouble to speak; someone who can't sleep, or who does nothing but sleep; can't read, or call for an appointment for help.

There is nothing I can do against your coming. When I awake, I am still with thee.

9 WOOD THRUSH

High on Nardil and June light I wake at four, waiting greedily for the first note of the wood thrush. Easeful air presses through the screen with the wild, complex song of the bird, and I am overcome

by ordinary contentment. What hurt me so terribly all my life until this moment? How I love the small, swiftly beating heart of the bird singing in the great maples; its bright, unequivocal eye.