#poeticshine

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

suicide watch

writing can’t stop it doctor can’t stop it love can’t stop it thee

worm-shaped gape straining outward from the center of me

yearning toward black space in a fit of eternal anti-desire

  awake, i am totem; rock head, rock body

held down hard by gravity

can’t believe i have to lift all this up again and go

to the grocery store

for the hundredth time this week;

justify, maintain, justify my existence

by law, by instinct, by holy decree i must

prepare and eat another meal

  my body is made of densest stone and wants only

to sink

the cycling is unbearable; constantly i fall to

this sludging tide of sleep that grips, drags, regurgitates

  awake, i’m on the floor with

tiny-infinite humiliations popping around my face like molecules 

like fry grease

i will my skull in its heaviness to melt and merge into earth’s mantle

i watch, with unfathomable patience, dust gathering in the corner like

in the bottom half of an hour glass

little pile of skin and hair

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

it’s my twenty-seventh birthday

  i’m about to give birth to the empire state building on live television

saturday night live

i’m sarah silverman

live from new york—

i am sputtering it compulsively, cutting myself off violently before ever finishing the sentence

the small female EMT flashes her eyes at me; she’s half my little sister/half my psychic friend alma who lives by the bridge. the male EMT is crying real tears as he struggles to cuff me flailing onto a sitting-up gurney in my living room. he is huge, soft, brown. i see you dad. thanks for coming—-to this--

of course you wouldn’t miss it

there are police in here

i saw their guns

they came right at me

my voice is sarah’s

i’m shrieking safe-words

america is watching aren’t you

i’ll bite my own tongue off if i have to;

they’ll kill you with cops if you spoil the joke

  i’m naked except for an untied hospital gown that’s slipping off me----had been headed for the shower again when my traitor roommate threw me on the ground, held me down and kept saying in my ear it won’t hurt

what won’t hurt

in the shower it all stops for a second

  to my kicking-screaming surprise it’s daylight outside

my chicana neighbors are on the sidewalk

america is watching

the techs throw me and the whole cart into an ambulance, pull screeching into woodhull hospital at the end of the block

i can’t stop talking 

it hurts like birthing

death is the joke i meant

they throw back the gurney; rectangle lights and flat screens with news on them go flying over my head

i knew it. for weeks i’ve known this is coming

so They’ve beaten death into a joke but the real joke is: 

you still gotta go through it

ha ha

i gotta go through it

patient negative-one

pioneer

  the doctors talk behind masks

just breathe we’ll revive you in an instant

                                                                        you know, that eternal instant

then death is over

forever

you won’t even remember

i beg them. i am very distinctly begging for my life:

please i know it’s me

i’ve always known really

but please i don’t want it

i thought i did

i’m a coward

i’ve known that too

  i see the needle

  please don’t 

god please

  i can see in my head what’s happening over in Radio City’s studio 8H

everybody’s ready

it’s gonna be so funny

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

► livia o // reading synonyms for skinny gets me flushed on u 

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

may my verse pursue you in the afterlife like a murder of screeching crows

  i’ll mummify your body

pull the organs through your nostrils

jar their red string for winter

dress you tenderly in linen, sawdust

i’ll lap the bandages flat

as a cat licking stamps

mold the plaster to your form

as i have always done

  i’ll pack you off into eternity,

still masked elaborately,

with your teas and your spices;

at last, you don’t stink of the dead

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

infinity

.

i evaporate me

drip down on you lyrically

raindrops off the fingertips

acid off the teeth

and maybe

if i’m real lucky

you’ll dissolve beneath my tongue like sugar

like a slug under salt

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

wipe my memory when i die

i find out what’s really in the field:

nothing you can touch

all tricks of refraction, vibration, pattern activation

glitch and flow

  there’s no more than black, less than white

it’s full-hollow solitude; everything moving away at speed

the undersides of numbers

 i breathe myself into opacity

find death is already in me

this

gestating barrenness

 oh god but you can’t make me go in there

no i don’t want to go

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

that you cannot be grasped 

in the raw spot beneath the speaker you take me down,

devil--i feel your hands on my hips sure as if you’re standing behind me

sharp as static; your cadence expands in my earlungs, lulls me to repose in a language i cannot hear and i give in,

let you rock me like water, nothing between you me and the music/not even skin/dimensions porous as cell membrane you take me down

to where you always do:

into the dark fear-of-god center of me

                                                                     for an eternal instant

  the moment i notice,

you collapse from wave to particle;

i clutch you to my clav like a pearl 

.

[lithiviaoblivia]

.

derangening

alone in the kitchen, milk thistle brewing,

spanish tune crawling in from the hall

you make me........still

a train goes by, the empty bottles start singin

colors run together in an oil-slick of sky

  tonight, in the pitch, in the rich thick brisk you will surround me,

opiatic buzzsaw of a phantom lapcat out there in the bricky city

creatures of menace will

peel themselves off the walls,

slink toward me in the dark to interrupt the galactic honey sweetness of you

they’ll follow me for a block or two,

fall away when they see us holding hands on the street and

i’m the only one there

.