BRUISES IN

A Poem by Caz Wallace

I

Ordinary fingers, Aeolian harps

the curtains rise

the stopwatch begins

in a room

 

alone on sofa.

only body

space,

formed in the image of what they once called god.

moderately clean and smooth,

we desire it to be-

yet all at once horrific and brutal.

 

even when the spewing of soft warm fluids is repressed, the body is in eternal deliberation with the world inside and out.

 

the torso

feebly encompassed

attempt of self-swaddling,

too small to embrace all appendages composed.

layers wrapped and warped

Behold! the sense of other creatures.

a sad and comical scene.  

 

every problem is the result of multiple factors: > the person birthed a limitation and then embodied that limitation, allowing a slavery < the person unearthed an intuitive connection between the blanket and a particular set of sensations > < the person’s body was cold > living as the limitation, the person could not break out of the space of the room < this blanket was the only blanket accessible from the embodied room by removing it from the shelve it was sitting on, folded, between a towel and sheet

worn and thread unraveling,

exhausted

obstructed

the world.

like a baptism, once adorned the new and naked body

original moment of abstraction.

an opening of the mother, a cataclysmic churning and tearing,

leaving exposed.

like the soil still clinging to roots, the amniotic fluid is wiped away to be replaced

decorate and become apart of the new.

 

II

and now the person sits, by themselves, wrapped up

good and evil and neutral.

 

loves as it seduces and fucks and blinds, as it protects and persuades and disillusions

 

the still and the quiet fill the room to be fractured by a sudden rapid movement of the body caused by a hypnic jerk. perceptions of a vertical plunge while inertia logically reigns evokes a momentary terror, quickly abated by the recollection that its just the body. that there is a body. contained.

the body.

 

with knowledge, contemplation of potential physical movements

desires up, up, control

 

in affirmation of their material

as repetition and pattern

as what is known

 

present.

persistent.

direction persists.

I along it.

act?

act as the solution to the question of problems.

then will I be a revolutionary? a revolutionary who can’t get off their couch. a revolutionary who can’t leave their apartment.a revolutionary…

pessimism is only a symptom.

oh the aching of movement and of rest,

pleasure and pain, my two companions.

 

forgetting,

forgetting belongs to time.

 

to shit, to hunger, to shit, to hunger for shit.  

to feel.

but would i rather reign in hell than serve in heaven?

or…

what a cruel, unfeeling word ‘or’ can be. what a privileged power to cleave so swiftly. a choice of only the one.

only the other.

but there are so many

 

III

sediment

the poverty of my substance is disgusting.

i must not think of my bowels.

 

(television, 2 couches, a chest, good books, important books, books for looks, books whose material is really paper rather than properties of a book, candles, a lamp in a corner, a lamp on a table, a table. all of these objects have their price tag still on them somewhere: on a sticker, half torn or faded, written by the hand of human in sharpie or pencil. all of the objects are tattooed in this way. the objects mimic the inscription on person’s body, but person can not yet have that knowledge.)

 

the palm of the left hand is resting flat on the blanket-swathed torso, the palm is cupping what could be the intestines if the person didn’t have any skin to contain all the material. the palm desires to penetrate the skin and become immersed in the intestines. there is a natural magnetism toward such inclusion, but we all have skin. skin is tough and thick and vigilantly enforces boundaries.

 

the palm of the right hand is resting on the top of the left hand. one on top of the other, not in hierarchy but rather geology. on the hardened skin collects a series of pruritic energies. stimulation from the external onto the fleshy boundary of the person. first reception, then irritation, then communication surges to the cerebral cortex to inform the person to pick up their hand and dig their fingers into this point on the body, amassing skin cells that have already completed their cycle in the private folds between finger and nail.  

 

all this dead on me. stratum of dead protecting the dying.

junctures of displeasure.

pain is much better than an itch. thats why we scratch. the pain of the scratching distracts from the displeasure of the itch. the body would rather be pained than irritated.

 

diminutive next to desire.

my body, my body, my body…

to repress, chose desire

a very necessary biology. short lived.

 

a burden, to have

it follows you around,

i rest on pleasure now.

gesture.