At an edge of my severed sense, the only overwhelming
breath is not mine. Another sentence to cover this one and
another eye that
begins to heal. Normal
no dust left to trace through, fingers make
no more arcs. In the debutante’s crying room,
the body revolts against its housing, unwelcome
wherever it exists. There are memories of stoplights in the places
we used to go. I didn’t know
that we die
in pieces. My lungs
I've pushed back my hair I've not had
between my teeth: I have seen the way you appear in dressing gowns and in
another stage of atrophy. The debutante sees an image
reflecting back that belongs in another war: the science of my hands and nails. Her desire to eat dirt
is based in a math of revolutions, her mouth
another reason to belong
behind stage near mirrors and artifacts. If she could
will her own heart to stop, her eyes would flood her brain. It is the quietest of comments
which cause chaos.
In her sexual fantasies,
the debutante is a capitalist
and while the reasons
for being quiet are underwhelming, love achieves us
anyway. Her entrails presuppose
no wonderment at all. It is
only important that you
are listened to. I dream of diseases where the only cure is
another pair of arms. Rewriting
my suicide note, I see the errors
I've committed before:
letters are strangled and
words that were never mine appear. If these are
my last words, char them neatly
and pretend the veins up your neck are streets
meant to be crossed. Hell is not knowing
what you did to deserve it: that she shows up on film
amazes the debutante. Her story
is
eleventh track. If the debutante
heard you speak, your voice would become hers. Your lips and disease,
hers alone. What others do
is done to her, every scratch
across your back is three
on hers. A tooth falls out and
the nerve remains, swallowed in my sleep. The last thing you
want to do is stand up
in a crossfire. I wondered why
all my washed away drafts
reappeared, renewed
with a sense of purpose and
believing they meant anything. Being in her
own space, the debutante pretends
to speak in tongues, in
rhymed verse that
hollowly rings through the hallways of a discarded mansion, the drawing room
sprawled out. It's not her speech that
cannot be contained: the debutante's air
is bleeding together. A reflection is not what bothersothers in the house:
the way the vents are spaced and how
tragedy is a mural in only one note. Our debutante seeks
what turns scales into harmonics, a song that won't repeat
again today. What we've surgically structured
cannot be seen with naked eyes or flaps of skin anyplace else. Only
the debutante can see through the
unreal piercings, fillings, and
recitatives. It's in the seconds
after release that her breathing frees her,
allows the lungs to become set
in her chest again: the debutante knows peace
as a word and a sensation, but not
as a conceptualization. I leave myself
thinking about a need that cannot be expressed in standard notation. The debutante
is constantly in the middle of the sentence “we're
using our
special occasion champagnenow since no special occasion
ever came.” If I could make
make it so. What rattles a debutante
is acknowledging her existence in spaces
around a time signature: a pound of flesh feels heavy in her hands. Just another
song that's too light to be sung
on an off day, thinks the debutante's
mother, a fragile ear in a
peeled-away drowning. The debutante's father speaks only
when his words cannot be heard, but I'm the one who
hears his thoughts. The debutante
pretends she doesn't understand
how the dynamics of her
family revolve, but at night, when she's dying, she sees all conversations
before her as a projected verse.
[note. The longer poem, which the preceding lines begin, unfolds as a furious thrust forward over the length of the work still in progress, where each strophe awaits its continuation in the strophe ahead and never really lets up. Trivedi has for some time been a close associate at Poems and Poetics, some of his earlier work having appeared in the posting of February 25, 2011. Of the current project he writes:
“It began with the line about capitalism. Well, it really began with the first line, but I had a good laugh when I said to myself ‘In my sexual fantasies, I am a capitalist.’ But it couldn't be I, it had to be a person who would have that kind of actual fantasy and so came the debutante. I'm sure there are other wonderful poems and projects dealing with debutantes, but in this case, I hope I'm creating someone who is utterly anti-beauty and the seeming opposite of what our culture seems to define as someone of debut age. Gender isn't important and neither is age, race or anything else. The debutante here is completely wrapped up in itself, unable on one hand to be anything beyond itself and on the other, everything because it refuses (or is unable) to define itself. The ultimate spoiled self, in a way.
“Where the poem will end up, it's hard to say. Part of me wonders how much narrative will develop over the next 60, 70, or 100 pages. Should the debutante die? Should s/he/it be erased in some way and redrawn? Hard to say without it getting to where it needs to go, wherever that is.”]
No comments:
Post a Comment