Jocelyn Saidenberg

I : I’m in heat.

I hesitate — in what form will the upcoming offer the most pleasure? Walking down the street, in a doorway, behind the stacks, emerging from a flower shop or bakery — loitering and drifting. Not to choose in hesitation, the circumferences matter little to me, fed on resolve, tantrums, shipwreck, and further hesitation, a meaningless wrestle with that accomplishment, the time through which we grope along our way, all disappears into an altering perspective an event a naming a being receiving. That description excites me, discursive in its minute detail. The event not digesting all subsequent events but: “you meet me in the evening at a promenade, in a boulevard, you tell me the story of our lives, for you know nothing else.” That underground passage. I become the branches of which I was unaware. “Oh — you little slut!” you reply. I smile, whipped up. A ball of foam collects at the corner of my mouth.

II : The Bible

Into contents further removed—blood, all substance and abomination — bearing no trace of our depth — I approach you, devouring you, your physical defect — corporeal indent — blemish. Never clean, never courteous, almost symbolic of nothing, almost. Fully. The gash, not separating but unifying the abrasion to all the impure, non-separated. Still cleaving, still suckling I am unmending, secreting and discharging, leaking out in glops and gummy puss. Blending into the boundaries, coterminous sore on the visible, not presentable superannuated surface of self. Persecuting, threatening traces of expulsion, a clot, from the inside matter incorporated. I devour. I mount another step of the staircase, another tier, familiar, yet stiff. Fucked gladly. Aside from some sanitary effectiveness, your clearing that leads to my return to our substance and abomination, thrown down, not to be pruned, or cut back, never to be absorbed. A grudged and elongated survival.

III : The Crave

Completely taken, taken by the lull, by it, the lulling of the dream. I disrobe. You’re limping behind finding pattern in my lull, echoed in the limping behind, unattended. And out of contempt for contempt, disgust for disgust, shame for shame. I place myself lower than dirt, will keep digging, filthy, hands taught, in darkness, all in order to not. [Infer: that I like it] Here in the dirt I am an inductor, I attract and gender myself in accordance with my habit, attraction, unheeding steadfastness that wants only to weep over itself, limping further along, in the poured concrete cage, weeping over itself it sheds attraction, ridding and taking its shape dreaming again, that lull. “I am as you find me.”

IV : One of the Spurned

I’d like defilement to be your preferred fantasy as threat from being rotten, the poison I carry for you with an unswerving loyalty. Being rotten being stained the stain itself, drained or blocked, I gift me, or that malingering temptation to return, somewhere in the inbetween: that crossroads. I bend down and kiss, marking the confession, signing the poison. All suddenly disintegrates whose verging and barring — those being swamped — sinking irretrievably, rescued by prohibition alone. I can’t assume with sufficient strength this imperative act, the one that excludes you from me, the one that feeds on us, that one. I can’t dam that up or that potential, where it’s filth whether it’s defiling, from the line I traverse or the line we walk the inbetween, mounted between jettisoned and aggregate, vacillating, threatening in silhouette, permeably engulfed, hand in hand.

V : Hey, Fuck Face

Because of remoteness, that abscess and my respectful distance, calling just once a day, always after dark, resentment could finish this job, cold shivers, considering that becoming a painted object, in this way alone and visible from the very remoteness itself, and always after dark, to give outline and relief, against a background of darkness after dark, hungry to be let in and never complaining about improbability. Involved and part of it, equally thrust, so sooner than either the lofty impossible view, the two dimensional rigor, lightning throw to gain the way, removed from all attachments or in a pinch self formulated pariah skins at least for the audience, when the remainder is rejected and locked out — drove out — lost amidst the others, all that is denied. In that remoteness, toward a horizon of respectful distance, i.e. always call after dark and just once, that common puss I polish into glabrous surfaces, further, thrusting into doubtless myself.

VI : The Quite-Quite

I’m the Quite-Quite, Quite-Hideous, Quite-Wastebody, Quite-Lowmurmur. So I calm the invisible storm with a wave of my head, slight movement in lieu of voice or exuberant gesture, quite minute, quite effective. I’m the Quite-Quite, Quite-Indebted, Quite-Embarrassing, Quite-Forlorn, at the end of the day, Quite-Fingered. I lean out the window, follow the departed with another vague lift of my head, pointing at the horizon, that heavy fact, working its way into me, letter by letter. I yelp when I have found it: who’s died today — again — in their absence, I’m more the slut, more the unmade bed than they, never a stagnant smile, but bird-like, chipping away at the unsusceptible, unaware, no eyelash flutter no temple crinkle, whispering I chirp at you to draw nearer, quite near.

VII : The Rivals

I put my mouth around Kitten’s neck, going to kiss it when suddenly nine willful creatures leap out from the form of Kitten; they seem to detach from themselves and from Kitten, pro-gendered, in flattening layers as if they had formed from our own thickness itself as Kitten’s own formed structure. And they jump me as if to beat out the attachments, the parade of wounds, as if to cut my throat. It makes like a signal, so I disengage Kitten’s neck, teeth release the flesh’s shrinking warmth, and the garden moves to calm, soon, so calm that it allows bygones to be and forgive us, we continue on our crocked road, snaking over to scrutiny together. Into one another, interweaving and unreeling, harder, loyally drawing the line again and again, slitting, not for any purpose of treachery but of enchantment, undoing the rope, our shared rope or night vision. A shrug or a blink of the eye.

VIII : Bird of Prey

Sink like a rock to the depths of reverie, in that aloofness, sink like a little sparrow. Let the rest persist in their panicked flights. I do it to myself, slowly gash and fucking the one who turns the key, hidden it waits, gift-catch like the little sparrow. There is the well inside the well to number the dead of yesterday, caught and killed and eaten by another, the dead of yesterday and tomorrow. I intensify the spurious quarantine. Pestiferous doesn’t expiate the ghastly or contrite, rejecting that which cannot be recaptured, itself the operation, or idiosyncratic regression, bulletproof. The sparrow congeals into disintegration in release. No wonder the horror. No wonder the panting excitement. No wonder. No wonder. So I as shoes that have been sniffed and bitten and kissed hundreds of times.