Or/rather -- Part II

All subjugation, all domination amount to a new interpretation.
Deleuze on Nietzsche

VI.
Thus: despotism became democracy that is, [I] re made [my] [self] you
tangling between
You propose a new opposition: between becoming and making [oneself] come
come to to heady black no repetition There is an order to in order to
In other words, you world said
“get onto your knees” and [I] heard an invitation to sex:
In other words how did translate become subjugate because
vice versa

VII.
These were not equations they were
a grammar learned:
[I] listened = [I] subjugated [myself]
[I] read = [I] subjugated [myself]
[I] voted = [I] subjugated [myself]
[I] went about [my] business = [I] was subjugated

Under you [I] was subject
newly interpreted transformed

Or, we may be be coming our selves only as other selves or we are be coming only as we exit
our
here we subject ourselves to transformation profoundly common we seek
to look as housewives and indeed we could pass You in your exotic gray
housecoat and [I] in [my] sweater set and yellow gloves

VIII.
A girl became a mother. Her transformation was complete.

Running = Writing

The course of both:

1. Anticipation
2. Preparation
3. Starting cold
4. Resisting
5. Settling in
6. Pushing oneself
7. Exhaustion
8. Euphoria

Politics

All eyes east today for those of us in the Bay Area, but also inward. The poetic stance -- at once into the world and into the interior? Politics, for the poet, are inescapable because by attending to language and to selfhood, we must decide how we understand each, not only in terms of ourselves, but of our fellow humans too. At best, the poem asks a reader to see in a new context, that is, in terms of the related world. At best, we might view politics (or perhaps civics) the same way. That everything might be understood in terms of one rule, in a version even older than the Christian text: do not do to others, what you would not wish done to you.

Yes, both the poem and the vote are a form of prayer.

A recent poem still in process, because

Part One


Or/rather


I.

In recognition of the vast escape
between the body and her own or perhaps they were reading her
body as self as property
as property could can rise up
as property will as
we will under

Our frequent domination was the subject of discourse
frequent disintegration into
not body not [self] “my own hand my fingers/feet”
these re presentings under [their own] fingers/feet

Yes you found violence it was me
beating submission from notebooks
the black eye ink spots and
covers at an awkward angle


II.

Her own body for power of over
though the hands might rise up the voice
a spoken self
how then to command
“I speak my body
into contortions”
might not you entreat it to still under
your “own hands your fingers/feet” might not
she bid the nipples to forget order and
ordering into

She wished not to confuse
power and capitulation they were so like they
both involved losing one’s head


III. The naming of things

Call it the linguistic equivalent of paper [money][property]
he said “the world of things were not waiting to be named”
and yet
we speak “oval” and an elongated roundness manifests
a sub [super] textual element
she bids the lips open
the breath to halt

“I am un equal to” you I define

‘Dear Molly, Someday
I wish you to know how the world deals in differences and you
too will know yourself by what you are not’


[here we begin the discourse over again wherein
we seek to discover the explicit or absolute nature
of the material at hand “She spoke for instance of
a family tragedy and so perhaps Molly this could be
a deeply spiritual or at least metaphysical statement
about the nature of”]


IV. [for Erik]

Lend me your other hand the first will not reach and
then are there so many places flesh can touch and not reach
for that matter all of each other and for that reason
the poets write of eyes Lend me your other eye the
first will not reach and then are there so many souls the
eyes cannot offer
they offered to each[other] the mundane-painful-ecstasy-of-coupling


V.

She bade the self [property] the
hands to rise up body

~