From Touch to Affliction
(excerpt 1)
__________
I said City. I didn’t say keep.
City with its falaises.
City with its ruines.
City with its devises.
__________
I prodded what wanted prodding. With my boneless fingers, with my temperamental voice, with my illegitimacy.
The body that wanted burying shattered against me. The reach that wanted collapsing disappeared from view. And the wistfulness in the dry branches of fallen trees dissuaded me from leaning into the thing that might appease.
__________
City is stone, yes, but it is stone that
is worn. It is skin that falls away from
bone. It is the thing we go toward. It
is the thing and that is all. We haven’t
a name for it. It is that maddening. It
is that forlorn.
What is city is remains and the slow river widens and the ruelles
become constricted and the bodies in their skins with their wide hands touch water that is sullied and drink it into them.__________
These are your dead.
They are the stone walls, the misshapen walkways, the insurmountable inclines, the moss-grown crevices, the stained brick, and the métro with its thin scream pulling over metal, its rattle of boxes from station to station, its injurious rail. What is city is vociferous and batters the body, your body and mine. It is the city in its body and it is very much alive. It pulls what it pushes. It lives against you. And it walks with you in your hobbled legs and your collapsing reach. City is here and it is the place where you have yet to go.
As for your language it is what empties from your mouth and that is all. It is what I mean by mutisme and folie at times. There is a word for incomplete and it begins inside.
(excerpt 2)
__________
What part of you is city?
The mouth straying from speech. The hand from other hands. The hip from sleep. L’ahurissement.
The body you imagined keeping. The sentence, fourfold.
__________
What part of you is famine?
The distance from the body is a sacrilege. It is a cleaner word for fall. It speaks the suddenness of dust. And what wings tear. And what skin splits. And what claims the viscera. I am in it with mes doigts. The small body on the windowsill. And the waiting sounds below.
We are prohibition. Our skin strips. Our bloodless. And we are aghast at what we keep. What citystruck we keep. The wrought-iron bridges. The candied animals. The drone.
__________
Night is vertiginous.
City is fosse commune.
__________
« Et vous, vous ne m’embrassez
pas? »
Juan Bourla is a voice recorded on paper. A room filled with smoke. History is provocation. His mouth is greedy for sleep. To Lise he is a body in shadow. To Simone de Beauvoir he is what remains unseen.
In Bourla’s Paris, it is always 1943. The rail lines anticipate stone.
___________
This is as our languages recoil. This is what the mouth abhors. The fastening of suffering to the lettermost forlorn. Is this as madness is meant to be? The simple dislocation of city from bone. As though what was impassioned could not be borne. As though what was chaste was close enough to living. And touch reason enough for war.
There isn’t language enough for meaning. I want a mind sensorial. A figure awoken from sleep. The haze in waking is perhaps troublesome, deep. It certainly is burdensome and our mouths become slow. But if the city were wordless, if the pavement broke, what manner for walking, what need for breach?