all the time

when I first started to think about

writing this thing  this morning, I was

wearing my Basquiat nightgown, the one

I got from Uniqlo; it was Gary’s favorite

and he always commented “famous

sausages” when he saw it, because that was

the subject of the painting on the nightgown

and then I wonder, does she wear Basquiat

nightgowns?  no she’s not the type, I’m

trying to think, what kind of nightgowns

would she wear?  something polyester,

from Victoria’s Secret, maybe, OK.  and

some kind of citrusy perfume that mixes

oddly with her vagina smells.  Well and

then I started thinking about Basquiat,

the wildness of his strokes and of his

person, how he “acted out”, how he

(like someone else I can think of) was

both formalist and expressionist, and

how Courtney Love, who played his

girlfriend in the movie, acted out, too,

to the extent that no one likes her, she

gives interviews in the nude, she’s violent,

she’s a ridiculous character, and yet she

is tolerated, wondered at, even, for the

extent to which she plays herself: to the

hilt.  So I was thinking about the extremity

of these two, and my own extremity, which

seems to embarrass everyone – are we really

artists? –  this “madness” ­– people are so

prim and so impatient, just brush the dust

off your shoulder, pretend nothing happened,

let’s talk about more important concerns

than your human pain, because once again,

how many times do we have to tell you

this, only generalized human pain is

interesting. The house is a mess, there are

so many other things I should be doing

than sitting here typing this.  All these

drugs in my system give me a weird

humming dizzy feeling, last night

I wept and wept and cursed.  That

stage he and I shared, starting that again,

I felt a bitter déjà vu.  Fuck.

I should make everything completely

different like in the dream, see previous

post, but that would be too shocking too

so I’m forced to battle it out here in

the nest that was ours, letting things

pile up in corners because they overwhelm

me in their thingness, they are wedding

gifts, or they are things he had opinions

about, for example he liked the nightgown,

and he liked those black glasses I don’t so

much like anymore, he liked the Shimokitazawa

mugs and the cats and he liked the corner

of the leather sofa where wearing the yukata

(he bought it on our trip to Japan in May, in

a little town in Gunma, I realize now that

was our anti-honeymoon…) unshowered, sort

of slumping or shapeless,  he would stare

at his iPhone, reading messages from her. I don’t

know what things in the apartment he didn’t like

because he didn’t really tell me, but he said

disgusted at the end, “look around this place,

it’s all you,” as if he hadn’t all those years had

a voice, and as if I had not been something also

he ostensibly liked.  well and he hated the mosquito

net thing over the bed: “I always hated this,” he

said, that last week, and I pulled it down in one tug,

but I’ve since bought another, because, you know,

fuck him, and that tainted bed I’ve written about

before where Wanda spread her evil legs and he

so eagerly like a horny little schoolboy stuck it

in her with naughtiness and most vile deceit.

Did he then move rapidly like a skittish rodent,

I wonder, and did she make her poseur noises

and how much long after that did I come home

completely innocent of all their filth and say

hello sweetie, how are you, and what did you

do today? so yeah, no one likes this sort of

thing, it makes them flinch, it doesn’t have

anything to do with art history, it’s not coded,

it’s only prosodic by chance the way any language is

it’s just this endless swoop of, can’t you change

the record? can’t you be a different person?

because we don’t like this part of you, it’s

unseemly, it’s too furious and too abject and

it’s not good for you, yeah yeah yeah, well

you know what, that is YOU, and I am what

I am and this is how I am.  I had this absurd

belief, see, in the happy union of two creative beings.

And now it seems that lovers are not really

lovers, just co-illusionists at best, more likely

just routine frottage.  And then there’s this

authoritarian monster getting on my case about

PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE as if it mattered in the

slightest, as if anyone were going to care about

these little cries and revelations; I mean they do

care, but only in a kind of impatient way, with

a kind of tough love shrug, because come on,

it’s like Gary said, PEOPLE DO THIS (abandon

other people) ALL THE TIME.  People do this

all the time!  They kill each other in wars all the time!

People write pretentious art manifestos all the time!

People knock little bunnies on the heads and then skin

them all the time! People huddle in doorways in

urine-stained clothing with nothing to eat all the time!

People get horrible diseases and die of them all the time!

So who cares! Get over it! So right, yeah, I’m cool,

it’s cool, people do this all the time, and in between

sitting down and typing this I’m bustling about cleaning

things, and getting the laundry done, because these are things

that people do all the time.  I make the bed and displace the

cats, OUR cats, Dante wails in the foyer again, he does this

all the time, and now I have to go put the clothes in the

dryer.  Note here how DAILINESS enters the writing.

I am so absolutely nauseatedly SICK of the precious ways

people talk about writing:  they do it ALL THE TIME.

Now I have been five months alone, some people say that

is a long time, and other people say that is a short time. I

don’t know what kind of time it is, only that it is terribly

distorted and my dreams are too strange and I am too skinny

and full of the most piercing sadnesses and furies they are like

stalactites or something, and I have all these “coping strategies”

and I function and I go to my job and I teach and I interact

and I go to poetry readings and I go on dates and I put the

clothes in the dryer and I go to the hair salon and I go buy

cat food all those things, I can do all those things, as if I were

some sort of normal person, all those things that people do

all the time.  And then things sort of build up and on the train

coming home last night I just wept and wept, and I “cried myself

to sleep” as if “sleep” can be defined as this state where one’s dreams

go on way too long and are just as tumultuous as the daily state of

trying to cope with rupture and betrayal and then I got up and now am

writing this in between doing all of those little things one needs to do

to maintain one’s life because for some reason that is what we are

“given” to do.