THERE IS MUCH DEATH AND
READERS SQUAT ABOVE IT
Stroke and a stress that stars and storms deliver,
That
guilt is hushed by, hearts are flushed by and melt—
—G.M.
Hopkins
What
is the difference between guilt and complicity?
What tinges each hinge iterative in each trajectory,
what changes the red bean substance of one's misery
as the world turns over and over itself in the lipped
erotics of material beads popping out wounds listlessly?
If guilt is privileged, which it is, isn't non-guilt nothing
but the blankness of blank bodies blanking like crabs
sideways in the imminence of a hot tide pool, sideways
and unnoticed to themselves in the exoskeletal structures
of banking, along the edge of the pool, along the edge
of humanity in money, like dumb children in polyester
sleeping bags made into logs and rolling like logs. Logs,
under the little feet of men with axes, with axe machines,
men who are loggers, who spray themselves with the logos
of masculinity, taking the axe to themselves, softly
with no violence. These loggers who log dividends
while releasing logs into the pool, from the orifice,
from the hole at the end of their long log systems,
from the wound at the base of their gently axed bodies,
like an axe, like an axe creaming out of an ice cream
machine into a soft serving of death, death blank
because the axe cannot be easily located like wood,
because the axe is a violence perpetrated in complicity,
because the violence reproduces like dead children,
like dead children into more dead children below,
like a kind of birth out of a blank history into history
like history's bloody pool of hacked limbs were down,
deep down, the toilet the blank body shit its material
into, deep down, like one's own death mattered so,
mattered so much that deep down one ignored death,
both in oneself and in the avoidance thereof, and in the other,
in the dying of the other at the soft violence of the axe.
And this poem is just rolling through images like an axe
spins in the hand whimsically before stilling and moving
down at the rolling log that spins too, because this poem
is this poem that only has a kind of end, as things roll,
as small shapes surface in the violence, as small shits
are taken or given about other bodies in the rhetoric
of the disappearance of violence and refuse like shit,
like the bodies of the children in commercials who grow
a world away into death, or into adulthood, or in
to subjecthood, maybe, as a shit is given or taken,
as guilt and complicity waver on the edge of silence
like a log wavers on the surface of a pool before sinking,
like a log wavers on the surface only as an imaginary
of alive things not subject to the ocean on which they
live and perpetrate their movement against movement,
like the whole world flushes into the wet world anus
alive with violence all the way down in this complicity
where even guilt against the hacked remnants of children
is valuable in a system where violence flushes and rains
like the silence of a wet field bloody after a hard rainstorm,
where each of us stands with an axe hacking at nothing,
lost in the turning rhetoric lost in the turning of ourselves,
attempting to attempt advocacy out childhoods into form.
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