Some Poems on Self, Stochasticism and Positionality
Written for a Creative Writing Class
A Chariot in Flux ("I am" Poem)
I am nauseous to reduce my life to words, for I am not words, I am a rockin' meat computer
I am coloured auras that smell of music and the autumn breeze, taste of tears and synonyms
I am irreducible, intangible and warm-to-the-touch, an arrhythmatic mania
I am Plato's logistikon made manifest by a lovely assemblage of synaptic meat cubes.
I am an exhaustive repertoire of intelligence, stimuli and experiences processes and tangentially linked together by chosen identifiers
I am non-existent, yet I am being, thinking therefore I am, or so I am told by the Great Deceiver
I am a putrid machine of organ-based processes and chemical explosions descending untraceably into the entropy of rot
I am impenetrable turgid membranes popping as quickly as they give birth to fresh self
I am lego-brick tumors that broke into an Ossuary and exhumed a corpse to waltz
I am memories in the fog, a presence through a screen, with a future I give no shit about beyond the whims of passion
I am an electric milk bar, drinkable for all denizens of the Heideggerian nightmare of the wired world
I am ink on a page, a vista and guttural intonations translated into an idea, physical only as a simulacra in the realm of sopor
I am a puddle of vomit left somewhere after a bad night, a “Hello, my Name is” floating soggily atop
I am a papertrail, a chemical trail, skin and hair flakes that sneakily creeps in the lungs of my acquaintances
I am screaming on this page, but rhetorically come off as a shy little exhale
I am a snake-oil salesman of my own trauma, a witch of deceptive charisma
I am a brain worm tucking brutal candies in neuron folds of the unsuspecting lonely
I am the grand construction of twenty-some odd years of snacks
I am an entity hurdling towards objecthood, desperately scratching others with sharpie marks
I am unsure how to keep writing, but Hi, they call me Charlotte
My Body is Inherently Political
My Doctor says I’m traumatized, but I can’t help but smile.
I know no source, no one who’s hurt in ways that can be reconciled.
Yet in every day and hour, I feel that I’m floating, not here,
Not focused on readings, feelings in my schemings, because I’m queer.
Square peg in a circular hole, two plus two has always been five.
It seems through how being myself, I’m barred from this notion “alive”.
My body is political, my name’s become a ticking clock.
I don’t think that I’m wanted here; no smarts or heart, earn an unblock.
I want to scream, for all but dreams are basked in fog, cadaveric.
I live through ink, pixels and links, eyes wand’ring through life’s labyrinth.
I want my brain to crack and spill, spilt neurons fuel a phoenix swill,
Meat prisoner of meat essence, flesh off maggot, will convalesce.
There’s pleasure in the lovelessness, yet pain in total absistence,
I want to get close, not that close, just leave my room, some absentness
Put your gender in a blender, euphorica-lly transcend ‘er,
Unclip your wings, breathe a minute, return that shit back to sender,
No resplendent punk soul clears and leaves the outward fender bender,
Get clocked in jaw, take dog-whistles, intentional miss-a-gender.
Suffer by a sickly system, squeeze your body, wrinkled tissue,
I feel crazy, am called lazy, all not with don’t take no issues,
An ally in black, brown, poor, while white-wing vultures wince for culture
Home and safety, they live elsewhere, where pundits don't want you mulchered
Greasy palms in every hand I try to shake and it’s insulting,
Nothing feels real, no one feels here, so I’m despotic’lly sulking.
Know your body, then pay the toll, witness how deep we’ve dug this hole.
Pray and be and pursue meaning, time and love ought lift the scarr’d whole.
Markov Chain of a Waterway (or misinterpreting Parataxis)
Apples bob down the river, red lumps dot the white-water foam.
In a separate stream, a plump fellow fishes, his grey hair salted by the mist
The stream meets a pond, a soft-headed frog experiments with eating lily pads.
And in a lake by the pond, where algae cakes, a carp does a jig with no one watching.
A waterfall descends, giving drink to the lake, laced with dumped booze and molasses.
That falls from the drainage of a factory, a man eats a sandwich, blind to what he’s caused.
Deep beneath this factory, where the sewage convalesce, a gator gets high from shitty fumes.
That poor gator’s mother, who lives in the lake's shallows, knits a scarf from a poor duck’s guts.
The duck, too, had a mother, experimenting with trees, which were all the rage with the robins.
But the robins, so blue, moped near in a shrub, where their life can get back in one piece,
A hose waters that shrub, and threatens that spider with heavy bunches of dew.
A hose who’s water comes from the river, where bedstones form a pentagram.
The devilish koi who enacted this has just learned of Neoliberalism
But the water’s flow prevents salmon from organized religion
Confluence will unify these waterway soldiers