alexia
the greatest gift i have
drips off me the easiest.
i want you
to leave me languageless, lips with only breath.
words repeated lose
one meaning and pick up another. i want you
to make a nomad of me.
a gift is a debt.
a word runs away from itself i want to run in–
to you.
syntax spills out of me
like so many secrets. you
accuse me of expertise. my
tongue is a border
i want to dissolve
into yours. the greatest gift i have
is in quarantine. i have
tried to give it to you anyway.
alexithymia
you cannot taste your own tongue, i think,
or maybe only mine is tasteless. no
measuring stick on reality, i pour out
lies about myself: this is the miracle of language.
untruths/imaginations
freedom dreams/dreams of myself.
i build universes inside an hour,
inside a page, inside a tasteless brain. i cannot
imagine
why you like me: me i cannot imagine, or
imagine in infinite iterations.
words are slow. i am already
not what i was. i am always
practicing my loss of myself, spinning
words like enough lies will save me.
derrida
everything smells of you.
your vestiges creep into my senses
having lost the rest of you
i have
mostly your words,
mostly the text of you.
in your absence i will tie you to the page
(i am already practicing my loss of you),
ram you rectangular,
cram your limbs into letters.
your negative space is librarian:
you throw whole books at me.
i devour, reply
with muted hieroglyphs.
quinn, cegłowski, makiguchi, have become signs
of you
slipping into each other and into me.
i want to overwhelm you with alphabets, characters, script,
anything language, anything
polished,
significant,
grave.
code
extinction races us to our ending.
who will be first, the insects
or us? an endangered language’s
speakers are dying. a communist commune
disappears on the map.
a two-person communion’s a
transient praying. a secret’s
a telling behind its own back.
why mandala? why pencil
mountain river tree time computer breath
parrot chant telephone?
you could hack this
only
you could read this.
a repertoire grows with practice,
takes on habitual shapes
in unfamiliar sounds.
a code runs away
from its dissimulation.
a two person communion’s a
circling track.
python
or
snakes
this is the language
in which you build
a world you already know, you insist
no imagination.
syntax simple
constraint/structure like
sonnets/sestinas like strangulation
no blood supply.
this is the language
in which i build,
write what i perhaps don’t know. i image like
slipping out of old skin.
where are your former selves?
the worlds you have built,
are they old worlds now,
obsolete operating systems,
memories, archives, correspondence
collections of figures whose history we find
too small
constricting for our violent craving?
how do you build a world
always in motion? how do you
imagine a man still
inside his skin?
tongues
living is faithing;
i approach taste through your tongue.
you faith in commonality:
behind a million tongues
one. one langue.
parole with me,
let me know
your million nerve endings.
your faith in animality
has me quivering:
dopamine the universal currency
touch the human economy
skin the border
and the boundary. skin the quality.
skin the shape of the word.
your skin rosetta stone. your breath
cartography. your hand
on my neck
translation. your lips
a vessel. your tongue the
ink.
Like this post? View similar content here: Queer Chicanx
