Fall 2013
**Escape**
1.
It cannot be said—
to see it utterly absorbed
into the private blues of her clean eyes—
to feel it discharged, flushed away, by the ‘me’
she keeps hidden inside
the bathroom of her ‘I’—
Is it impossible to know her?—
Can I only purge myself of this immemorial ‘it’—
this phantom limb, this imperishable guilt,
this astonishing confinement, this self—
*my *self?—
No, I must speak—
if only to have a word of mine
plunge into the center of her will
and be forgotten; I am homesick,
homesick for myself.
2.
Our pale hidden hands, longing, guiltily
gesturing toward a greater cognizance of pain—
as if to misinterpret the matrix
of God’s suicidal compulsions
were to see a disk of vindictive love
fall from the sky and incinerate
the last punishable traces of *our *will.
Have I no tongue, no fingers, no eyes—
only ears with which to suffer the abuse
of infinite black doors
swinging open & slamming shut
in the flattened palace of the sky.
Black time rolls his negative dice through space,
as bells toll the extinction of the wild.
3.
Ricocheting like a siren in a block of ice,
your excitement settles, a kaleidoscopic veil,
over the soft warbling of her intent.
It is not, you suppose, unlike the hysterical dawn
retrieving the stars, one by one,
from the palm of your mind.
The injustice, the torn signature
of the absolute, drawing you shut—
She tiptoes, like a priest, through your secrecy—
Accused parrots
quivering in the black branches of her eye—
a ring of hazel witnesses poised to speak—
4.
A labyrinth of me’s
to confuse the course of you and I—
I do not dare, I do not speak—
pacing anxiously, like a faithful dog,
the shores of your invitation—
I do not dare, I do not do,
gawking at the world as it bends itself into a ball—
thinking whether a moment’s indecision
were better spent sheltered and clean,
alone inside the cage of my me.
No, it cannot be said—
to see it exiled, apprehended
by the petty judges of your foreign smile—
doused again and again in the oils of unreason—
and sentenced to the darkening waters
of lonely remembering.
No, I will not speak, and have
my every yes shown to be a matryoshka doll of noes.
5.
Sickened by the thought
of world masked by, and masking, world—
of some implacable creativity
miming destruction, a straitjacket of images
hurrying to restrict the mad twirling
of twisted limbs—
dysthymic jaguars or retarded fish
carried like sleeping children
to the door of insomnia—
Taking his face in his hands,
he thinks, Yes!, there is no greater joy
than that of never seeing myself,
of never feeling contained within
what, when barred without,
hangs the world in its greedy frame.
6.
The crippled girl walks when father shuts his eyes.
I watch with shame, and wait for her to fall.
You will tire of yourself, and still ask for more time.
I have been lazy and afraid, hiding from my life
in a nightmare of my self; letting thought,
like a crippled girl, walk only when I shut my eyes.
I have sat like a dog, and watched the empty streets—
the nobodies and nothings that time will turn to fear.
I will tire of myself, and still ask for more time.
Should turns pale, and could grows thin, and you cannot—
cannot forget and cannot begin, needing time, time to worry, and time to wonder—
until, crippled in your will, you walk with eyes that time will soon shut.
Have I courage to speak, reason to try?—
when she may laugh, or pity my crooked heart,
tiring of me, while I beg for more time.
An elbow on the table, the riptide of hysterical dread
sweeping past the stove—voices** **rise when faces fall away.
The crippled girl walks, and father shuts his eyes.
You are tired of yourself, still you ask for more time.
7.
Time, like God, hangs itself in the scarlet sky.
Without reason, thought descends the black rope,
Enclosing the world, for a time, in a mind.
The mind, a child, scrupulously imagines
That it is free, and arranges the night
In an austere array. Then, the mind
Forgets—the cell doors swing open.
It is as though some pitiless form
Slowly, like a fist, unclasps itself.
A procession of images
Exits the mind, the poor, inside-out mind.
Strangers with downcast eyes move briskly
Through the rain. The cold, homeless world.
Pain persists where thought from thought lies barred.
8.
The evening whistles, walks with his hunters through the sky,
my eye sixteen thousand bicycles riding blue out of the sky.
The mad acrobat bows blindly to the crowd, whimpering,
his marionette legs dividing at the knees. A tantruming child
sin-spinning away his merry-go-round memory.
The evening blinks, wakes drugged and naked in the morning,
his hunters eight thousand blue bicycles riding black out of my eye.
Missing mothers and fantasized fathers,
exchanging fits of laugher and interpretations of dreams,
spill like violet ink into stenciled minds.
Stricken, the mad acrobat peers disconsolately at the abandoned stage.
His lies four thousand ruby eyes depleting the sky.
Meek mothers and volatile fathers,
clipping the wings of zeal, secretly auction
stained glass yesterdays and papier-mâché muses.
Morning wears a face, silver and magnetic, mimes an afternoon,
her juggling clubs one thousand jack-in-the-box fears in my smile.
Broken bells fill the world—the rocking-horse homes,
Persian rugs, and flickering trick candles—with incorrect sound
and incorrect silence, herding wayward feelings into gravedug thoughts.
The mad acrobat asks again and again, is it me?, is it me?,
the homeless animal that emptied its eyes of pitiless resolve
to give itself a name and call its thoughts thoughts; the skittish wolves
chasing worry and neglect into indignant dogs; a red-nosed crisis full of laughs.
Tomorrow stretches and folds itself into today. Figure eight heroes dissolve into zeroes.
9.
It cannot be said—
to see it grow dim in a chamber of mistrust—
to feel it unpardonable, torn from the page
of an unutterable truth.
An unspeakably private hole in my center.
My tongue nails itself
to the amber cross in her sunset eyes—
And I see that it is you,
not her, to whom I address my silence—
Words harpooned in the fabric of what I see,
a daisy chain of voices enclosing what I am able to feel,
a two-faced mistress nude with the mind,
turning me against myself—
Dividing time into time
enslaved and time ignored—
as when an insult to the mind
sickens our love into a defensive coil—
a black hole of mercy—
Speaking, I appear,
lighting an old chaos,
from which we may never escape.
Commencement 2014
I.
Self-deception police wear red
slippers and yellow suits Comet-gliding
through rain Nodding diplomatically to the dog, never acknowledging
you Hiding parking tickets in side mirrors, bovine
contortions as you chew, the trapeze-like idiocy
of your laugh Arraigning you for existential
exhibitionism: to engage in philosophical despair
II.
publicly. The how of mind
misinterpreted as the what Hypostatizing
why Deleting the unparticular
from the person, the unmotivated act
from matter Green-eyed howling
stranded in the howl Either instinct
or speech inside the un-self-knowing violet-barred
III.
God-cell. The origin of skepticism
in the recurrent sprawled-by-the-heater
dream in which Kafka is the mailman and the mail
is your mother Appears again the slaughterer
of perspective and mood, the categorical
rejection, the eternal human ironed
and exported Hanging like community service
IV.
from your father’s coat hanger. Solitary
suppression of reality, antidoting
mystifications of the girl you used
to know the girl you never knew
the introjected girl picking violets Peering
through chain-link vivisection The girl
converted into self-discipline and logic, metaphorical
V.
God-fearing dogma. The tame in us murders
Spring 2015
As a child, I often fantasized about killing Hitler. Many of these fantasies involved gruesomely humiliating him—and this, more than his death, seemed to be their salient aspect. As I remember it, when I felt emotionally paralyzed—beset by an uncomprehending nausea at the magnitude and inventiveness of evil—these fantasies distracted and pacified me. Oddly, in these imaginings I never quite appeared or acted; I pictured the violent scenes in such a way that the perpetrator remained anonymous. This anonymity shielded me from the painful irony that I had unwittingly stumbled upon the same violent fantasies in myself that I detested in others. Perhaps then, the true horror stemmed not from my inability to comprehend the subterranean roots of evil but from sensing these roots in myself and grappling with the possibility that forbidden, half- conscious impulses could be acted on.
Today’s collegiate consciousness suppresses this uncomfortable fact, disavowing perverse fantasies, exiling them to the realm of perverse action. The art of Socratic ignorance and self-questioning is thus abandoned. Certain values and moral judgments are taken for granted, and assumed patterns of thinking and reasoning are confused with thought and reasoning as such. Biased and exclusive modes of consciousness masquerade as objective and inclusive totalities of consciousness. Where we might ask questions, we instead assert unassailable facts of human relations.
Abuse and abuse of power, from police brutality to rape to misuse of privilege, are almost never considered in relation to individual desires and fantasies—in terms of psychological structures present in all our minds. What is thus lost is an awareness of the distinction between natural feeling and aberrant behavior. We (justifiably) vent our frustration and rage, belittle and exclude those with disagreeable viewpoints—and refuse any kind of identification with those guilty of or sympathetic to violent or oppressive acts. Ironically, in doing so, we betray the presence in ourselves of the same impulses that, when outwardly expressed by others, we reflexively disown and condemn.
Would it even make sense, or be conceptually possible, to experience rage and indignation over acts committed by people with feelings and desires utterly foreign to our own? When an animal is killed for killing a human, our empathy tends to attach itself to both the human and the animal, both the victim and the culprit—our psychological distance from the animal allows this. Why, then, when solely humans are concerned, do we recoil from empathizing with the guilty? Perhaps our revulsion obscures the inward injustice we feel upon discovering that, where we tyrannically inhibit ourselves, others indulge.
Our wrath is consistently aimed at institutions and impersonal offenders. We confront the puppet strings of oppression in political, legal, and educational systems—but these puppet strings are anonymous, invisible, difficult to grasp, impossible to control. At Harvard, University policies and Final Clubs are frequently scrutinized for condoning reprehensible behavior—while quietly, imperceptibly, we become unable to stomach the innateness of impulses that deserve censure as actions, not as fantasies. The recent controversial Spee Club invitation sparked a fervent backlash against ‘structures’ and ‘cultures’ that reflect power imbalances and promote the degradation of women. Students are eager to discuss and reform these structures and cultures, but how can such an endeavor possibly succeed if we do not first explore the individual feelings and motives such incidents betray. If the loathsome desires at stake were not shared by perpetrators and condemners alike, I cannot see how Final Clubs would be a problem—no one would attend their parties.
It is likely that an uncanny half-awareness of the omnipresence in imagination of that which we detest in reality defensively directs our scrutiny toward policies and practices and away from individuals—toward an institutional unconscious and away from our own unconsciouses. However, if we cannot acknowledge the existence of aggressive and base desires in ourselves—if we do not dare investigate the repulsive majority that underlies the rational minority of the mind—how can we hope to do more than retroactively address instances where the mind ceases to function democratically and its hostile and unprincipled majority forsakes the lofty demands of socialization? How can we strive not merely to punish and protest but to anticipate?
The rise of political correctness expresses precisely the opposite of that which it purports to represent. Targeting fantasies and impulses that have leaked into gesture and speech but not action, PC dogma also gratifies tamer versions of them. The desire to censor, to include all by excluding some, undoubtedly stems from aggressive feelings. Moreover, unreflective political correctness suppresses a crucial dimension of self- awareness, conflating the natural scope of feeling and desire with reprehensible behavior. Such a paradoxical collective attitude is bound to depress and provoke, alienating us from both our communities and ourselves and exacerbating the same problems it addresses. Where feeling and speech become shameful and forbidden, acting out becomes more likely. Of course, PC dogma is itself a form of acting out, at once prohibiting aggression and indulging in milder forms (i.e. aggressing against the aggressors)—and it thus projects the imperative to resolve this conflict of feelings onto the external world. It requires offenders as fervently as it denounces them.
As Nietzsche observed more than a century ago, when such a vast portion of our inner lives becomes unacceptable and inaccessible to us, we become lost, aimless intruders in our own lives. We desperately need reasons to live, motivation to act, senses of purpose, and causes by which to stand. “When I think of the craving to do something, which continually tickles and spurs those millions of young people who cannot endure their boredom and themselves, then I realize that they must have a craving to suffer and to find in their suffering a probable reason for action, for deeds...These young people demand that—not happiness but unhappiness should approach from the outside and become visible; and their imagination is busy in advance to turn it into a monster so that afterward they can fight a monster.”
2025