3 Travel Poems by D.M. Rice
At the Sacre Coeur
Light a candle,
Steal a prayer, for doesn’t
This church have enough
Mortal fame to incur irrelevance
Upon all who enter, despair
The slate of inattention, beg
To sum the cost economy
Straddling two languages
Among the cacophony of blood.
Irreverent masses, descend upon the sortie
That clings to the convergence: an exit
And the universal exeunt, stage right
By the atemporal deviance—suits
Of new born gentlemen that make their
Way to Bethlehem, Nazareth, among the
Burrows of etched bodies, signification
Itself, themselves among the martyrs
We speak negation through organic
Flux.
Spines crushed by the weight of corporal
Exhaust, skulls crushed by our collective
Cruelty, I was Pontius Pilate, and the thief
Cackling the sublime from a punishment
Displaced, drag queen testimonials by
The ring light of profound supposition
, falsity the universal impulse to creative
Myth, my love for you and fear as ubiquitous
As photosynthesis, a polymer of rejection
Sensitivity unto the a priori fall that uplifts
None but the condemned, martyrs by earth
Or the universal impulse to exact my love
There again renewed among the multitude.
@lacucarachaofficial
Invisible Waltz
Watching two Japanese tourists
At les halles waltzing to no music
Fixed in their suffused dynamic,
Love but for the social baggage
Carried through their burgeoning
Conceit, their novelty to call a sparrow
Love, regards among taboo among their friends
No trust or judgment to betray. I want to play
Them music, a waltz with some accordion
Part exacted through cliche, but know they
Could not perform under such exacting
Circumstances, and that the waltz must
Occur for no one, but let the thought twist
Its knife in my reflection, carried over the seine
To wonder why the ignorant accumulate capital
When the brilliant multitude destroy themselves
Through inspiration, wine tempered with smoke
And hazy prescription, self restraint, this has been
My question for wisdom, Pallas Athena in the
Other room holding her breath while the sirens
Pass, and releasing the haze with no intent
Clear the bowl, rid the genocidal instinct
From those who will never know success
And their actualisation is anarchy, lost
War against the systemic rioters, looting
The impoverished for the shrine of their egos
With no substance but simulacrum, woebegone.
At Shakespeare and Co
I
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS
hangs over the doorway
but i am curious more than
awed, reminded of Keroac’s
insistence on drunkenness, si
vous plait, that any american tourist
crowded here in polyvalence, the commodity
that knowledge has become here systematised
in the misnomer, late stage capitalism, lost
generations for sale with no need to contextualise
the philosophic rancour, disruption and real disdain
, hyperreal fixations on a failure of romantic transcendence.
i among the crowd, here to live my decadence as compensation
for my ancestors’ opperession, full of lobster and fresh oysters reading
ulysses with a dandy smile, buying rimbaud i flip to a random page for
to divine my destiny “certain skies focused my seeing: all characters modulated
my features” then for a brief moment i disappear into the present, telling m. what
i should rather tell you, “the tools of oppression breed their own resistance” but i
said antithesis first, and better meant to look around again, for a critical biography
of freud, but i only find an uncritical text, which deigns to ‘save’ the author, a project
of no use to me. again, outside the shop, i ask, hasn’t freud already been saved? isn’t
that a bit like trying to redeem christ? there is no sign of this critical treatment, nor
the novel upon which i plan to base my own fictional attempt at exegetical historicism.
i am drowning in the seine as an oil fire crackles on the surface and the fading light provides
no choice of salvation. i am having trouble telling reality from fiction. in line the clerk reaches
for my books with no interest, and i am a mirror of her uncaring focus, but rather see the other
clerk, for whom this poem was written: stately, beautiful, with an arm full of scars that i resist
to show, ridges of nonconformity beside abstract tattoos, pained to the point of tears next door
making a confessional of my otherwise externalised redaction of madame bovary, or reading
ted joans at the cafe with a sly grin. i tell m. again that paris has the most beautiful women
in the world, or greatest population per capita perhaps, and m. smiles a pernicious smile
knowing my sexuality is polymorphous, if not perverse, as i wonder about this obscene
artist next door the new barista speaks of a folk artist subverting genre and gender, i
hear my name again in the clamour of my goethe, a personality exuding all pomp and
circumstance. there is a narrative that such beautiful persons may congregate in paris
for an opportunity to transcend their superficial substance, and be taken as one drop
in the wave of the unfathomable, in a city where no hateful stares follow them even at the oddest
hours of the night. and the work of poets is not to share beauty but to scream of ugliness
, from homer all the way down, and she is no doubt a poet. but i, unfortunate soul, am poetry
as kafka said of himself to be not but literature, and he could be naught else, none other
than the written word. lacan has misunderstood being as poetry, as i am tarried away
from her that moves my pen even now. so many interchangeable letters collapsed
in the machine of subversion and normative praxis. i am the blade and blood exuding
from her pleasure wound. i am daydreaming with joyce as we laugh foolishly, and talk
of immortality, standing over the grave of proust we are returned to childhood, my local
grocery store carries roses to foretell all dissolution, watching my parents divorce as my
friend over the phone says he seeks not fame, but lives for the attention. the matter, he says
, is between himself and dr. freud, who i take for myself in the castrating revolution of consciousness
, in bound for the lazy afternoon. this cult of obscurity begging for change
under the burned out notre dame.
II
there
is some
comfort in knowing
i’ll never pay back
the money which has funded
this excursion. for either will i
languish in deferral or bankruptcy, or coddle
the minimum return for however long i live
, and in my dying absolve the future generations of
my debt. no matter then the price of mortal fame, dissolution
before a captive audience. the boat here is called the ‘metamorphosis’
but i am excluded again. this seems to be genetic, if not gendered. the
status of queered existence in this city, where the sacred feminine suffuses
actively, and the counterpart exchanges in a cycle of categorical rejection
, but for the self-same indistinct and emaciated figures of no significance.
an economy of no fundamental value, bodies for the stockpile condemned
to dull essentialism. i am practicing externalising my consciousness. today
i am the atom bomb. today i am the mute waters of endymion. i take
some comfort among the british tourists , seeing how the americans
have taken refuge far from the montmarte , where i now bleed
out on the sidewalk. these day dreams are asymptotal, and kafka cannot
conceive of what it means to be genderqueer, despite the obvious intellectual
precedent. look to nietzsche! i insist! metamorphosise again into the androgynous
lover framed at the musee d’orsay, scintillating and undressed with no discerning
features. m. has signed the petition, and asks for change to better help the destitute.
another wave of american tourists has lined up under the great bard of england. and
i myself am indifferent honest once again. the employees here are american or else
speak with an american accent, never affirming a request for any particular text, but
hopeful that their patience might bring about deliverance. on the seine i open rimbaud’s
evocative season in hell and copy diligently: i have the white-blue eyes of my gallic ancestors
, their narrow skull and their clumsiness in fighting. the bad luck, the bad blood, that may
have come between//two good souls, that’s one half of an offering. the waiters seat us
way in the back everywhere, under a camera for fear of us walking out on our tabs. today
i have decided to be the death of marat, utterly ignored in the louvre despite the profound
insights of zizek in lacanian ink. my hand is shown by the references to joyce, when i mean
to feign originality. yes, i say the night before, it is like the ouroboros in that the peasants and
aristocrats both ultimately dine on the same diet. my prison lobster served with champagne
and tart cherries. bees are wasping about the tables where raspberry jam has been left on
napkins and in ramequins for no one. this line to the cheap boat tour ignores me and vies
for the chain partition, as i am inclined to think my legacy in place.
III
The phone has autocorrected excluded to exalted and i must fix the error.
i sing myself, or else the destitute.
it will be an intervention, forming my body from insecurity and comfort to a disturbed peace of mind.
i tell m. this is the terminology of our action, kissing in front of the mona lisa to block the view of the squabbling tourists, inattentive to the fetish of commodities and utterly ignorant of art.
joyce reads diligently in a fey voice: ineluctable modality of the visible.
no no, try again.
mystic and mysterious, are the abodes of isis and osiris, of horus and ammon ra.
better, better.
you remind me of antisthenes, the professor said, a disciple of geogias, the sophist.
it is said of him that none could tell if he were bitterer against others or against himself.
i rather like the ambiguity of m., because you have been appearing in my dreams with some frequency and i cannot narrow down the scope.
a beautiful barista is making an iced chai so mediocre it is the opposite of inspiring, dejected race of wage slaves literate in post-marxist ideology.
forgive them, eloi, for they know not the cause of their alientation from the products of their labour.
this is a simulation of knowledge, my stream of consciousness runs down my cheeks to admit my longing, somewhere between nostalgia and pure fantasy, sitting lotus blossom over the river of revolutionary blood.
charm the snake, isaiah, turn the litany here inward.
flippant and not subsumed in ego, a fluidity of creative expression in the freudian hive of abstract dogma.
i have drawn continuity again where the project is defined here: a breaking pattern of sacred geometry resisting its algorithmic purveyance.
back and legs stiff with luggage, if not the baggage of your memory.
the luthier provides a vietnamese lunch, but you’ll have no more food from southeast asia, until we return home.
kafka’s burrow as unconscious material, you reading henry miller at the point of a knife.
i detail the link the burroughs, and my own pernicious, self-referential, wiles.
the comfort of your kiss as the waters rise and in the distance we hear the persistent wailing of sirens.
IV
”isn’t it strange that there are no genderqueer
people in paris?” i ask m., expecting them to be
aloof to this observation. instead they respond
in the affirmative, and we count the number we
have seen. “un, du, twa.” perhaps it is not that in
this city there are no attractive young men, per se
, but that they are all rather abysmally dressed, like
some normcore simulation, denying expression.
on the way into the city i am ‘randomly’ stopped,
again, but too polite for any real fuss. I guess I am
who I am, despite my doubts. redacting madame
bovary out of order, without having read the book
prior, means that i cannot guarantee this passage
will be yours, only that it is mine, the words read:
motionless, black fumes, the rumbling foundries
in the midst of the leafless trees, made violet in
the midst of the shining tumult, the vague memories
and the old norman city outspread before their eyes
: an enormous capital, as babylon against the breeze.
jumping the fence that keeps the locals from urinating
on jim morrison’s grave is easy. i leave my crown necklace
for the lizard king, and take the virgin relic from its place.
again, my phone writes grace instead of grave, and i must
correct it. overwhelmed by the heat under the wicked sun
, i begin to smell burnt popcorn. my head on a spear hanging
over the tower of london. a guillotine cuts through my neck
after i am deemed (falsely! i insist unto my dying breath!)
a traitor against the cause of the revolution. i have decided
to become a billionaire to become worthy of the crimes
of which i have been accused. by this i mean the freudian
notion of original sin, rather than any binding legal codex
by which i may be implicated. original sin as in the incapacity
of the conscious mind to contain the innumerable impulses
to which it is subjected. here, i point to m., is the raft of the medusa
, whereupon i first conceived of the sublime with any accuracy. if
you do not mind the smell of excrement, even the metro can be quite
romantic. compared to kafka i can scarcely be said to regiment my
body. but i seem to have some advantage in the regulation of my mind.
in this exacting goethean structure, every idea of necessity is accompanied
by its opposite, the beggars at the notre dame appear to take advantage of
naivety. another ouroboros of signification, exploitation in all instances. i wish
to be removed from the systematic violence, but would that then mean, my friend
asks assertively, would that mean to be something other than human? i explain to
deleuze this is the idealism of the writing machine theory, no more than wishful thinking.
perhaps it is not a rigidity, but a fluidity inherent within gender we perceive, without
the need of colloquial performativity so often deemed (falsely! i insist again, falsely!) butlerian.
at this site of time lost i hold up a platonic rose to my nose and breathe in deeply. proust is here,
and we spoke only of you. the point is made, the fall of the sparrow and its special providence.
ginsberg hands me a long hand rolled cigarette as i point out the beautiful woman dancing
to klezmer infused jazz music in the stuffy basement, watered down mojito hand in hand. are
you even queer? he asks me, and i explain it means something different in this cowering new
world. m. says why not get in touch with alice notley, since you have exchanged a discourse and
there may be more to learn about how to live the impossible existence of a writer. but the thought
is a panic attack to me. should i insist on the candour of my ambition while she loses day by day
, friends gone, capacity slowly easing itself into pictorial disambiguation, to say nothing of the inborn
growths. i dare not speak the name. that i have conceived of the death which she became, via certain
magical acts, and elsewhere, as actualised through fear, a very rational fear which has precedent in
her dark persona. that i myself share this self-same fear, though wonder if i sublimate, or, as bloom
suggests in his falstaff beard (another boat i see as i am carried over the water in my viking pyre,
before the flames ease my waking burden), it is repression of the past which literature exacts
with its circular modality.
it’s strange, i’m skinny
when i’m standing, but
i’m buddha when i sit.
quater for bearing some
absinthe, anxiety: everything
forgotten; they gazed into each
other’s faces. voluptuous laughs
and tender names. mahogany boat.
red levantine. the bell shaped nothing
in the world, so lovely—as their brown
head and white skin against this purple
shame, hiding their face in their hands.
Discreet ornaments. The intimacies of
passion.
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, and I
Like Sancho Panza, Followed Gracefully.