for Nate

“Things congeal as fragments of that which was subjugated; to rescue it means to love things. We cannot eliminate from the dialectics of the extant what is experienced in consciousness as an alien thing: negatively, coercion and heteronomy, but also the marred figure of what we should love […] .”

Adorno, Negative Dialectics

[…]

You are a man who by nature is content

You are a man who is content by nature

You have arrived at love but blurred by its image and lesser

As with fish which become light

You are muddy and swollen with cold

Your body is unchanging in content if not form

Your skin has pebbled over like fruit

Your body is unchanging in form if not content

You play variable stress

Being with you is like being without you

You play circle of fifths

Being with you is like being without

At times your cup runneth over

Thus you nullify contact

You lay claims in a little ring

As if having arrived you draw no closer

At times you leak wine from your little bowl

 

 

 

Your color manufactures intercourse with the exterior
of event

You appear to exchange position with your self-same substance

As with fish which become light

Your eyes flicker as if within you

Your bones are permeated with phosphorous

She appears as either frequency or motion

Thus you appeared to emit a low light

“For he gives to his beloveds: sleep”

You consider yourself a student of desire

If you are beholden not to another’s wants, then doubly so for an-
other’s needs

You indulge your vanities in enjoying not your semblance

when you appear you appear

Fish dart amongst your jewels

You indulge your vanities in the pretense that they belong to another

You toil not, neither do you spin

Your color manufactures intercourse with the semblance of event

When you appear you are become one or several birds

 

 

 

You dismiss sentiment as a “craze for memory”

You balance a series of flat stones upon your thighs

Thus you take heart in your ability to act as a scrim

You balance a series of flat stones upon your throat

You recognize all but your own self-same substance

Your surfeits emerge in practice if not in form

You retire “back to the desire mines”

Thus you soothe yourself with the thought of your semblance

You ponder the degree to which your abstractions are “merely” ornamental

Thus you refuse longing

You dismiss your skin as merely that which bears light

Thus you shoulder the burden of form if not practice

Your body is tiny and ornamental

As if greater musculature aloft in smoke

You tip a mysterious object from your glass

Thus you nullify contact

As if to suspend a string of stones beaded along a single strand of light

 

 

 

If toil befits you, it is on behalf of neither material nor time

Your hands held aloft in mercury

You emerge from your articulations nude but for your caul

Your eyes flicker as if within you

Her tongue, she said, felt heaviest in the moments between bursts of sleep

As if it would roll down its casing and settle elsewhere

She bit first the wings then the antennae off the moth, before inserting a hairpin through its thorax

If not in her fingers, behind her eyes, she supposed

In the darkening room she admired her gums’ pale glow

Despite glancing, occasionally, through the aperture, she gave
the impression she was unaware of being watched

If not behind her eyes, in the hollows of her teeth, she supposed

While her throat remained still, she tilted her head back and ap-
peared to swallow, as if from a glass

She appears to you to be mistaken for either one or several birds

You contemplate her pores, a series of flat stones awash with light

When she spawns amongst the barley, she appears to emit a low hum

As with fish, which become light

When you emerge it is on behalf of neither material nor time