the absence of feeling

desultory neurons bellowing
names names names
empty raindrops sinking
corpses corpses corpses
wooden bench wasting
shadows shadows shadows

The American Jeremiad of the Disenfranchised (?)

Well, it's 2012 and i have a few things on my mind, mainly, American literature. I've recently been thinking about the American Jeremiad and how, I believe at least, it has been reinscribed by minority writers as a space of productive melancholia. So, what is the American Jeremiad? The Jeremiad is a sermon that accounts for the calamities of the present time as justifiable due to the sins of a community or a nation, but also imagines the possibilities of change. Jeremiad is named after the Biblical prophet, Jeremiah, who was also known as the weeping prophet. The jeremiad is often used as a rhetorical figure to perpetuate the American myth of progress. Yet, the jeremiad, which is inextricably linked to the ideology of American exceptionalism, is based on a paradox that constitutes America as a nation. That is, the paradox of community and the individual, oscillating between the two, but also constructing an exclusionary community based on the auspices of democracy. I will suggest that the American Jeremiad of the minority is characterized by failed mourning that maintains the possible return of the object of loss. The spectre, or the ghost, represents this American Jeremiad of the minority. Spectre, as Derrida defines it in Spectres of Marx, "is some "thing" that remains difficult to name." Toni Morrison's Beloved attempts to name the unnameable, which is paradoxically named Beloved, by either returning to or finding oneself faced with the irrevocable past. But, I would like to argue, that this space can be productive, a means by which to reinscribe spaces of oppression as sites of subversion and resistance. Beloved is about the traumas of African American slavery, and the healing power of "rememory" as the protagonist, Sethe calls it. However, this return, as Sethe discovers can be life-threatening as Beloved attempts to strangle her. Sethe who had attempted to kill her children, and successfully killed her youngest daughter, Beloved, in order to safe them from slavery is haunted by the return of her daughter. The return both seals and opens wounds. It returns without warning, yet can only be removed, in the novel at least, by a community. The imaginary reconstruction of the past is never total; it reveals gaps and fissures that remain unbridgeable.
The American Jeremiad of the minority, perhaps minority isn't the proper term to use, maybe disenfranchised in more encompassing, evokes another type of lamentation that threatens our present, but asks of us to give it voice, even if it remains at times inaudible.

looking

i look at my image, but only recognize war in scraps of paper floating above my half-opened books. an inward raw terror unmasking, yet too timid and delicate to join the outside world. dragging longing and loneliness in this wilderness that is my eyes. is there a moral dimension to looking, inspecting self as other? the soul is boundless and empty lying underneath a pair of boots. lipstick stains part of this fictional fluidity i call the self. unromantic disguises in four lettered words. i look.

conversation

his words poured like a broken faucet
the water throbbed beneath my palms
it was lovely and deep
as though we were two
but, the water soon became waves
as the tongue rolled the eyes.

clarity

Past Midnight
I strive for clarity, always
walking the empty streets to find simplicity:
rummaging every corner beneath the outstretched skies
lifting the dancing dust to expose the fissures of human consciousness
uncovering eye lids and pot bellies below cherry trees and uncut grass
passing sinking ships or swinging hearts of lost souls, beggars, or artists
but, I fear in my straightjacket I cannot erase the raw names, promised lands, cold faces that clutter my mind.

reflection

the red sky, still, sound
speechless, I sit thinking silky thoughts
of the heavy happiness we carry in frames
that leave us with trembling hands.

appearances

I'm momentarily back to write, or repeat, that things aren't as they seem.

We always want to create linear narratives to give sense to our lives; and for the most part, we're successful in creating these fictions that create a sense of destiny or fate: that we're moving toward where we're supposed to be. But, a nagging feeling persists that where we are is not where we are and perhaps who we are is not who we are. When we tell our stories we necessarily fictionalize, draw connections where is there none, to produce meaning, or to give meaning. Sometimes, however, there is no meaning to what we do, or what's been done, though it remains important to invest some illusory meaning for the sake of sanity.