BLANK BOOK # 14165

by DANIEL BORZUTSKY

The last time she saw him was ______

He was going to ________ to make sure that _________ did not become a ____

_________ did in fact become a _____

He understood the outcome prior to the proceedings

It’s unclear if his body ended up in the ____ or if it was ___ into _____ or left to _________

His name was ______

Do you say of a dead person that his name was or that his name is?

He was a member of _____ who disappeared from ________

He was holding his baby the last time she saw him, an image captured in a photograph taken by
______

The baby’s name was, or is _______

They were at the bus station and he was on his way to ______

Years later it was discovered that he was ____ on the morning of ______`

He was ____ by ______ in front of a ____

One ____ went through his thoracic duct

Another went through his ______

He was taken to ____ by ____ who did not inform his _____ that he was ______

_____ ____ _____ an official from ______ traveled to ______ to _____ the blank

At a ____ _______ mentioned that he himself had _____ into _____ that were then ____ and
then _____ into _____ a few _____ from _______

_________ were later ____ on the beaches of ________

It was said the ____ had been ____

It was said the _____ had ____ that indicated that they had been _____

The discussion now turned to the question of who has jurisdiction over what portions of the
rivers, the oceans and the mountains

If ____ has jurisdiction over the waters into which ______ were ____ then ____ is legally bound
by ________ to process the ____ according to the norms and codes of _______

But who can really tell where _______ ends and ______ begins

The first time they took _____ to the _______ he saw ____ from the _____

There was a man on a _____ who fit the description of ________

______ a ____ to his _____and each time ______ was asked ___ ____ was ____

The ____ did not have the capacity to _______

He could not ____ or _____ his __________

He _____ when it became clear that he could not ________

THE LEAKY FRAME

by DANIEL BORZUTSKY

What blows, what blows up, what blows up in our expertise. A skull is on fire and it is an end, not a means. The Workshop is called: How to Efficiently Obliterate a Body. All the seats are full. The waitlist goes on forever.

To be satisfied with an accomplishment is a preface to your own decomposition. To lengthen, to delay, to depart slowly from the blankness, to be loose or erratic, to shake or totter. Best advice is to not become: the smoke of forgotten bodies.

Sour mouth. Sour mouthhole. Tart teeth. Dead mouth covered in acid. On the other side of the metaphor is a chemical reaction. Where you see petals, I see thorns. To chew on petals and thorns, I drool on them. This is what they contract the child to perform. She digs for colonial stones on the genocidal beaches of tomorrow. The decadence of desperate survival.

Survive or disappear. The indulgence of depression. Try not to feel what you are supposed to feel. Quantify your suffering as comprehensively as possible. Quantify your future suffering. Your suffering futures. Deduct what you can still taste. Breathe as if your life depends on it.

Liberation does not nullify the question of ownership. Who owns this body? Who owns these words? Who owns this mouth, this tongue, these lips? He imagines a path in the woods. It is blocked by tons and tons of garbage. With his little fingers he digs a tunnel through the garbage then runs into a different nation. The survivor must repress their feelings and endure their deterioration with patience and grace. We will not intersect again with the nothing or nobody that owns me.

Saying it this way or that way. Either way, the writing kills us and the things that want us dead, well sometimes they want us less dead. And sometimes they want to blow us up just a wee bit. The company disappears into our mouths and we disappear into the books, the holy texts, the cosmic bits of paper, the galaxies. The poems get better as the war gets worse. The critics know well how to explain this.

We are always transitioning out of ideology and into the material reality of our blankness. In the dream you told me if I licked the bankers’ eyeballs I would no longer be in debt. How many, I said? All of them, you said. All of them. The end of the dictatorship was on page 131 in the novel that contained my life. But I was just a dot over a letter, a scratch mark in the margins. A shit clump in a field of broken nouns.

He said: X was a Nazi before there were Nazis. Or maybe he said: you will live a long and prosperous life if you can keep the pages from becoming diseased. A proper name: stars in the trash. Propriety: balance the books with a cryptic code of mouths, legs, torsos. What is the name of the bullet that came for your arm? Someone once said if it’s inside you, you should love it. Everything he knows about science came from one particular image: a bird attached with thick tape to a brick and tossed into a river. He was taught that if he says “peace” enough times he will feel peace in his mouth. Our people don’t like air, light, wind, rain, ponds, meadows, mountains, oceans, caves, burrows, etc…We like the small bits of human that are not human, the watery parts, the smell of burning hair.

When the machine goes crazy, the machine is actually just doing what it is supposed to do. They play stick your hand as far as it can go into the machine’s teeth and see how long it will take for a cry to leave your throat. Twenty-seven seconds, the guard screams; another guard types this into a computer and the numbers are transmitted to a server where they are turned into mystical data. We know the codes by heart. We know the meaning of every breath, grunt, whisper.

A bit, a fragment, an itsy bitsy thing. Truth has a tendency to move towards its opposite, to bolt, to decay. Can a particle be governed? Can it occupy the same discrete space or energy field as the radiation it represents? The principle of exclusion states that certain particles can’t live together in the same quantum space. When you assign a name, he says, you begin with a sound. What should we call your agony, he asks. What should we call the scream that is stuck in your mouth?

To recede, to go back, to go away. Here is a body that has recessed into what they call “the private chambers.” This is a joke. There is nothing that belongs to one individual only. There is no blood or thought or grief or words that are outside the view of a public. What there is in the so-called “private chambers” is hunger. There is plenty of food. But when they take our bodies near the food we are met with a challenge. Eat and someone else does not eat. Starve and everyone starves. In these moments they ask us to think of our mothers and fathers as an experiment. Your parents are in a petri dish and tonight you are there with them. An exposed light bulb beams restraint upon their desires. A man in a lab coat holds a parliamentary dagger in his arms. He tells a story about time and a magical echo chamber. He disappears your mother and father and delivers you from all that you know.

It’s okay to kill a traitor, they say. It’s rational, even. So many things are rational. Humans on highwires, swinging around like monkeys. It’s rational to pick off your skin when it is studded with vermin. The poison swims in my vein and it’s rational to try to breathe as freely and as deeply as I can. Rational is the etymology of the word “villain.” From the Latin villanus, “a farmhand,” from the Latin “villa,” a country house, or farm. The lowest class of unfree persons were “villains,” scoundrels, criminals. The opposite of a villain is a hero. A property owner is a hero. A serf or a slave is a villain. “Those buttocks sitting upwards,” write Vallejo. Rational. It can’t be that one. It can only be that one.

We divide the days and the hours into triangles. We divide the triangles into smaller triangles. We sleep in the corner of a triangle and every so often the division of time into smaller units of time interferes with the progression of love or the devolution of history or the mechanization of breath. I don’t want to see you anymore, says lover X to lover Y on the saddest day of the week. I don’t want to know you anymore. But really these declarations are not intended for the other. They are directed at the moment that one minute becomes another, one day becomes another, one month becomes another. It’s rational to stand in front of a speeding train if you don’t want to live anymore, she says. It’s rational to think there are mystical underpinnings in the syllables of your name, in the umms of your voice, in the splash of the dying river.

author pic here

Daniel Borzutsky is a Singaporean Chinese poet based in the UK. He is a finalist for the 2024 Oxford Poetry Prize and 2025/26 Magma Poetry Competition, and the winner of Singapore’s 2022 National Poetry Competition. His poems appear in Ninth Letter, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, Salt Hill, London Writers’ Centre, and elsewhere. He is a Philosophy, Politics and Economics undergraduate at the University of Oxford. Read more at conantan.com.

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