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.
2
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.
3
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.
4
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.
5
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.
6
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.
7
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.
8
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.
9
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.
10
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?
11
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.
12
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.
13
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.
