2 Poems
Featuring “morning routine" and “inflection” by eae Benioff
eae Benioff, artwork by Lee Teka
Lee Teka
morning routine
for Paul Celan
unwedged kettle bell
clanks down the swollen stairs
to the listless enema of the piano dribbling
against
the glaring prose
of the wallpaper
on which each day
is trying to write itself
like almonds in a sparrow's mouth
deuteronomies fly
& solicit soil to receive them & where they can't find soil
asphalt & where they can't find asphalt
children
flung laws fall like manna
& the tongue unwitting gleans
from the desert turf
a complex of feces & urea
a rollie pollie in the noon mumbles its maroon
onto cement
a girl scrawled like a nūn in the sun
considers licking it
but then relents
because her shadow is cool
her mind unbends
so it’s like she's purchased on a stool
above herself & her wonder
& her mother & her mother's mother
all the way up to god's mother
who still in my late age
i refuse to call
for my piece of peace:
my hunger has been spoiled by someone else's hunger
i lack now inertia
watch cereal get soggy in the bowl
win admonishment
self-pity & clandestine bitterness
that seeks my whole being
for its mood
i have been rude today,
i write, in my diary
the crucible of being felt is full & i toss the leathered spine aside
to stew
on my misprisions
oh paul,
i write, in my diary
why did you fling yourself law-like from that bridge into the Seine
am i so vain
to wish your life was better
had we met as friends i would have made you tea
& stroked myself with feathers
& demanded that you laugh at my impersonations of the weather
see already you clouding thru your brightness
the composition of so little slightness is bare
not barren
his feet go first into the heat & then into the garden
but these subjunctives
like the elastic in balloons
eventually do harden
& it becomes impossible to not say war
war war. war,
war.
& remind myself that nothing is evil
only history presenting itself as causeless
& myself as feeble
inflection
for my co-workers
the brain flickers on
dimly i c the day has been
relations, as Marx said, can become manifest
only thru the mediation of ideas
like when chelsie & guille wrapped around me as they danced
my cheeks brightened
& they laughed
& all tasks became minor
& the irrelevance of everything
became delightful
relief is surreal but relief doesn’t compare
to the felicity of thought
b/c rlly there’s nothing in the mind
only vacuities abysmal shapes & ampersands
expressed in various degrees of neon
that the mind goes off is mysteriously painful
by contrast sleep has aspects
such as buoyancy inherence calamity & lack
ennui exists
is not off either but the salutation of a bourgeois
life falling deafly on the heart’s being ever on
it is a sub-species then of sleep
unforgettably there’s death but death
doesn’t happen 2 us @ all much less our minds
it’s an anvil & onto its gr8 feasance our form falters
becomes indescribably hot & iron
becomes time
2 keep it is something only a mind can’t do
i’ve been stamping pastry bags 4 hours
the force of my palm extraneous & required
grows a green nothing in my metacarpals
all pain is srs 2 the bones
the failure 2 be distilled in an experience
like a tumor
sometimes it’s a mercy 2 be cut
i walk beyond the store to where the oranges are
bedded on the rooves & the colder purples on the lintels
no age is being added 2 the river nor xylum
2 the river birches the day is punctured
i am buffeted by laughter the sun’s timely edges
lather everything is in earshot everything
is improved by its shadow the sidewalk goes
where i wish i have five infinite minutes
deciduous in the extreme but never fleeting
so long, i ask, whose time am i living
who am i b/n & what idea am i & what idea
am i behind everything ends in a careful fuss
of coats & hinges the hours that appear
do not lessen into peace – thank god –
i come home & my heart is full of intervals
perhaps what’s in the mind is this: a chair
a stenotype & a stenographer a transcription
of a case against fear that is ancient & pending
an archive of the soul w/ no librarian
but i’m a soft bitch & i like hope