Loving Ourselves Without Denial (ROUND 2)
scent of the day: NOSE REST DAY
*Let’s workshop this poem about the beauty of automaticity—a beauty that rings clear no matter the upsetting implication it might have in regards to the soul or to an identity-preserving afterlife.
Loving Ourselves Without Denial
Blessed be the nerve circuitry that keeps a kayoed boxer, eyes fluttering beneath the ringside medic’s penlight, bobbing and weaving—or more like whispering out
the note-to-self choreography of bobbing and weaving, of slipping and rolling— as he paddles out live-lobster-on-ice hooks through the viscosity of a roofie nightmare,
working the body with vestigial uppercuts (piss-ass digs below the belt), in that seam between mental rehearsal and showtime— cortical current bleeding into the lips,
into the tongue, like hound dogs woofing phantom bluster in dreamscape conflict over some bitch or bone; like jazz guitarists murmuring erotic ache in slack-jawed flow.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
