Crying is the Body

There are two men who are medical students and one man who is the doctor. I take off all my clothes and put my feet up in the stirrups. Fold my knees together. The doctor pushes them apart and says, This is my territory. Those are his words.

The nurse is a woman who stands beside me while the doctor puts the metal thing in.There are so many organs in there, and I’ve never seen any of them. He opens my body like he is jacking up a car. All the men look.

The machine is like a telescope, and he puts it in my body. His eyes are in my body. My cervix is the moon, and so far away. He is close to the place where babies grow.

There is no room in there for me, let alone a baby.

I keep my mouth closed when he speaks to me and answer with my head. I don’t want my face to open up. It’s the only way. The nurse looks like she wants to bandage me, and I can’t look at her eyes because then she will be in me, too. There is nothing she can do. All I can do is lie down and let him fix me.

The bad thing is growing where a baby should be.

He pours the vinegar in like a marinade and takes out a part. If it turns another color, that’s bad. It said so on the Internet. There’s something in me bad.

The nurse puts her hand on the chair near my head. Or she holds one hand in the other. I think she wants to touch me. This isn’t me.

The three men leave, and I put on my jeans. I put on my coat. The doctor comes in. He says, You have to always use a condom. As if I don’t know that. He tells me it’s irregular, abnormal, what’s in me. He says, Don’t worry, your body will clear it out. My body with its scalpel. You have to get the shot. He gives me a pad and says there may be discharge.

Outside the office, I let my face open. Crying is the body coming out.

LOWER DENS: NOTES ON A PERFORMANCE
A VIEWER’S COMPOSITION¹

I. How mud valleys

Hovering, as carbonation rises a dust cloud from ginger ale, we rise faint above the stage where when there are none of us left we rain down bodies.

The moment of central music gathers a mass upnecked and bob perhaps like of the ocean’s buoy breath. Then I, breathless, as the closed door seals my mouth like a jar. Why do we crane necks to see machine musicians press keyboards on the stage? It has been a dream day. This is not unpackaged music, but for the atmosphere, and here he speaks to me, the lights he says are too much. It is the quality of vibration that accounts for the liveness of music.

If my heart speaks to your heart I need say nothing. In our overcoat pockets we gather shells.

Of friends who now lovers flirt with lover’s friends: Who is not the peacock? Can the peacock ever turn his head around? Does he know his splendor with only the eyes of instinct, or is fact relayed in peachicks who spring off—though perhaps then all-brown hens. Such is what truth lies there.

Touching bodies
I am worried
for your heart.

But in truth: The weekend’s hem trailed into this Monday as rolling out of bed I do not wake even as I brush my teeth.
To write then not “I” but “teeth”.
Teeth even as brushed do not wake.

II. The erosion of music into discord

A full devotion to the interruption of action to engage in dialogue (a dialogue already meaningful for the fact of its existence).

Feverishly I ring the bells of discontent.
Am I writing now from lack of courage to giggle?

Is suffering through discomfort, unnecessarily, brave?
If so, then: bravery = all that is not passivity?

How can I engage with erotic experience? (That would be brave.) The heart of erotic holds itself in broken perspective: to zoom in on a crowd and see one standing, sparks. Or rather is it in anticipation, in knowing many stand alone though seeing only a mass amassed? To stalk the unique among the uniform, though never capture a lonely one?

Bravery here does not exist.

In the body of relationships there is only Romantic (generosity), Platonic (absence of), Erotic (to sit inside of fear).

Vulnerable, but mostly true.

III. Seaweed body forms seaglass people

sand-soft             unhemmed by             and wavebound
                                                                                                      to cut when already broken

Speech waltzes

Tone, scream, moan, wail, & cry wither, unclaimed

The machine
that measures worth
on stage is called to action.

Through breaks erotic whispers when seamless tension rides absent. Is the break a window through which erotic might steal, or is it itself erotic?

IV.

They end with no warning just thanks

Words of the Day

One doe,
and two bucks.
One does,
and two buck.

One doe bucks,
and one buck
does not.

One
buck bucks,
and one
doe does
not.

Does doe
do bucks?
Doe does
do bucks.

Does doe
do does?
Doe does
do does!

Does buck
buck bucks?
Buck does
buck bucks.

Does buck
buck does?
Buck does
buck does!

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¹ Written in response to a concert by Lower Dens, March 5th, 2012

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