Editions MSS
Editions MSS
M. S. STRICKLAND
The Safely Waking Loam


I and the world are separate.

The world is not outside me.

I am not inside the world.

Not is an eye that opens inside the world.

The eye is inside the world and has the world inside it.

The world inside the eye is the body.

I am not inside the world.

The body is not outside me.

I and the body are separate.

Separate is time that touches inside the body.

Time is inside the body and has the body inside it.

The body inside time is pain.

Pain is not outside me.

I am not inside pain.

I and pain are separate.

Lundi : I

A bride arrayed like a jester was springing towards me. Her embrace was of eight arms and at the ends of each were blooms of iris. She removed my bubbling stew of shame from my stove of passion in such a way as to insert purple corymbs where it had been. I was a form modeled perhaps on the sheathed stems which sufficed her to toy with. I could not dispel the monsters of mimicry that palmed me off to the charade of her coming near me when I was dreaming that dream that still haunts me. It was the first time that I thought she was fully mine and her full weight was bearing down on me with open eyes but the spit was rising in my throat as it chokes me now. Did I fall hard? I think I must have been a sort of wrathful salvation for her. I was that very bouquet she flung toward me and I was thrashing as I fell.

Dream that still haunts me.
Till I was five, I could always chase a nightmare by dreaming a bride arrayed in white. The star-capped jester springing from his box to choke me was checked by a tossed bouquet, his eight arms blunted into harmless blooms of marigold, primrose and iris. A gaggle of witches removed my spleen and stirred it into bubbling stew. Before shock of loss gave way to rage, my bride restored me; purple corymbs blossomed where hags had been. I never saw her face; her soft form, modeled on my sister’s, perhaps, sheathed in diaphanous lace, sufficed, with its trite nearness, to dispel the rarer, more horrible monsters of my nights. Or was she mimic of my mother? She was nowhere near when I woke to a dream that haunts me, now, when my bride returns from bar, drunk, and reeking of tobacco. It felt so voluptuous, at first, that heavy body crushing mine. Weight soon stole air from sleep, and open eyes, now, still saw only dark. Spit chokes fright: this is my oldest brother, drunk, and reeking of tobacco, slobbering his mouth on mine. My bride did not appear. Black stayed black, hard and smothering. Where was her wrathful salvation? Where, her bright bouquet flung like a spear? Anger flashed in me, and flashes still: arms and legs thrash rampant at my own foul memory; wild quivers of singing arrows. A lighter love, and never angered: could there be such trembling in it?
She was fully mine.
At three a.m., for some reason he can’t remember, he had to dump a bucket of ice out the window. Across the street, hers too was wide open, and she was in it, fucking, tits flat against sill, a splay of arms and fists against the window’s frame. Some lucky bastard, he thought, is taking her from behind.
I and the world are separate and the eye separates me from the world.

The eye is inside the world and has the world inside it.

The world inside the eye is the body.

I and the eye are separate and the body separates me from the world.

The body is inside the world and has the world inside it.

The world inside the body is time.

I and the body are separate and time separates me from the world.

Time is inside the world and has the world inside it.

The world inside time is pain.

I and time are separate and pain separates me from the world.

Pain is inside the world and has the world inside it.

I am the world inside pain.

I and the world are separate.

Mardi : The world

Loaded full of someone else’s champagne at someone else’s wedding, let’s say hers. That’s one pissed way to keep from getting a spray of cake from anyone who might have laughed too vigorously. What else could you do to distract their eyes from scenes of public hilarity but by passing out on the nickel-plated bar. And you thought that kids like these could only be bought next door. That’s no scaredy-cat way to exit a party running barefoot, now, is it? The furthest thing from all those giggles you were imagining must have been all the fun you thought you’d have despite the awkward leggy swings you took trouncing up the spiral steps with her voice echoing behind you just a measure too late. My nose is oily, could you excuse me? Coming back to the tent I was afraid to find her naked or at least giving birth to those sensations of voluptuous power she so often pressed upon my milder sensibilities by breaking out of character and forgetting about the pain medication she’d need to have sprayed on her back afterwards. I was laughing but not like she thought I was or not in the way she wished she had shaped what I did to it so that it would hit me knowing as you do why she makes me so nervous always.

One pissed way to keep.
Till I was ten, giggling was the most loaded response to the sight of a penis, mine or someone else’s. One old man, I remember, pissed from a warty hose a sprinkler spray of click-timed waving. We all laughed. To avoid such displays of public hilarity, and the nickel and dime poll tax of pay toilets, kids like us would crawl beneath the door. Scaredy-cat snickers and mass exit running. Whose piss could arc furthest from bank to stream? Never mine. Giggles all around. Camping out was fun, despite the familiar worry (see below). Time, my bride, clicks and swings spiral imitation; fugal voice, a fifth higher and a measure later, repeats, repeats, repeats: my nose pressed into musty oily tent floor canvas, all else too afraid to know, balk or not strip naked; to move despite the strange sensations of pressure, warmth and pain that pressed my nose to canvas, pressed giggles out of me forever: that strange pain sprayed sticky smelly warmth on my back. I was a girl but not laughing like a girl; I was a girl but not shaped like a girl. My penis, did it spray, too? I don’t know. I don’t know why I wrote: “giggles pressed out of me forever.” I’m always nervous, always grinning with fear, shy form marred by the recursive memory of being raped by my brother. A braver love, and never defiled: could there be such passion in it?
Voluptuous power.
She watched them climb the garden fence. It was not late yet, they were not her neighbors, and she knew what they were going to do. Beneath the fig tree were two white plastic deck chairs in which, somehow, they would arrange their limbs and fuck.
I am not inside the world.

The world is not outside me.

I and the world are separate.

Separate is time that touches inside the body.

The body is not outside me.

Outside is the eye that opens inside the world.

The world is not outside me.

The eye and the world are not separate.

Not is pain that closes inside the eye.

The eye is not outside me.

I am not inside the eye.

Inside is the world that approaches me.

I and the world are separate.

Mercredi : The eye

One could almost say that the stain bound us both to mutually reinforcing cycles of tears. However, I read lately that to overcome a weakness which might bare your true self, one should abide by such acrid wetness. Don’t approach too near to it, though, nor wander too far away from it, for it is said that the safely waking loam sleeps in shame. I thought that was a flaw I’d outgrown while waiting backstage for the unbidden cue to pounce on her performance with my voice drooling praise and a rose stem in my bared teeth but I realized that I’d been abandoned and that your act or hers was as unripe as mine and no curtain would ever crash down on our show’s acclaim. Still, it’s not as though either of us were incapable of dramatic exertion or that our plot was totally unplanned. The action falters like clockwork that trips out of sync only because no one bothered to wind it. It’s not that there are any flawed parts in it or that any snares lie in wait to snatch our newly fledged nestlings and lay waste to our whole ecology. But, I mean, what flight would you charter to take you to your most perfect vision of the tropics?

Such acrid wetness.
Till I was fifteen, I wet my bed almost nightly. That saffron stain bound me friendless to unshared cycles of loathing, poetry and tears. (Cause may be gleaned from what’s said above.) I wrote to hide, not show; I read to remain at home with my weakness which travel would surely reveal by failed vigil and spreading acrid wetness. Hence my furtive approach to love: I waited. I waited for the limpid embrace of safely waking without need to root out loam in which to bury my cold shame. I waited to laugh away that flaw, outgrown, but winking yet backstage, unbidden jester ready to pounce on any bedroom performance with a wince and a wilt of drooling stem curtailed, the act abandoned, unripe fruit dropped with prompt curtain-crash. Still stained and striped my body is, though mind may clear it with exertion or innocent dalliance unplanned. The scene is set but swift the action falters, threads unravel, clockwork trips and sticks and stumbles out of sync. Any toy I fashion is flawed, any course I take is primed with snares and dissolves into trackless waste. What vessel could I shape or charter to give or take me to perfect tropics abundant with warmth, friendship, pride, strength? That land does not exist. The boat leaks, the vase cracks, memory crumbles in anticipation. A stronger love, and never ashamed: could there be such grandeur in it?
Our show’s acclaim.
His deck overlooked her bedroom window, directly beneath which, he knew, was her bed, queen-sized, covered with an Indian tapestry. Tonight, her blinds were raised, her lace curtains drawn aside, the bedroom lights ablaze, and he watched her fall back naked on the bed, drawing a large, hairy-backed man on top of her. For what seemed to him a superhumanly long time, and without changing position, the back moved in a manner he knew to be that of fucking. At last it gave way and ventured out of sight. He watched as she finished herself off by hand.

“On a hill I stood; overlooking: Observing:

Past present future spread out before me:

Not separate but one.”

Three pairs of oblique, informal, yet nevetheless resolute strokes, drawn northwest to southeast in a soft blue indelible felt tip pen, score the above cited tercet of incipient, or marginal incipient, textwork that occupies the very heart of a dactylographed feuille jaunie dont l’oubli, l’obliteration, la biffure même from conscious memory function(s) as a schizomythic oospore around which it has drawn to itself a nourishing stromal patchwork quilt of maturer subject matter that, though staid compared to what you readers of Hester Esmans The Meaner Side typically excoriate your senses upon in that organ, said editrice thereof deemed suitable enough to put out for in the issue following hard upon my thirty-fifth birthday, to celebrate which I wrote the stuff, steeped as I was with a recent, select, and very intense reading of the Appalachian conjunctivists as well as feeling that it was high time I tamed by means of the shimmering versality of diligent textwork — in the chimeric medoid of the tetradic structure of the iterative litany of which the eternally vernal imposture of self may be imagined to frisk and prance and chub about like a fully masked and costumed ritualist indomitably pursuing, through the fancy-footwork and taboo-defying rhythms of the dance, the cathartic colature of be(com)ing — various of my oral speculations anent the emergence and embodiment of time from and in the organic (precisely, in other words, what Lamarck dubbed the orgasmic) resistance to entropy, not to mention bringing to fruition the lexical ecological pépins and the heteroclitical noyaux of rhesophrenic dissociation as well as the savage sociophysiological baies gleaned here and there, in Lutèce and Owlstain, primarily, but also I should emphasize that my brother, alias Victor K. Strigil, is no stand-in, despite the insistence of malevolent wags (soient frîtes ces langues ennuyeuses!), for either me or my nom de plume, M. S. Litarn.

Jeudi : Clinamen

Thanks for having us over and helping us get through it by shining light on the consecration or absolution of that passion we’d leapt from so many times before into the eternal bliss of passing out in each other’s arms. We’d thought that the real last try would be an option for us but now that we’re back from it with no skin off our backs we have more wisdom to spread around. Let someone tell us that it’s wrong to have one’s mind’s eye already focused on something else such as whether consciousness is a sham or not or whether it is at all without having to ask for once what every child’s sex is before it’s born. I came crashing down against earth’s atmosphere and she was some gash cut into an island’s lagoon as if she had been born sun-bright from the sundering depths of it. No diamond can withstand a star’s inferno, nor mind a woman’s. What’s to be done first? I skip a flat stone across the waves turbid with life. This is not someone else, mind you, this is me the continuously carefree and afoot coming back from parts unknown and waking this morning on a beach built from a scar of rain forest.

With no skin off our backs.
Till I was twenty, I was waiting for consciousness to wash over, through me, a pure kiss of waking light, consecration by woman’s lips, absolution through shared tears, passion, a cliff-top picnic from which we’d leap, hand in hand, into eternal bliss. That spectral world was never born. Co-author of nine abortions, everything I’ve loved I’ve destroyed. Every relationship ends after nine months of empty conception. Real pregnancy comes late: nature’s last try to wrench a perverse option from spirit’s clumsy grasp and give it back to soul’s more ancient wisdom. (Let me define my terms: spirit is mind’s veneer; soul, everything else; consciousness, not quite a hollow sham, is a vain orchid, as every child and martyr knows: it dies for sex, not love.) I woke to waves crashing against liquid rock spewed from earth-gash; in barbed ocean a new island born of hissing steam and a sun-bright sundering of surface and depth. Diamond forms from ash; gold grows in star’s inferno, fathomless to mind. What’s it matter who betrayed whom first? I was myself both sea and stone, turbid with minerals, seething with life. Infinite worlds pollute me; the jester springs continuously from his box; dream is equal parts waking and nightmare and memory built of blossom, blood, pain and scar. A purer love, and never betrayed: could there be such beauty in it?
From parts unknown.
A woman was taking a shower. It was five in the morning, and this woman, she knew, worked in the hospital down the street. What she hadn’t known before, however, was how admirable this woman’s breasts were. Through the narrow bathroom window, through the incongruously unfogged glass of the shower stall, she watched this woman as she soaped her body, paying particular attention to the breasts, the punctuated nipples of which were pink. A second woman, naked, entered the bathroom, drew aside the sash of the shower stall, and closed it behind her. This, too, she had not known before. She watched the glass fog. Contrary to any definitions of the word she had hitherto been aware of, this couple, she knew, was, miraculously, fucking.
From outside the body the eye opens into pain.

Time is the world that touches the body.

Time and the world are not separate from the eye that opens into pain.

Pain and the world are not separate from the body that approaches me.

The world inside the body is time.

Inside the body time touches and is separate.

I and the world are separate.

Pain and the body are not separate from the world that approaches me.

Approach is inside the world.

The body and the world are not separate from the pain that touches me.

Touch is time pain the eye the body the world approaches.

The eye and the world are not separate from the body that closes.

Vendredi : The body

Item: a dose of social indulgence I begged from the dull pebble bed. I drove by it on the way to watch wildfires pock the stream with ash. Adduce that not unrelated to its heft, polish, and grain, the boon I there obtained will tide me over till I return. It is in it that I will have sealed this cauldron of envelopes. It, too, wobbled when I walked. It was as naked under its gown as I was when I kneeled and saw myself slicing from it snapshots, notebooks, letters, gifts. I sliced the desk of its containment too. That leaded crystal of its hide, notice, consists of dangling panicles of plum as bright as the most impressive geode the scurf of which I can use to appease the guitar-wielding guardians of the terrace wherein dwells the goddess of the night’s beacon you might be tempted to call her. I should say that that clinches the deal but with other merchants I might also have bartered. Am I not the coven of all? Or is it that I have become the coven of none? Here you will find beer for borrowing and music for measure.

Dangling panicles.
Till I was twenty-five that fraction of self devoted to social indulgence remained trapped in a dull pebble gleaned from a dry stream bed. By turns, flashflood whirlpools would grind it to a perfect sphere, and wildfires pock it with whelks and blains. (I adduce that this situation is not unrelated to that which obtained till I was fifteen.) I used it, that pebble, as a paperweight: sealed cauldron crushing torn envelopes. Too light for its size, though, it wobbled. Naked, in a dark room, I kneeled slicing the shy mirrors of snapshots, notebooks, poems, journals, letters, gifts of books and clothes. Such storm when I sliced my thighs knocked pebble from desk. That pebble shattered into crystal panicles of crocus and plum, bright innards of a precious geode the shards of which I was able to pawn for a chat with a guitar-wielding jester on the terrace of a cafe where the pale goddess of nicotine became my night’s beacon. Various bar-room clinches with midnight witches were also bartered for. “The hour in which I am is fragment of the hour which I become,” proclaimed one of that coven. “Here,” I said, hunched over my beer and pointing to my scars, “is music for your sabbat, stave and measure of nuptial communion, memory made flesh of raw debauchery.” A nobler love, and never abased: could there be such carriage in it?
Guardians of the terrace.
In a soft low club chair upholstered in yellow velvet, placed at an angle between two overburdened bookshelves, a naked woman was squatting atop a naked man. He admired her viola-form from hip to shoulder; the dimples in the small of her back. The dogs, too, wanted to come out onto the deck and watch. No, no, don’t let them out, it’s too hot. His wife wanted to come out and help. No, it’s all right, I’ve just finished watering the basil, I’m almost done. Stepping back into the chill of his house he thought, “Fuck, that couple doesn’t use air-conditioning.”
From inside time the body closes to touch the world.

I am not inside the world.

Inside is the world that approaches me.

Outside is the body that opens into pain.

Time is the body that closes into pain.

I and pain are separate.

I and pain are not separate.

Separate is the eye that closes.

I the world the eye time pain close outside the body.

Time and the world are not separate from the body that opens into pain.

I open inside time the world the body pain.

I and the world are separate.

The world is not outside me.

Outside is the eye that separates me from the world.

Separate is the eye that opens inside the world.

Separate is the body that closes inside pain.

Separate is time that touches inside the body.

Separate is pain that approaches inside the world.

I and the world are separate.

Separate is time that closes pain.

Samedi : Time

Was anyone ever capable of finding starlings that sing the moon which makes the plumed cloud blossom? Those porno films we made still slide a lay of geese. The delta is calling with the sails so polite and the willow so complete at dawn. Two reproductions by Paul Klee hang above the thick muddy clot I let fall after stumbling up the spiral staircase. There’s a storm in the Gulf on whose sands we squatted and watched a solar eclipse erase the shadows we cast. Shells wink from the turf of seaweed and what you taught me was already inside the whorl of what the crow pecked out. A corrupt captain’s in the hold and on the ant’s ocellus the aroma still clings or transforms the drop to cloud too quickly and the arrowed wind evaporates the blood beneath our dream.

Slide a lay of geese.
Till I was thirty, I thought that home was what I’d despaired of ever finding. A place where ruffled starlings sing at three am, and full moon makes irid angel wings of gray plumed cloud. Across screen of eye two films slide counter to each other: blue lay of stars; black line of honking geese. The tarry scent of nearby delta; the desperate sob of lowered sails; polite applause of elm and willow complete that bend of stream at dawn. Two paintings, a Gerrit Dou, a Paul Klee (textured reproductions), hang above the yellow bed of a nine-year-old dead of leukemia, or first-love dead of a fluke blood clot after falling down a spiral staircase. Adrift in the bitter gulf on that sidewalk where I squatted and cried, I watched a partial solar eclipse in the crescent shadows cast by locust leaves. Two green snail shells wink from the frame of mottled turf. And a beautiful woman who taught me to kiss was rotting inside of cancer. I’d been searching in vain. Corrupt or vibrant, home coils in on itself, contracts when stung by ant or parasitic wasp, transforms to writhing burst of membrane, pearled cloud quickly tracing feast for swifts and arrowed martins on sheer ground of wind. Beneath purple vaults of sky dream prances pied a reel of memory unspooling dense refluent time. A surer love, and never unmoored: could there be such compass in it?
Thick muddy clot.
They were going at it against a horse trailer parked near the corral; the hostel wasn’t too far away; she’d seen it all before: he who went first would take the other in his mouth, if such was necessary. “Where horses fuck,” she thought, “people follow, especially when they’re drunk.”
The eye and the body are separate.

The eye and the body are inside the world.

The world inside the eye is the body.

The body inside the world is time.

The eye inside time is pain.

Pain and time are not separate.

Pain is not outside me.

Outside the world I open into pain.

The body is pain that touches the world.

I am not inside the world.

Time pain the world the eye approach the body.

I and the body are separate.

Inside the eye the body closes.

Approach is inside the world.

Close is I the world the eye the body time inside pain.

Pain closes the world.

I and the world are separate.

Soldi : Pain

From my tailored wardrobe I chose the costume I find invariable for such occasions of worsted flannel and silk unweaved from the wild moth unspun. I dared not don nor did I not dare provocative combinatorics of geometry, of texture, and of words for functions so supple as hers within the frame of her toe in its goatskin sandal. Those bounds of leather we must learn from another. My word, how your Cardin grows such plump puns, my dear, and it’s obvious that so many pin-striped cigarettes are simply so many goblins and witches watching one’s childhood go up in smoke. A wicked silhouette presaged the medusa bloom of her face, and sapphire bouquet her envy and wrath.

From the wild moth unspun.
Till I was thirty-five, the fabric tailored to fashion my wardrobe I perceived as invariable. Worsted, linen, cashmere, flannel, silk, tweed — all, I learned, could be unweaved, unspun, unbonded. Self could don not just the staid combinatorics of cut and cloth — geometry of web and stitch could be changed; texture and style rethought. The sense of words, for example, became as supple — within bounds, of course — as the frame of syntax that chained them head to toe in speech and text. To expand those bounds, try talking to a stranger; learn another language. Height of word grows proportional to gloss and pun and novel context. Obvious to you, perhaps; not me. Thus was that striped jester tamed by cigarettes and song. There still awaited witches to be harried by my childhood dream. Satori recapitulates ontogeny, I discovered. A horned owl’s auspicious silhouette presaged my bride’s return in face and form: Shirazi eyes of sapphire and gold which Venus would envy; nose and mouth rare goddesses repeat from Ur to Athens, Norlia to Upper Engush. Her scar-dimpled chin quivers and glows through a veil of pleasure edged in broad strokes of paint-bristled striations of hair brushed light and dark: thick-plunging memory of absence, loss, release, rejoice. A wiser love, and never obscure: could there be such knowledge in it?
A wicked silhouette.
He couldn’t believe so many positions were possible. She went down on him, he went down on her, each went down on each according to the sign of the Crab. They awkwardly managed to put each other’s nipples into their mouths. Then his back she did vigorously hump, and hers he slowly rode, then, supine, he allowed her to straddle him ventro-ventrally, ventro-dorsally, dorso-ventrally, and, somehow, dorso-dorsally. Most shocking of all, however, was a position almost impossible to describe, but from which, he could see, they both derived immense satisfaction: in the manner of a patient awaiting speculum or curette, she raised high and wide her knees, and he, in the manner of a monkey exploring a tight mineshaft, squatted to lock his tail into hers, his face pressed into the foot of the mattress he could see from his kitchen window, a secret perk his landlord had failed to point out when showing him this, his first apartment in the city. Thankfully, however, they then fucked for a while in standard style, then he kneeled and she enveloped him, then he lay back and gave birth to her from between his outspread thighs.
[ A not-for-profit instantiation of human imagination and human labor ]
Copyright © 2002 M. S. Strickland