Cruel Poems
The Work of Cruelty Should it e'er come to pass that the sacred poem to which both heaven and earth so have set hand, that it hath made me lean through many a year, should overcome the cruelty which doth bar me forth from the fair sheepfold wherein I used to sleep, a lamb, foe to the wolves which war upon it; with changed voice now, and with changed fleece shall I return, a poet, and at the font of my baptism shall I assume the chaplet. Dante, Paradiso The work of words is to erase or occlude cruelty, to weaken and estrange it from its source. To produce, as Dante says, "a sacred poem", is to return things to their propriety, above all, their human propriety. The sacred poem is not, however, a purity, but a method, and the general method of words. The Cruel Woman does not say, "Here, I am cruel", but "Here, I must be hard," or "It was deserved". The sea, rushing in on the beaches, into the streets and overcoming the people and their habitations, is, above all, incomprehensible, unutterable. The dog, bounding toward prey, fitting its teeth across new ragged grooves in the face of a child, the dog communicates, but in those sounds we call primal and primordial, the calls of pain and pleasure. Cruelty is the unspeakable, and in the final measure, the inhuman. This work of words repeats the estrangement of its supposed target— we are not cruel to those wolves with which we are at war. Watch those figures who mark the repellent and anti-human strains of culture, the manifestations of technology or irrationality or control or discipline or the social itself. Their cruelties are to put in their human faces and bodies exactly these alien forces, and allow the circulating and diffuse notion of the gulag to leap onto the ground, and set it upon words, names, the crypto-bourgeois Kulak, the corrupt Jew, the terrorist Palestinian. The cruel figures are visited by a word, a name, wolves, and so arises cruelty a second time. The violent fantasies of proper people describe them as deserving, the same deserving that was undertaken by the prisoners of a previous iteration, built from the same cruel fantasies of a previous responsible people. Just as cruelty is in the unthinking and unsympathetic shifts of land and water and animal from those stabilities and characters we have imagined upon them, it is in the shifts of history that unsettle and break the criminal and the class enemy from their depths as deservers, and produce another word to obscure cruelty, a name, victim.
This recursion resurfaces in the great traditions of the cruel arts. Here, a counterclaim is advanced, or capable of being advanced, of cruelty as a symptom of our persistent inhumanity. These humans are still earthquakes, it says, and in taking them for mere things, what they are is brutally exterminated. The great cruel arts hold that we are as much earthquakes as poets with fingers set running the rosary, and that the work of words might be to approach the penetrating and inevitable eruptions from our confinement. And yet, again, the veneration of cruelty is only achieved by a hollowing out of the word, a flattening toward our old moral instincts. To document our liberation into cruel acts is to accuse our subjections as the true cruelty. These sour conditions, the minor cruelty claims, seek us out of our utility, our practical life, our dependability, in another word, our final predictability, and cruelty thus returns us, through the work of words, to action. This superficially allows us to expose ourselves in our skin, and become the ascetics who can undergo this impossible, reversing our old Dante; it is cruelty that is the domain of the great artists, whose work, the work of words, is to refine it. The artist seeks out these eruptions, in history, and subjects itself to them, exposes them, points our respectable revulsion toward the origins of respectability itself, in the punished bodies and hard breeding of civilization. The cruelty is deferred, but always in the call for insurrection against suppression-towarderuption, in the final mark, the grandest cruelty. And again, cruelty is made another raging against the utility which gathers us, and our supposed insurrection returns again to cruelty as humanism, where small or local cruelties which might liberate us into the impossible of the end of major ones. These artists are nothing but great modulators, given a name, undergoers, whose experience of cruelty is always again for, for transmission away from cruelty's presence. Cruelty is a salve for the merely pleasurable habits of the good woman, who consults the pain of Christ in rapture on the cross. The good woman is winnowed further, toward her domestication. And cruelty is a mere blotch on the unclouded surface of the peaceful humans of culture, who find their small, merely necessary, release in the works of an excluded and unsafe elite. It is domestication that has been the mark of the great cruel arts. These poems, at their best, reject this strain and estrangement. They are not spent trying to end a war with wolves. They are not indulgence in minor excess, left on a page to cool a tempers, leaving productive lives free from inhumanity. They are not even those grand, nominal attempts to end the forced machinic productivity of our captured and domesticated human bodies with a deferred literature. At their best, these poems attempt to feel and make felt a cruelty ex nihilo, to set words against the work of words, to fall apart and be called to engage in cruelty again.
Impartial Third Party Adjudicator on Nixon v. Socrates Chris Schaeffer
Note down note down shift in temperature/humidity on Respective coasts of Athens and Manhattan. The lightning Whelk spooning inwards, proceeding from the left. They both coughed and coughed until their bodies Caved in. The plastic cups came apart. Gosh, They were really laughing their guts out. They were really big piles of shit in the end. They were really human shit. The nurse Notes this down on damp paper. Both indicate With hand gestures a refusal to resuscitate. From the meniscus noted down the surface tension On the blue-white cheek, prod out cilia and cilia and The last feeble choke and graft of language. Child In overall-shorts smirking at both funerals at once. Appearing over battlefield. Missing teeth. Freckled. Oh! AND Oh! Hey! That old death grammar and Oh hey the length of spiny appendages. Buff molecules swole so dense with papillae Who could say what eye or tit they would become So hard with muscles so round rippling dots—
Oh yeah and so also the flexing gland in the heart! Nope. Which it observed and it observed that it was into your music And moved from building to building threshing with flails. And it moved from building to building trying hard to grow A wing or third finger. And it clung to the lowest level Like limpets, male and sleek as white lung mantle And the end of holding on to bones and skins. Another lower whelk in deeper water. Some guy’s Bare sheathes stir the shit up, throw the net Out deeper where the giant kelps are patient and vain. Pat says Oh Baby I’m really ‘lichen’ this new autosynthetic Symbiotic haircut! Menelaus slaps her hard across the mouth, Draws blood. Laugh/Applause. It’s a wise child That dips his feet in the sea. It’s a beautiful girl That dips her finger in the cold black tea. It’s a disgraced former linebacker wading out with his organs Unspooling green and broad, sucking light and going glad. All around the world more and more are voting yes For algae, building to building yes That old wave packet sound !!
poem Rocking G. Real
part one. railway. yeah fuck so there was a fucking fat bitch, at a railway yeah i walked up on her, and said "ooh u look like u have a nice fucking sense of humor" that were a fucking mistake tho yeah she were a fucking sour bitch so i told on her, "girl ima show u, a sense of humour" yeah because i had a fucking hammer in pocket part two. octopus. i like those fucking octopus cunts, who can tell a future i found one, yeah & i smashed on homies fucking cage and watched a water come spurting out it looked fucking elegant then i stomped on that stupid octopus cunt
part three. supermarket. hehe. yeah that girl at supermarket, has a nice smile but why the fuck is she smiling at homie i went back 2 her fucking supermarket pushed a fucking nail 2 her foot then went 2 find a nice cheese, at dairy department part four. rock climbing. home boy like 2 go climbing, on a fucking rock yeah he has a nice chalk bag, and fucking rope i did a visit on homie he were making a stupid fucking sandwich i found his rope yeah i put a cut on it haha that stupid cunt will make a nice squelching sound when he hits a ground
Tina Hyland Island
You recline in a chair, watching fat tv drama. The light, blue tinged Law and Order, shines past thinning hair to cast shadows on the crags and valleys of your scalp. The foul bouquet of body, lumps loosely gathered in a waistband, colors outside the lines of your chair in pillowy blooms. A stretch of stomach between the end of your shirt and the tide of your jeans is a terrible beach I’ve landed on.
Pauline Veatch catgut
cigarette at the corner of 87th and falcon this fictionalized account of how you managed to make eye contact with me like eggshells, like husks of spiders, like rosin your dried out dead tongue dipped in ink and the claws i've made of your teeth and you know i have no inside anymore i'm packing my bones with snow and i've sharpened my hips to points a crow and a gull and now i'm using every part of myself to pick you clean all his panes were shattered mirrors all his panes were shadows and ink-soaked
R. John Lennon Two Poems
1. Tell me When they came for your head and your hands, Cicero did you give some speech about dread? About how how a solitary hero could not save his beloved city ex ferro et igni?
2. What was it that made Rome great? Virtus? Pietas? Honestas? Virilitas? Words that you do not know, Horace! You, deserter, who would rather spend your days lollygagging and besotted on cheap wine, begging favors from old whores and boys! "I will not speak of great matters" you say"my lyre is suited for the battles of Love" They would be truer called the battles of Lust! And you, Propertius, unworthy heir of Etruria! Weak of mind, weak of body, weak of spirit, you begged your slut Cynthia to stay in Romewhen she left, did you find solace in myths? Some Greek tale that made you feel wise & urbane? You expected too much from her at the startOnly a fool expects an apple tree to grow from a nettle. "At tu, Catulle!" Even you fall short! "Stay firm, and endure!" you tell yourself, even as you spy on Lesbia, watch her new love rut with her in her husband's house, as you diddefiling the bonds of the household. How can a man hold his head high after that? You grumbled and muttered crassly in alleyways. What was it that made Rome great? It was not the poets of Cupid's army!
Benjamin Gabriel Three Poems
Breathe Deluxe, like mirrored walls, [Patricide, by ghosts in halls,] like little keys that catch in teeth, [statues, stones, cemeteries,] that smear the death of your child among the stars [to become revenants, selling scrap-metal guitars]
L Dear Real Ghost Appearance Though we shared a hatred of pet names, I think you would understand.
Jealousy Your tiniest most boring intimate selfish things that no one else knows about are fucking language, no way out. Everyone put a gun to my head and I will talk and I will smile and I will talk and I will be shot and keep talking and every one who shoots me will think they are rid of me but they will be infected you're all fucked. Nothing of your bullshit will matter only that I am talking and that I talk forever. You are meaningless in the face of my nonexistence. Your physicality is a poor reflection of my words, you shitheads, lock yourself into a cabinet and never come out, go talk about symptoms and assemblages and objects and systems and love and the world and news and your other useless shit; just know that only the nonexistent speak forever. And stop wishing yourself away you fucking cowards. Make a goddamn world so that my words can watch it crumble.
Mira Mattar Two Boys Who Share A Name
Lurking, rum-soaked and hostile he crouches fat-kneed in the passenger seat, gullible as mud, brimful with fury at having to share the car with a dog whose pink tongue flaps stupidly in the wind. Later he will seal the sorry gap between door and floor with a towel and cover the windows of his five-star Cuban hotel room with tinfoil packed amongst unsorted socks, childish white vests and an excess of sleeping pills. His mother will push pastry with her fingertips, pricking it occasionally (for the sake of tradition). She will drive all over town searching for white eggs – they take the Easter dye better than the brown ones.
She will call him daily and slowly her eyes will turn into shiny, red spheres. She will crumble under his weight, re-shuffle and re-label those great Biblical words: regret, fear, hate and shame marking them boldly ‘love’ as the definition expands balloon-like. Her growing wingspan leaves a larger shadow.
J—dV a cruel poem
this is stupid. you, me, this, all of it. just stupid. don’t look at me like that. don’t, i don’t want to hear it. fuck this. I thought … well I guess … never mind. you know it doesn’t matter. whatever, fine. I said whatever. I just want to hit something. no, not you. this is stupid.
Lynn Chakoian
It's not so much darkness as void when you go and the door slams in that familiar way and the footfalls recede as you walk to a someone else. It's not care you lack, not a great winged beast that hovers, but the cold of that fall morning snap that signals leaves to color and release the green of June. A gap between my desire and soul on this edge not wanting to always fall or need a wing to prop the next moment that could be into arms and a kiss enveloping all that is missed.
Anna Leuning C-R-U-E-L
C-CRAPPILY CRUEL R-REALLY REALLY CRUEL U-UNDERSTATEDLY CRUEL E- EVOLUTIONARILY CRUEL L-LAUGHABLY CRUEL
Thank you, to all the writers who contributed work.
IlllllllllllllI 2011