[Digital Poetics 4.5] on hydrocarbons and containment by Mau Baiocco
You’re on the inside and the outside at the same time
for Dom
Eighteen soothsayers ripple out of the palm
each locksided and saying 'oh it is uncertain'.
Surely it's a privilege to live in these final times
where you subject any given item to a walk and just say
be who you are, be your potential realisation
your garish fullness and life intermittent —
surely it is the time to write furiously, to pull the weave
with two hands. Or what if what you love is the fragment’s glottal perversity.
Started to completion. Starry yellow of Antares.
I could tell you they chopped up
the big air above us. If fear made simultaneous all these movements
what can still bind us to their initials.
But Marxists
never made great lovers
everyone nears violet and is then impassible.
You would legitimately believe the terrain has thinned
the incessant drilling now known as a mental habitat
I measured my furies under the scope of the susurrus
the hope for a further century, the grey stones quiet
save for the knives they sharpened, no horizons save for those
abraded on these identical nights.
Las calles se desnudan salvo el armado
The streets are bare save for
the dust dust
this image goes away. There were
no streets no cars no food stalls.
No general ambiance was prepared.
It left. The seven walls of your hideout, the monuments
the kinetic sculptures, decrepit, all
left. The trees & bullets & gravel and
the instruments for burial all left.
The complacencies, the purges, the rehabilitation
of the field all left. Antagonisms left
the mountains left, the road exchange
the grid left. The urban prison
to the left, the caustic mind all
the images left the body
and also populated the images
now left, the concentrations left, the issue
left. The languages left, this overlay left.
All contraries left — solutions in equanimities
— a flowering parenthetical. Lifted
left across every geography.
Questions for Architects
I
You won't even need to imagine
that the commodity would speak
or: five hundred parachutists
could fit into the airbase. It
takes thirty seconds to empty
a street, less than eighteen
minutes to erect a barrier
the side of the hill
costs nothing until you
meet the fence. Any neatness.
The metro will be one long string
of malleable explosives, viscous
in form like the hidden angle
at which glass meets observation…
Your face will get broken into.
There will be no method
parcels of sky are taken
(not for money). Simple
position…
An accident will happen
at their barbecues,
in party halls, clubs. Any residence
still remaining. The water
tanks will parch, this
idea of the trickle
in your language —
you get used to it.
Caught in a house with
no mirrors for twenty-eight
years. The regulated morning
preluded nothing. The architects
had always had complete control
over the city, not its habitus.
You asked where you could find any;
in the city museums, the gardens,
galleries, the hidden suicides, the
sexual theatres, in the conversant.
As occupations came the architects merged into our -,
then into the vowels of
the language, nodules and billboards
around which silences screamed
— everyone burns up their poetry.
Your motions a sort of kinetic transcript
quiet for now:
on the evacuation of symbols from common life,
on common life proper.
This murmur all that exists
thick with contact.
II
You had never been naked
not even the time you were born
in the back of this vehicle
beaten up you find a reversible
god, the officials begin
to express outwards coagules
through their regalia.
Ties of gauze in your head
already compressed
to the narrow dimension
in which a vehicle
military or otherwise
could pass. You would love
then so much of the weather
the degraded palms
placed on balconies, terraces
in shopping malls, small cells
where quiet reigns. This
unnecessary compression
of the space. Same anywhere.
You would extract a pure grammar
from the stones, in the air
snatching the speed around them.
A splenetic smile returns from the architects.
New clouds of smoke go up in Aprils
under which we meet.
//
Not a single breach, not a boulevard, not a centre that is not the centre. Equivalent plumage, synecdochal pelting. The gutters line with sympathetic aesthetes. East and West ran through the collapsed face of the tunnel. Infection — once a national mythology — hardened into abstraction: the hardness of woods, wavelengths, not maps. A systematic study that the suns would replace. Under conditions of permanent jubilee fleeing becomes a regular occurrence. I want you to get a feeling for how close the vaults are, so that you do not mistake them for form. The suns were not seen but inferred. It was the way that night was tiered into kingdoms — of the moth, the frozen chord in the still, the ceaseless traversal of signals through air. Too much communication; little coordination. The anagram was a social derangement, a way of sinking every proposition, like a slew of fishes in black quilt. Bovine carcasses are spilled on rural highways. Everything gets scavenged without waste. Language is a hydrocarbon, a complexity of bonds, a costless traversal or translation. The heuristics are different if you start with the name of every fugitive. 'Sol' admits a palindrome: los. To know them. An experience only given through the secular accumulation of night. You feel disgust at this 'only' like the fencing of a common or poetry's claim to its own experience. Only then you understand the shore as an infinitely manicured machine, a tradewind cloven in the opening vowel.
the death of chávez
the current situation is my country's
poetry has long sought to disappear into
the vast spherical night and the shapes of
its static demolition, the time maddened
oil that's what i admired, to run the machines
and gasoline with a cleanliness like war
as it were a style, everything a
style now i wear a gun.
we made a strong & assertive start
a flash of tranquility passing
between the eyes the homes of our childhoods
are on fire. revolutionary biography
still means doing without position
mostly meaningfully
maneuvering on hostile air.
our guerrillas were bombarded by
britsh canberras decisively
defeated by the end of the 60s
at school too lurid to escape
teenage attention what i
was keeping score of:
i can now see the hinge
of the century, syndicalists
communists, students, end up
in prison at times and free
elsewhere. complete boredom
i start writing with a sliver of saliva
on the pen a face cognate with
another face, how not to be caught in it.
a national guard once stood over a classmate
pelted his legs with buckshot & sliced
damp covered the windows of my language
a strange house a divine distance
foaming the blow against my head.
distance means having been agreed to it
the synthetic capacity of the lived
street knelt down with the ruminants
children, shoppers, bones, psychiatric
sun would be down your throat
clicking of a motorbike a scalpel
directly to the grid. the city has
an overground archeology
i only have the age i'm always repeating
our cities are barely cities suspensions
of governance the only time i've felt
anarchic was with the windows down
the first poetry came through the mirrors
the sentence grasps, holds on, finishes.
Originally published in Ludd Gang 2, in support of the Poet's Hardship Fund
*
Mau Baiocco is a poet and translator from Caracas, Venezuela, currently residing in the UK. They are a staff editor at SPAM Press. The Resting Acrobats (Monitor Books, 2022) is their debut pamphlet.
*
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
