Glass and the Ocean

Richard Siken GLUE I stepped out so things could progress without me. The knot of the self; take it out. The know of the self: what is the rope? The ability to nullify the self in favor of the landscape, or a lover, or a bowl of fruit. What happens when I no longer want to meet you? Something interesting. A legitimate answer, but it leaves a hole. Nothing lasts forever: we know this. Looking changes the looker: we know this. It's easier to talk about one thing at a time: I know, I know. Mortal love? Sure. Lovers abandoned and desperate? Sure. Longing and suffering? Of course, of course. You want it to mean something. Sad pink cakes. Five strange blue things. You want to have it glued together. The days were short and the halls were long. Something like that. Crawled up the pleat of my coat: a shadow did. Shut the basement door: a ghost did. It accumulates. Grounding the abstract offers several pleasures: certainly. Love, maybe love, maybe bathtub: certainly. Grabbing the throat of it: that's what we always do. You can disconnect it or you can try to glue it all together. He could glue it all together. I could. Who's speaking anyway? Not really a problem, says the moon. Since y'all look the same from up here. We could pull it apart, spend our whole lives pulling it apart and have no time left to do anything smart with the pieces. The wrong things have been wired together. Things that shouldn't touch. The sooner you embrace it, the sooner it will leave you. Okay. The bruise: milk yellow. You are what you cover up. Okay, okay. These damages are connected. I glued more pictures to it: doctored, rigged, unverifiable. There were boxes in my head and I moved them around, pretended it changed something. It didn't work. I plugged my cord to see what kind of a lamp I was. It didn't matter. What is a ghost? What is a painting? Yes and yes, the same answers. My mind wanted a reward, so it filled in all the gaps it found, smoothed it all out. I lost the important parts and I set about restoring. Wanting to show and not being able. Sometimes the wing of the bird and sometimes the bird trying to fly. The bird eats worms. At least that one pure thing. Put yourself in the painting: you are responsible. Broadcast from a smeary place: you are responsible. Wearing your dead face, your man face, your real face: you are responsible. Clomp clomp down the mines of thinking-- the compromise: where the thought wants to go and where you want it to go. Truth is relative to the model: big deal. Mathematicians extend the natural language: big deal. Precision is necessary so we can know what we are investigating. Yes, yes: show me. What holds it together? Glue, some kind of glue. The image remains as a body would. I turned the image over like a rock, but then the worms. __ __ FLⒶT$ is very happy that Richard Siken has made available his poem GLUE to be shown in conjunction to the exhibition Glass and the Ocean – Anne Neukamp, David Attwood, Esther Kläs in Cologne (06.11–14.12.2024).