GARETT STRICKLAND / EFFIGY MOUND
I need for you to fill out these forms,
she says
All the livelong day, its sizzling embrace
( unto & unto & unto )
What’s that got to do with me, this battery
To know oneself better into an image a likeness a stamping down footfall or inscription in order to hail fellow fragmentations or demonstrate a seriousness to be held suspended tectonic and that way constellated like ‘what were they anyway getting at’
Just so I’m clear, you say, I need to do this in order to plow
This is simply to secure your place, she says, in line
in the construction of a ziggurat, a grain elevator, or a bank
to prepare for one’s shape to be shot thru with meaning, a consolidation of artifacts toward the general lifeblood and memory-system of your species
Right, and then
I’ll be allowed to do my work, is that right
There will, she says, be that bodying that runs its course in the fiction an existing does, playing out piles the foot scrapes toward an imagined center into a kickable heap, there in the field where no one’s looking. If you manage to get your head in the game, your head is then part of the game, and shouldn’t it, then, be enough to matter
It’s impossible to tell if this is rhetorical
At the base of anything so grandiose, what other kind of mirror is there
Look, you blurt, I didn’t pull myself up out of the desert just to be given the business, to be dwarfed by the process of which, sure yeah, I am composed, composing, ultimately composted. I like the taste of blood as much as any stone does and I appreciate likewise your position, but if you’re expecting me to yield to some hidden bureaucracy then you underestimate the subtle fondling my hands are doing here, right here, before you, just watch. These hands are you, is that not obvious
And in begins the glaze, inset with the crosshatching of fires we may as well forgot, call it an ingot or a lump of shit or anything, all that we had striven for, torn up or plundered from the other as ourselves, seen for a moment as tho vivisected, pulsing the marriage of your efforts and whatever sky might find us
GARETT STRICKLAND is an ordealist and liminalogist working in text, sound, ritual, and speculative semiotics. He is the author of a long-poem, WHOA DONT CARE (Jerkpoet, 2015), and UNGULA (forthcoming from Inside the Castle). He is popularly known through his tenure as editor for the landmark literary journal .PLINTH.