skinworks
a valentine by Bodies in Flight
in collaboration with Angel Tech, Nicholas Watton & Lucy
Cash
no flesh given, no harm done
TIM ATACK sound
LUCY CASH video
DOUG BOTT sound
POLLY FRAME performer
SARA GIDDENS choreography
NEIL JOHNSON sound
SIMON JONES text
GRAEME ROSE performer
KAYLENE TAN performer
NICHOLAS WATTON new media
with
MARK BOOTH, BEN CLOUGH, STEPHEN FIEHN, STACY GOLDATE
OLEN HSU, ETHAN ROEDER, HAMZA WALKER, CHRISTOPHER & RIA
on video
and
ED DIMSDALE photography
PUBLICITY DESCRIPTION
Three handles appear in a chatroom, they’re anonymous, they’re anybody,
everybody, they’re angels, demons, they’re hermaphrodites, they’re making a
new kind of love mailing valentines into the void.
Three performers cruise the web, crashing chatrooms, flipping identities,
spinning yarns, beguiling, ensnaring unsuspecting novices, seducing each
other, pushing imagination beyond the tech spec. Through a collision of
sounds, images and words skinworks explores how new desires and moods
of love emerge from the irresponsibilities of sex without bodies.
A NOTE ON THE MAKING OF SKINWORKS
skinworks, like all Bodies in Flight’s work, emerged out of the remains of
previous shows, that which got left behind, got insufficiently worked through,
failed, refused stubbornly to clear itself of the stage, those elements of the
work that did not have the decency to let go. This unfinished business forms
a kind of scattering of clots in our general activity of creating a “situation”
within a work to dwell upon. Most of the material of that dwelling finds a
form, eventually, through the various expressions of any single project. Our
business is one of principling this dwelling-place, making it understandable,
firstly to ourselves, then to our audience-spectators, phrasing it, making
explicit that which we felt as implicate within that particular dwelling. This
activity of phrasing – to borrow a word from Lyotard’s book The Differend;
and to avoid using the word process, since that suggests product, with all the
finality and easy exchangeability that any commodity possesses – tends to be
around and about the unspeakable and untranslatable in-between two or
more discursive practices [what we often label for shorthand’s sake – texts],
such as – the verbal, visual, sonic, musical, choreographic, spatial.
As a choreographer, co-director Sara Giddens tends to think of these as
complementary pairs, duets of texts, words with movement, movement with
sound, sound with vision, that can never actually speak the one to the other,
never agree upon common terms for exchange or translation, but do,
nevertheless, move alongside each other and affect each other. They are
compossible, like the wave/ particle duality of light, impossibly co-existent,
until, as a critic, one decides which text to analyse. However, we know that
these pairings are simply constructs that enable us to focus at particular
moments within any show on particular material. In actuality, all these texts
are at work all the time; and the attention given any one duet is constantly
subject to disruption and disorganization.
So by this principling the various discursive fields are folded the one into the
other, each retaining their discrete and irreconcilable logic, yet nevertheless in
a kind of dialogue [in physicist David Bohm’s sense of the word, and more
latterly Luce Irigaray’s, where one confronts the unintelligibility of the other’s
experience and suspends one’s judgement upon it – which she figures as a
radical act of love]. However, some material cannot be organized through
this principling; and yet remains within the work as inert matter – a clot
within the living system. That material becomes the seed for the next show.
In this way, skinworks grew out of Double Happiness – a collaboration
between ourselves and Spell#7 from Singapore: about a double marriage of
internet romancers, two English boys with two Singaporean girls. For us, the
traditional comedic conclusion of boys meets girl [that our collaborators felt
was a necessary tactic for avoiding the attention of the censor] did not
address the fundamental challenge that this communication technology posed
to human desire: the narrative closure of marriage could not adequately
explore the hyperbolic excesses of this interactive technology. Furthermore,
we did not find the place where Double Happiness happened. We knew it
was somewhere between England and Singapore, somewhere between the
stage and the screen, the website and the theatre. However, to paraphrase
Kristeva, Double Happiness was staged without a place: the relationship
between the performers and the stage and the stage and the audiencespectators was unsatisfactorily default end-on proscenium arch.
THE EMERGING RESEARCH QUESTIONS:
1, EXPLORE THE PHYSICALIZATION OF A VIRTUAL PLACE;
2, WHAT HAPPENS TO DESIRE IN THE DISEMBODIED VIRTUAL
REALM?
From these clots emerged the first twinned folds or turns of material for
skinworks – the chatroom would not be on screen, but literally the
performance space itself AND the declensions, possibilities and spills of
scriptural desire would be unbounded by dominant narrative forms or cultural
sensibilities.
skinworks was commissioned by Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol) & Now Festival
(Nottingham, UK) in spring 2002. In a rehearsal space at the University of
Bristol, we worked for three weeks, Sara Giddens, Simon Jones and three
performers and for the first time with the Bristol-based band Angel Tech,
three musicians who were just emerging from a contract with Island Records
and gigging in the US. As material Simon Jones’s texts were used, and the
idea of the salon as a means of organizing the audience—performer
interaction and its spatialization or putting into the scene. This generated a
welcoming and seating of each audience-spectator individually, so that their
introduction into the space was collectively noted, and the gathering of the
chatroom was palpable. Furthermore, it provoked a seating arrangement
whereby each individual audience-spectator was isolated in their own space,
through which performers circulated.
In this way, people arriving in couples and groups were separated and seated
at a distant apart, the first seats being positioned apparently at some distance
from each other, the precision and proximity of the overall seating plan not
becoming clear until the majority where seated. By this means, individuals
were both alone and together, both carrying the sense of joint arrival and
now separated from loved ones. This expressed one of Bodies in Flight’s
basic principles – always to re-sensitize each individual audience-spectator to
their own embodied experience of the performance event; to re-express a
fundamental drive in all performance – a gathering of the asocial to
experience collectively the isolation of confronting total possibility, the
inhuman possibility of humanity.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, video artist Lucy Cash [whilst working on another
project with Goat Island performance company] was gathering improvised
material – to represent the virtual world of cyberspace. We had no intended
uses for this material, only that, apart from Lucy herself, it should be made
remotely and that it should be a kind of found material, and then introduced
into the making from “outside”, from the particularly mythically remote
America, contrasting markedly with Sara Gidden’s minutely choreographed
moves and the text’s well-worked-over lyricism. The camera was always to
be positioned in the same relationship to the performer, above looking down.
Inspired by Beckett’s movie with Buster Keaton, it was both the all-seeing eye
of God and the classic position for the web-cam, perched on top of the user’s
monitor. The Chicagoan performers were directly remotely by way of onscreen instructions from both co-directors, such as –
Instructions
This is cyclical & physical.
Always begin at the table & move towards the camera.
Always begin at the camera & move towards the table.
1.Look at me then.
What are you looking at?
What do you think you are looking at?
Just show me
Show to me
5.Now a part
Show a part of the body, still performing
Only that again & again
And from a different angle
And another part
As long as you can
Again
Another
As long as you want
For another
And another
8.You can repeat
You can negotiate
You can confuse
You can refuse
New-media artist Nicholas Watton, working in London, then created a basic
application so that this video material from Chicago could be manipulated by
the performers in Bristol.
EMERGING RESEARCH QUESTION:
HOW TO USE MATERIAL CREATED REMOTELY, THEN FOLDBACK THE
RESULTS, CREATING A DIALOGUE ACROSS CULTURE/SPACE/TIME.
This work-in-progress version was shown at Arnolfini in May 2002 and lasted
about 40 minutes. A shorter version of this performed at the launch party of
the NOW festival in Nottingham a few weeks later, involving only 2 of the 3
performers and 1 of the 3 musicians, the circulating happening amongst a
standing audience with complimentary drinks in their hands.
In July 2002, as part of being a Visiting Artist at the School of the Art Institute
in Chicago and participating in the Goat Island Summer School, Simon Jones
was able to work in person with some of the performers from the previous
video material. He asked them to read some of the texts; and Sara Giddens,
via him, asked them to interpret some of the moves she had made with the
other performers. With Lucy Cash, we decided to shoot some of this on the
streets of Chicago to make a representation of this “other” everyday – the
American everyday, that from the position of the British spectator was quasimythical. For the next phase of the work, audience-spectators would be
invited to visit the website made by Nicholas Watton, as a kind of liminal
zone, a place in-between their own domestic spaces where the chatroom
experience was normally notionally embodied, and the licensed space of the
theatre, gallery, concert hall, where the performance would happen. The
Chicago-everyday would be invoked at the end of the performance, just
before the audience-spectators return to their own everydays, as a visual
register of how far the sense of place had shifted during the performance
itself.
This return to Chicago in July with material that had been worked on and
worked up in Bristol in April/ May, itself a partial response to what the
Chicagoans had done remotely in March, folded back the work like layers of
pastry, a continuous band of material, but folded into and on top of itself, so
that elements that had been or could be distant were brought into sudden
and unexpected proximity, creating a hybrid and virtual place (as in
acculturated and invested space) somewheres between Bristol and Chicago.
Hearing the Americans cope with the particularly nuanced phrasing of the
text, heavily turned through the kinds of language games beloved by the
Elizabethan poets, a deliberately archaic form of writing for a supposedly
cutting-edge performance practice – was very exciting. A kind of alien
English, recognizable on some levels, strange in its rhythm and fold-back,
expressing again how the very technology of the tongue – how we speak – is
a practice of a specific culture, and what appears second nature to us is
indeed far from natural. Stephen Fiehn’s rendition of “Don’t hurt me
anymore” captures beautifully the uncertainty of finding oneself speaking a
language somewhere in-between familiar and strange, domestic and alien;
the disorientation of expressing an emotion for which one has no context,
neither in terms of its causes, nor its intended auditor, an expression of desire
and pain into a void, captured only by the technology.
Lucy and Simon, with Stephen as live performer, presented a 20-minute
performance installation of this material at the Summer School. The full
production phase was worked on in Bristol and London in September/ October
of that year and opened at Arnolfini and then the Bonington Gallery
(Nottingham) – a black-box studio space, then a white-box gallery. The
website was constructed to include the Chicago video, some of the text, and
some of the documentation photographs from the work-in-progress in spring,
taken by Ed Dimsdale. Audience-spectators were encouraged to visit that
website before coming to see the show.
In 2003 & 2004, the show toured to a variety of venues including black-box
theatres, a school hall, a concert hall, an Edwardian music-hall, a converted
church. We returned to Singapore to perform in The Year of Living Digitally
festival, folding back skinworks into the collaboration we had made with
Spell#7 – a tragic answer to the ecstatic call made in Double Happiness for
the possibilities of this technology.
PRESENTATION DETAILS
skinworks toured to Arnolfini (Bristol), Wickham Theatre (London), Bonington
Gallery (Nottingham), Crewe & Alsager Arts Centre, ICA (London), Battersea
Arts Centre (London), Hoxton Hall (London), Colchester Arts. Presented as
video installation at The Goat Island Summer School, The School of the Art
Institute of Chicago; and as performance-lecture at Speculation & Innovation
Conference 2005, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, and
Collision Interarts Symposium 2006, University of Victoria, Canada. Invited to
perform at The Esplanade Theatres in The Year of Living Digitally,
international arts festival, Singapore.
FUNDING
The development of skinworks was made possible with financial assistance
from the Regional Arts Lottery Programme, Arts Council England, The British
Council, Arnolfini Live, The Bonington Gallery and NOW 2002, as well as The
Arts and Humanities Research Board and the University of Bristol.
WEBSITE
www.bodiesinflight.co.uk
SKINWORKS: PERFORMANCE TEXT
G: no one is really here
are they?
how can they be?
really here
really anywhere
just the mood of the event
the buzz or hum or vibe of the room
you were really there!
pah
you expect me to believe that
to act on that
to found a philosophy on that
G: smile
THE BAND: you’re my cookie lover
I know you inside out
I printed off your cookies
I let the cookies lead me to what your
heart desires
to where your soul abides
P: love leaves all its mess in the real
world
but here
only the endless horizon of the line
unread
unreadable cos not yet written
unwriteable
my clasp of you untenable
K: I’m really selfish … but I’m honest
about it and some people think that I’m
mean, but it’s really that I’m honest. I
can’t stand people who are needy. I
have a lot going on in my life and I
don’t really have a lot of time for people
who don’t also have a lot going on in
their life. So I guess I’d like my date to
have a life and not try to live through
me or expect me to live through them.
P: Cyberlove is a beautiful thing, cos it’s
like fictional love. It can be anything
you want it to be. Cyberlove is
exploring fantasy. It is like a dream, a
shared dream. There doesn’t have to be
any inhibition, any limitation to it, no
fear about what’s gonna happen, about
where it’s gonna go, cos as long as it’s all
virtual you can create your own world
… with no worries.
G: I’m a modest fellow, handsome, tall,
respectable, but not too high
maintenance. Got hobbies. I like carrepair and I like dancing. And I dress
well. I’d like my date to be a woman of
stately stature, a woman who knows
how to carry herself. I’m not a picky
man, but I would like a lady who is sure
of herself. I’d like my date to dress
nicely, to wear make-up, to wear
perfume, and to have fun, to know how
to have fun.
G: between the face and cock
or cock and cunt
or cunt and arse
K: a whole world
between the ear and eye
or word and mind
or tongue and flame
o holy you
K: I’m a heterosexual male, 36, actually I
think I’m 37 at this point. I share the
same birthday as a famous British
musician, but I won’t tell you due to the
prevalence of credit-card fraud. Now if
we get to know each other better, I will
certainly tell you my birthday. But not
in this sort of impersonal format.
K: let the monsters in
P: I am five foot eight, 150 pounds and
like to swim. Looking for a short-term
sexual relationship with … er … I like
Mediterranean men … erm … big black
fetish … swimmer’s build … five eight,
five ten, 150. Just for no relationship.
Just fun and … er … that’s about it.
K: there is a place where the river runs
through
a concrete channel
I took you there once
or maybe you were with someone else
I like to go there with you now
to go back there … with you now
wherever the river may take me
wherever the river may take us
G: I am versatile … versatile bottom …
looking for a pretty aggressive top who
also likes to be bottom sometimes. Er
… big … big into … playing with toys.
You gotta be open to that. Anal
massage is definitely a plus. What else?
Dark hair is good. Blond hair is good.
Latin blood’s very good. I guess I said
that already. Erm. If you’re into role
playing, I can definitely do that. And
would definitely be attracted by … I’m
looking for somebody who is definitely
very sexually liberated. Basically that’s
it. You have to be comfortable with
your body. Take care of yourself. Eat
well. Definitely drugs and that kind of
thing is not for me.
G: the tenderest of you
so slowly through heavy night traffic
rendered up to me
desire naked of its daily drag
so bright and deft
I cannot have you elsewhere
the only here lovely impossible you
K: I … spend … well … what do I like
to do? I play music … I like to listen to
music. I like to go for walks, long walks
actually, with no particular aims,
destinations. I’m a collector. I collect
lots of … just … most people would, I
guess, think it was junk … people’s old
… old belongings or … so, I do a lot of
that. Takes up quite a bit of time.
Yeah, okay.
K: there’s a devil in this room
eyes on my eyes
a person within a person
another soul in my body
an alien in my flesh
o clever virus
lurker lurking
with your anonymous hatred
and your everywhere terror
how lovely you are
P: this body feels so strange tonight
ill-fitting
like I’m performing it rather than living
it
a quasi-thing hardly crediting this quasireal
look
somebody, look at this
halfway through a riff that’s suddenly
playing itself
makes you kind of queasy cos you know
you’re in for the ride
but high so high
cos it can’t be you that’s doing these
things
you can’t be held responsible
sex without secretions, ha
a world of blame and not a single guilty
soul
G: If I was going to describe myself to a
prospective date, I would lie. I wouldn’t
say anything about the way I looked, or
how tall I was, how old I was.
K: this is not my body
and these are not my words
and all of you
and all of me
and what is all of me?
and that which is all of me
now down
fall down
not my body
not my words
someone else in the head-space
and the mind?
what about the mind?
have you fucked everything else
ruined all my innocence, ha
and gone and left me my mind?
you reply to all
what use is pain
or experience
or at least the loss of innocence
without its mind
to feel pain, to have experience
to want again its innocence, and despair
G: I’d like my date to be witty, and
interesting, and good with words, and be
able to keep up a conversation for a
really long time.
K: do sexy for me … more … more
K: I don’t know what cyberlove is. But
I think what it is is what I was talking
about. That lack of … of er … the lack
of … of an act that’s put on, so that
people can get to know each other. It’s
almost like an arranged marriage.
P: are you hurt? Have I hurt you?
K: this is as far as we take this in private.
In performance, we would….
THE BAND: I’m Barbie
doll me up
dress me down
spank me hard
fuck Barbie
Barbie’s fucked
P: all intimacies now so blasted
so spread about the world
like you slip in this smear of intimacies
maybe you surf them
the interiors of people’s hearts
the spill of their desires
the liquidized hope of each shared secret
betrayed
this world now turned inside out
all closenesses exteriorized
all hearts on sleeves
all genitals on webcams
show me, boys and girls
pull back the folds of skin and show me
… what?
how the world came to be so … so
empty … of love
(now that was simply put)
I see your fingers’ tips pulling at yourself
they say this is me
this is the very heart and soul of me
made visible
transmissible
unmissable
download me
print me off
and if you take to what you see
save me
somewhere deep in your hard-drive
protected by passwords and firewalls
and if you think you like what you see
bookmark me
cos I’ll be there
waiting for your return hit
with my fingers about my sex
pulling back the fold of skin
ready to show how very much I love
you
K: I can’t be cool and oh so contained
like.
I splurge. I seep. I leak all over you
every hole dripping with the gore of my
soul
this holy mess
my body is not a containment area
it is not secure
my body is a catastrophe that hasn’t
waited to happen
a bomb that’s gone off
whoops
my body is not a temple
no health here
only the just-about staving-off of death
only the constant and unregulated
exchange
this wide open border of love
and the torn open arse of the betrayed
whoops
I am both
abuser and abused
object subject
an outer in and the inner out
my skin is the only thing around that’s
unreal
it’s a chimera that dissolves at the
lightest touch
the lover’s sigh upon the neck and
whoops! access to the soul
hacked right in, fingers in the trough of
my personality, fiddling away
I share these genes with most of the rest
of creation
I drop these jeans for all the others
I’m not proud
you fuck me over
you will fuck me over
I will be fucked over
by you
and I will love it
I do love it
and I will beg for more
and I will weep
and make a mess upon your doorstep
or in your bathroom if you let me get
that close
I’m incorrigible
there is no exclusion zone around me
there is no love without me
and where I am is love
G: and to what forms of abuse did she
put herself cos she thought no harm
could come when there was no
exchange of flesh – exchange, ha
so deliberately submit herself, open
herself out and let his words – for that’s
what they were, as she thought it must
be the male of the species, so desperate
and exacting were its desires
render her most hidden places most
public, sometime just the two of them
he promised, othertime the whole
chatroom packed with anonymous
handles each, she imagined, had to
imagine, tugging at themselves as each
detail of the abuse unfolded, too caught
up in the systolic rhythm of the chat, as
it tried to cross the current of the traffic
on the web that night – was it a night
for all of them?
held together in that one strict sense,
our own customized darkness, to enter a
reply most times, sometimes wanting a
private chat when he had done with her,
when he was spent, and she would
commit herself to yet another opening,
yet another detail to the flesh she once
had, no longer really there, no longer her
own, no longer real, but lost in
impossible detail, flesh she could never,
indeed, have had, implausible flesh, that
seemed the only variety that could now
convince, the only stuff somewhere
about this globe somehow substantial,
somehow realizable, so calculatingly and
haplessly, so casually and momentously
give her whole self, her whole holy
carcass over, her one true soul over to
this man, for let him at the very least be
that, for his purposes, for him to do the
deed, for his use, and after all, since no
DNA exchanged – ha, no flesh given,
no harm done.
P: you get in my head with your infobytes
these little stories you oh so
disingenuously chatter off
like butter wouldn’t melt in your orifices
but me, you burn up
you desiccate me
you prise open my jaw and pour superglue down my throat
you stretch my anus-ring beyond its
elastic limit
with the fist of your oh so throwaway
tale
o how I hate your words
but o how I get off on your
performance
you cum in my face and I lick my lips
you cum in my mouth and I end up
talking your language
you cum in my skull and I submit
and come to think myself in love with
you
you render me
you end me
you are me
and I am
well … what am I?
What have you left me?
What is there left me … to be?
K: how could it be
that I remember you there
when you have never been there?
recall the flavour of your skin
the taste of your mouth
that particular liquidity to your kiss
or the temerity of your ass
or the absurdity of your cock
I feel those things
I feel I know those things
the trail of hair down your belly
the bony rib-cage
I should have felt
your stubble burn
your spunk splash
your tears’ salt
I would not have imagined
all the languor of that morning
all fuck the night before
the entire scope of that thing
you called your love for me
I could not have had that put into my
mind
by some idle chat
at the dead of night or turn of day
you could not be so present to me now
fiction though you now are
had you not been immemorial you
in some now long forgotten place
at some now long lost time
fiction though you are
you were real
my soul founds itself upon that
G: you put your sex in me
tonight
you do
right now
something articulated anyway
I feel it bend to my … ahhh
you have put your one and only sex in
me
and I … must yield
cos the will is mightier
than space and time
mightier even than the words you use
to close the inbetween
and in my submission is my will
in the complete openness of it
and the utter abasement of it
and the obvious disregarded shame of it
you put your will in me
you do
tonight
right here
in those places I dare not go … cannot
go
about my heart … etceteras
where my will lets you in
to find me out
K moves violently to music/ screams
P: if I were to admit
you had gotten under my skin
that would be as much as to write
that skin were real
which is more, much too more than the
total possibility of me
and yet you have been thereabouts
for some time now
a presence without sense
a motive without goal
a sin without its sinner
and a love without its soul.
Such poetry ha
you draw off me
like I never had
never could have had
just some few hapless tappings at the
keys
like there was particular you
just a spell-check away from perfection.
I was enjoying the ride
or was it the fall?
if I ever had a mind
and there was something worth standing
for
or was it just standing in for?
for what it could have been we thought
we felt
cos others too might have felt
something like
at some other time and place
between some other times and places
(words to that effect)
for sure we are not alone
they are gathered hereabouts
in the darknesses
in the hush
countless others maybe for whom a not
dissimilar issue has come to mind
G: I feel odd
like love cannot help me out
can despair have a face?
your pixellated grin
an inadequate reproduction of the
smiley on your T-shirt
who says life doesn’t imitate art?
I could be unwell
I’m sickening for something
something with an origin
with a dead-end
I’ve been searching, searching
and gotten on too many freeways
that come from everywhere and take
you nowhere
I crave a good dead end
this thing began here and it went bellyup there
this thing is this thing and no other
thing
o where is that face?
where I must stop
and take succour
and all other oldy-worldy things like that
but not like that
like nothing but you and me
you undo me endlessly
with your charity
K: this is not a hand
this is not a face
where am I?
(P: she wants answers)
this is not my body
how the lungs squeak
and this jaw clicks
like I never had
never could have had
this is not me
I am elsewhere here
a speaking without a voice
a moving without a body
o lend me your face
that I might smile upon the world
give me your lips
so I can sigh upon my lover’s neck
let me have the use of your tongue
to help me phrase a time and place
adequate to this love I bear
but cannot bear alone
this is not a prayer
and this room is without
G: don’t hurt me anymore
I can’t take anymore pain
can’t you see I distress easily?
when I come I hurt
don’t even think about it
that’s abuse too
no touchy touchy
much less feely feely
I bruise when you think about me
I read your emails and my eyes bleed
P: I can take this nowhere
and I have no heart to follow
there is no memory to this
and no event gives it shape
it will not stand alone
it cannot stand outside
I have no names for it
to call when it is lost
to accuse when you are done
to remember when I am gone
I thought I had desire
that went to it
came upon it
and was spent
but that was just the last of me leaving
now there is not even the ache of having
been
not even the relief of something undone
to be able to say: and now we know the
worst
you have given me all this
and there are not thanks enough
in the old world.
I have been unminded
my words have undone
this anti-annunciation
word unbecoming flesh
as terrible and lonely as that other event
was miraculous and lovely.
and none of this now can be unsaid
you are hearing the last of me
which maybe (you think) is a blessing
but maybe unminding me also undoes
you
which is (I think) also a blessing
cos then this last unsaying can void itself
unheard
THE BAND: this valentine just for you
the unwanted for the inattentive
this electronic for the narcotic
my insomniac’s love
cos all sleepers must eventually wake
all silences eventually speak
and all the dead will live again
and go to work and play and love
G: so much energy voided into each
word
each blood-bloated syllable
force fed with heart
still on your screen they stink
like you can taste the kidneys failing
you can smell the brain
bubbling in its pan
get a feel of the endless ache in this cock
from arse root to raw end.
I do not have to be there
to be there with you tonight
o miracle, in this age of delete and drivethru
work offline and walk-on-by
where the sweetest virtue is to remain
cling-wrapped and tamper proof
I have touched you
too late
game over
you have already been touched
sex without secretions
sin without sinners
and what was that other delusion it
pleasured me to let you suffer?
o yes
that all those desires you so carefully
researched and painstakingly
reconstructed
were indeed your own
did you own a soul?
a thing most intimate
are you sure you didn’t lose it on the
way?
like the keepsake you never knew you
had
like good health before the cancer
like the mind before babble?
that left such a little unlocalizable cavity
somewhere deep in the body
the leaving of which ended flesh
that aching place
the hollow trace
your still sad face
his last embrace
that took the place
of God’s good grace
and other banal shit
K: where is the void
there is no void
there is only void
void beyond void
still voiding void
and voided voids
the one within the other
the other within the.
unavoidable voids
we have names for them
we call them persons
the void full
then voided
the void full of body
bodies climbing into this one bed of
void
then come
and go
the fullness voided
the perfect disclosed
too vast to be called back or hearkened
unto
the coming
then the going
inbetween was the void full
is could be will be shall be
between saying the done thing
and the thing done
then been and gone
between the wow-factor
and the sigh
my breath that sucks in life
then disclosed in words
from the void
into the void
funny word void
void me no voids
unavoidable void
my funny void
all you need is.
THE BAND: I-and-you
feels more like
he-and-she
makes one-on-one
is only really
they-and-them
turns into we
that’s thee-and-me
all over again