Michael Martin Shea
From The Immanent Field
*
And the descriptions of the field were gruesome, for the field was hard to describe • To hold as many things at once under a certain banner, a sort of subocular vision • Field defined as a set of points not reducible to its component parts • To hold tight to each other when the human graves appear • Painted laughter, pointing out flaws in our systems of value • There appeared in dreams an immutable loveliness, which we could not have truly wanted • Our systems of governance value the artist only slightly and at first • And there were other worlds we dreamed over but never wrote down • What the artist wants is not a refusal of the state but a transcendence of its bondage • Dream defined as the possible sphere, or, the space beneath the curve of the definite arc • The myth of the law’s transcendence offered the state an irrefutable bed • In my dreams I am often unhurried and unaccustomed to hunger • We imagined the field as a blanket, under which we’d find the mattress of the real • To accustom one’s self to changes in altitude or demeanor, to not despair in the winter months • Real social change births itself from the orifice of orphan culture • Despair is not the je ne sais quoi of sex • I imagined I was born in the backseat of a cab, during a blizzard in my father’s Baltimore • The golden ratio of sex is to spend less than twenty percent of your time dreaming of other people
*
The state can offer the artist money or legitimacy but not both • It’s probably best to suffer under the weight of not-knowing than to fly a jet into a tall building • A legitimate savior in the eyes of his own mother • Building a life out of TV newsmen • It legitimizes itself after years of masturbating in the shadows • The derelict newsmen wore their pants at their ankles • The shaded areas denote that which is included in the rotation of the curve, forming the volume of the solid • Dereliction has nothing to do with flesh • My voice, possessor of a distinct volume • The nectarine flesh hides the cyanide inside • Possession creates between the object and its possessor a unidimensional matrix of power • Hydrogen cyanide is a byproduct of the synthesis of the bitter almond and can only be removed with heat • To objectify is to tie into a knot • Awash in your synthetic materials • The tiresome complaints about birdsong • The materiality of the world taken for pleasure • The birdsong unbleached by sundown • The pleasure of a to-do list speaks to the ontological primacy of work • Down with cops who sit on the homeless • Ontologically, no world is more real than any other • Down with cops made out of chicken-wire • Ontology is the doing of unspeakable things
*
The particulars of my arraignment were leaked on the internet • I tried not to picture what my offensive friends looked like while fucking • A leaky faucet is never a suitable plot device • Phil Levine as phenomenological fuckboy • A scent erupting from a freshly-packed bedroll • James Dickey as phenomenological fuckboy • A sense of fresh accomplishment undone by red wine • The death of ritual and the rise of genealogical madness • Patients should discontinue use if occasional redness or cultural violence occurs • The purpose of threats and the rise of a torture syndicate • Patients given to white man’s madness should not be permitted to legislate about world affairs • Syndication occurs when you get old and stop trying to align your “moral compass” • The world of the poem subsumes all distraction • Paranoid about prematurely contracting an old-man disease • Contact with distraction disqualifies it as distraction—a distraction is a thing that can never be touched • I’m a twenty-four year old man scheduling a colonoscopy • A contract with yourself does not qualify as a “moral foothold” • I’m a twenty-five year old man with occasional rectal bleeding • Contractual obligations prohibit the expression of our full splendor • Occasionally I relive the moments of my great embarrassments and thrash wildly and touch myself above the sheets and drive a tractor through the neighborhood Sears • The fullness of desire lurks in any apartment • The epiphanic moment of a pediatric waiting room • What happens to an apartment infested with invariable sadness and fleas? • I was waiting for my desire to become some sort of production • I wanted someone new to fuck me so I wouldn’t be sad anymore