NOTA BENE: A DAMAGE

"Aaaah, Nico. But don't forget the Phoenix..."
                                    *****

Am proofing the pages for Moi next book, NOTA BENE EISWEIN (Ahadada Books, Tokyo / Toronto) -- thank YOU Jesse Glass for asking for a manuscript.

But something occurred to Moi while going through the proof -- besides noticing that I'm reading the poems as if they're written by someone else as I don't recall now the space I inhabited whilst writing them. And it's something that's reared up its ugly thought before, starting about four years ago, to wit:

Poetry has done many things for me, including many wonderful things. But Poetry has also damaged me.

The damage seems very evident in NOTA BENE EISWEIN as I read through it this morning.

There is no "should" in art-making. If there were, I would have listened to the Voice that began speaking four years ago: "You should stop making Poems. The Poems have started to break you."

There is no "should" in art-making. I didn't obey then. I'm not obeying now.

Even as this damage, in all seriousness, is ... painful. My back alone has become a recurring concrete pavement. Once a week (sometimes more), a huge Russian jackhammers on it for nearly two hours.

There is an antidote for me to stop writing poems. It's bottled in glass bearing the label of Skull and Bones. And a forbidding "X". (My) Poetry -- it comes from a hurt alleviated only by Death.

And, still -- Or, yet -- I want to live forever?

From the "Ice" section of NOTA BENE EISWEIN:

Entrails sparked
when she breathed...

...and that is something
like pink pearls
luminescent among
the gutted goat's remains

From the "Wine" section of NOTA BENE EISWEIN:

a bird caws
from my
mirror.

My mirror spits
out bloodied
feathers.

I love you
nightingales! All
of

you!