What I've Learned: A Future Librarian's 10-17

"Those who talk about revolution and class struggle without recognizing what is positive in the refusal of constraints and what is subversive about love – such people have a corpse in their mouth." —Raoul Vangiem

I wonder if I am loved. It is not a question, really, at least not one asked of another. Beneath its surface dance tones and rhythms of seeking, pleading, yearning, searching - but it is stated. Solid. Alone. I wonder if I am loved. It’s all I have really, this statement that states nothing except the question it cannot quite find its way to be. These letters and spacings, grouped this way, or that, with others (always only other letters and other spacings), with more or less, but always these, these same, these letters: I wonder if I am loved. But to whom do I speak? I am speaking only to myself, always only to myself, for that is all there is. I am trapped in a world which I am told that I have made, although I forget doing so. I find myself always searching for this forgotten beginning, this archaic time, this primordial, primeval, archaic place, where life was safer, simpler, easier, a place before this place and outside this time where I am now, alone, trapped in a language that is a world that is a “there is” that is just myself, the “I”, hidden, un-enunciated, robbed of place, of time, and of itself. Of choice. For there is me, or there is the “me” hidden in illusions of languages and worlds that are only myself hiding from a past I do not know that calls to me from a place I cannot imagine. I feel the yearning for it, and constantly I search to find this past or this place. I make countless tools to help me in this pursuit. I build homes to shelter me in my search, and envelopes in which to hide and feel comforted when the search feels hopeless and lost and the wind feels cold. At night, I masturbate to relax so that I can sleep. There is no pleasure in it, no jouissance - only the other side of the feverish pace of my producing: the rest I need so that I can do it all over again tomorrow. This is the solipso-technecro-disjointed world of which I am (the creator? the sustainer? the prisoner?). I wonder if I am loved.

Toronto’s old streetcar district
On the Westside of the line
In a dive among dives,
dim with smoke, and
Tom Waits’ song;
Where grand hopes are traded
for cheap wine
Two young autumn women
feed leaves to the ground.

Pisinoe came too and
sang that night
Though the sirens did not scream
It was the ocean’s roar.
But she couldn’t stop throwing
rocks at the sky
Sad woman, draw close, and let me
kiss your knees
Bruised from the fall
that pushed you around.

Let me hold you so tight that
you can hear
my heart beating
Beating the drums of this thing
we fear,
love.

Cut off your hands
Cut off your feet
Cut the tongue from the voice of
the dreamers,
Choking on the corpse that sheds
light on the dying.

But, just last night
we danced to Morrissey,
Didn’t we?

We threw garland around
the Trinity,
Didn’t we?

Our hands are covered in the
blood of red
As we pray to the Virgin Mother;
Better to mix the living
with the dead
And behold – to embrace an other.

A-men, A-men.