Ariane Reines Poems

FKN ZIGGURATS

My thighs r so stacked
Steep steep steep
Fkn ziggurats
4 u

…

The Four Seasons

Eight stars make
A soft solfege
 
Above this motel
Where there are never
 
Stars.
I let a skinny man
 
Put his long thick dick in me for you
So we could break our hearts
 
The way you want me to. Somewhere a white
Wall stretches up behind the backs of a tribe
 
Whose obscurity protects its secret from the common
World and the connivances it ordains.
 
What time is it. What season is it.
I don’t know.
 
The moon blows green
Gas into my skull
 
I want to hide what I dream
In a big boot, and wear the boot
 
And starve as I lean upon the boot of my destitution
And drag
 
The truth as a gimp would drag the weight of her body.
That would give me a feeling of honesty.

…

[Trying to see the proportional relation]

Trying to see the proportional relation
Of one memory to another
One is so strange, and then
To try and see what looms
And doesn’t for the other person
Who was there, it gets stranger,
Especially when you’ve read
His email.
I don’t know how people
Understand their lives, measure
Their sensations against “objective”
Or so-to-speak democratic estimations,
Whether people accept the externality
Of events, “events,” as things
That happen to them. I refuse
To accept some coagulate
Of other people’s
Impressions in exchange for this
Privacy, no matter how flawed it is.
This is lyric poetry. It has to be. It has
No other hope. What was it
About you and me that made whatever
Happen to us. In New York
Everything fell apart. What I dreaded
And expected.
But still. Tonight
It is dark and the weather is cooler
Than it’s been. It has taken
A while for Fall to break; the global
Warming kept me in summer
Love with you like I was under a
Fermata. Now that the times
Are changing, I feel
Even more for you; or I feel nothing.
I can’t tell; it’s kind
Of scary. I was sick of thinking
About you this morning but
I was listening to Bob Dylan and Leonard
Cohen in order to think about
You for literary purposes.
When I feel nothing for a person
I get scared I’m losing my humanity
And that turning cold means
My heart’s been botoxed: we’re
All fucked.
I watched a movie on YouTube
Called Ladies and Gentlemen, Mister
Leonard Cohen that was made when
He was still just a poet and only
Famous in Canada.
He’s a pretentious little nerd
In it, self-important, teacher’s pet wit.
I think that, making music, he became
So much nakeder, much more desperate.
The talent, real, even pure, even
Natural, had to ripen in
The artificial man.
Alain Badiou, on the day
Of his class, said, “Because an event
Is pure rapture, an event disappears
Immediately: it does not exist
Objectively, but only by appearing
And disappearing.” This is both
Precise and vague; it is attractive
I guess. I guess since you and me did not
Disappear immediately, it was
Not pure rapture, not in these
Terms, but my smile
Was real each time I swallowed
Your cum. Getting
Fucked by you was great; I could
Feel it in my organs, but
You didn’t make me go insane
Except for maybe once
Or twice. Actually maybe I am
Being unfair. Maybe the fucking really
Was that great. In this moment I
Can’t remember.
I just read a poetry
Review in which the reviewer
States that a certain book
Made his cock feel as though
It were tall as a tree. That’s
Nice. I have no idea
What it feels like to have
A cock. Sometimes I feel
As though I’m getting close
To understanding and then
Something happens to make
Me have no clue again. When Sinan
Fucks me, we lose our individuality
So severely it’s like we’re both
Gasping after an animal that’s his
Cock that is beyond us and I lose
All sense of the world. His cock’s
Not even him, and he’s not him either
And we aren’t anything.
It’s strange, the possessive. Didn’t Thomas
Mann write a book called Herr
Und Hund or something like that?
Man’s best friend. What belongs
To him. Me and Sunder
Talked about how scary and arousing
It is to watch men masturbate, cos
Everyone relates differently to his.
Like dicks are always almost but never
Quite another. Je est un autre,
Said that brat Arthur Rimbaud.
I am definitely in love with you
As I write this. You are so petty
And superfluous I cannot stand
You. Sinan is definitely
In love with me. I know, because
I saw him tonight. I love
Him too. You are gracious
To accord me the space and time
In which to develop, or to elaborate
Upon, as the French say, these
Extreme emotions I am, despite
The odds and certain lapses,
So capable of feeling.
It was good to slap
Your face and to admit
That your asshole
Made me nervous.
Your eyes had a way
Of going soft and shiny
When you said the really
Tender things. We admitted
It was intimidating
For us both to hear each other describe
People we’ve fucked and been
In love with. I’m proud of what
We accomplished together. Alain Badiou
Ended his class with a reading
Of “Ariane et Barbe-Bleue” which
Is an opera by Paul Dukas. You
And me had gone pretty far
By the time this day came, and
Something very fragile in me breaks
When somebody says my name, or
Even a variant of it. I was tired.
I think Badiou discusses “Ariane”
In Being and Event which
I have not read. In class he said
That the story of the opera is
About the relationship between law
And freedom, and that it shows
That the desire for freedom is not
So simple. Ariane experiences an Event
That causes her to demand freedom, Badiou
Said, but she is unable to convince anybody
Else, any other women to want freedom; she ends up alone.
She genuinely falls in love with the wicked
Bluebeard at the beginning. Bluebeard
Who previously got women by having a castle
To lock them in. This woman Ariane
Does not have to be taken
By force. When she enters
His castle he hands
Her seven keys, six
Of which he gives her permission
To use, and leaves. She hears the cries
Of his other, imprisoned wives,
Coming from behind a door. So she uses
The forbidden key, releasing them.
Meanwhile Bluebeard is assaulted
By the local peasants, who want
To free Ariane, fearing her fate will turn out like
That of the women who came before her.
But Ariane is already free
In herself, and proves this freedom
By bringing the wounded Bluebeard
Home, caring tenderly for him, and then
Declaring that she’s leaving him for good.
By the end Bluebeard’s shattered, sobbing,
Bleeding. Ariane
Invites the other wives to leave with her
In a wrenching aria, pleading
With them one by one to taste
With her the freedom awaiting
Them, The World. But they all prefer confinement
Even though they had longed
For freedom before Ariane opened
Their door. Once liberty arrived they were no
Longer capable of it, preferring to serve; even a gutted,
Hollowed-out power. Ariane exits
Alone. The end. Badiou narrated
This with emotion and
I cried. Maybe cos I was tired and
That thing about my name or because
I am not heroic or free.
I had missed half of Alain Badiou’s
Lectures messing around with you
On the couch by the fire; in the women’s
Toilets; up on the hill. If this were a suitable parable,
And it isn’t, I would try to tell myself
That those very early mornings in Brooklyn when I sat
Up in your bed feeling wrong and
Got dressed and walked away, I should
Have stayed away cos I don’t need you.
Maybe I don’t need you. But I want
You. Maybe I don’t love you. But
I am getting to know you. Maybe
What made me cry in class was how tired
I was and how sad and hard
It is, and how rare, to undertake an act
That’s truly free, and not just a response
To a confused surge of drives and  fears.

…

A Partial History

Long after I stopped participating

Those images pursued me

I found myself turning from them

Even in the small light before dawn

To meet the face of my own body

Still taut and strong, almost too

Strong a house for so much shame

Not mine alone but also yours

And my brother’s, lots of people’s,

I know it was irrational, for whom I saw

Myself responsible and to whom

I wished to remain hospitable.

We had all been pursuing our own

Disintegration for so long by then

That by the time the other side

Began to raise a more coherent

Complaint against us we devolved

With such ease and swiftness it seemed

To alarm even our enemies. By then

Many of us had succumbed to quivering

Idiocy while others drew vitality from new

Careers as public scolds. Behind these

Middle-management professors were at pains

To display their faultless views lest they too

Find censure, infamy, unemployment and death

At the hands of an enraged public

Individuals in such pain and torment

And such confusion hardly anyone dared

Ask more of them than that they not shoot

And in fact many of us willed them to shoot

And some of us were the shooters

And shoot we did, and got us square

In the heart and in the face, which anyway

We had been preparing these long years

For bullets and explosions and whatever

Else. A vast unpaid army

Of self-destructors, false comrades, impotent

Brainiacs who wished to appear to be kind

Everything we did for our government

And the corporations that served it we did for free

In exchange for the privilege of watching one

Another break down. Sometimes we were the ones

Doing the breaking. We would comfort one another

Afterward, congratulating each other on the fortitude

It took to display such vulnerability. The demonstration

Of an infirmity followed by a self-justificatory recuperation

Of our own means and our own ends, in short, of ourselves

And our respect for ourselves—this amounted to the dominant

Rhetoric of the age, which some called sharing, which partook

Of modes of oratory and of polemic, of intimate

Journals and of statements from on high issued by public

Figures, whom at one time or another we all mistook ourselves for.

Anyway it wasn’t working. None of it was working.

Not our ostentation and not the uses we put our suffering

To, the guilt- and schadenfreude-based attention

We extracted from our friends and followers, and even the passing

Sensation of true sincerity, of actual truth, quickly emulsified

Into the great and the terrible metastasizing whole.

To the point it began to seem wisest to publish only

Within the confines of our own flesh, but our interiors

Had their biometrics too, and were functions not only

Of stardust, the universe as we now were prone to addressing

The godhead, but also of every mean and median of the selfsame

Vicious culture that drove us to retreat into the jail of our own bones

And the cramped confines of our swollen veins and ducts in the first place

Our skin was the same wall they talked about on the news

And our hearts were the bombs whose threat never withdrew

Images could drop from above like the pendulum in “The Pit

And the Pendulum” or killer drones to shatter the face of our lover

Into contemporaneous pasts, futures, celebrities, and other

Lovers all of whom our attention paid equally in confusion

And longing, and a fleeting sense like passing ghosts

Of a barely-remarked-upon catastrophe that was over

Both before and after it was too late. We were ancient

Creatures, built for love and war. Everything said so

And we could not face how abstract it was all becoming

Because it was also all the opposite of abstract, it was

Our flesh, our mother’s bloodied forehead

On the floor of Penn Station, and wherever we hid

Our face, amid a crowd of stars for example as Yeats

Once put it, and for stars insert celebrities

Or astrology here, your choice, and even when

We closed our eyes, all this was all we looked at

Every day all day. It was all we could see.

We were lost in a language of images.

It was growing difficult to speak. Yet talk

Was everywhere. Some of us still sought

To dominate one another intellectually

Others physically; still others psychically or some

Of all of the above, everything seeming to congeal

Into bad versions of sports by other means

And sports by that time was the only metaphor

Left that could acceptably be applied to anything.

The images gave us no rest yet failed over

And over despite the immensity

Of their realism to describe the world as we really

Knew it, and worse, as it knew us