The Ring

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

Not knowing otherwise how to cry
It's true we cast shadows which only sometimes fall
And which usually rise

That are a cause for occasion
The fall and yet the sleep of the tick
Their machine properties and gaps in instinct

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

A body draws near a warm body and because that body is near one sucks
The fall is suspended in sucking them
So sucking is true to shadows

Green and purple to the arrested touch
The teeth are true only not having a face
The animal is this singing and sighing

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

These signs are the collapse of eyes
Wrested from a mortal glance
One paints bulbs black

Any color they are not as I
That splotch of red not real as meat
But as the pain of color itself

Of color itself falling thru our bodies
The pity of both before and in
The cage drawn so to the animal crying out its face
The cage confined by what makes us us

Like a curtain drawing back and sliced but not torn
Like here when it is here
The flicker of gravity born

There is sovereignty in the things we lack
Lack itself divides inside from inside
We remain in our animation like quiddity repeatedly killed

I knew this at once when it painted itself
By itself the appearance of action in the things we create
We cried a lost dimension or indiscernibility around an endangered body
What felt necessities sighing this body is the soul

There is danger precious danger only if we discover and sleep
There is danger prescient danger crossing the leashless rings
There is grace but not elegance in this per se

The greater the mutilation and discrete jets and interruption of organs the more we ascend. The head follows the hand of course, the literal hand like a physical belief in this ascendance by haphazard degree. The hand of the painter presupposes such consent.

Kierkegaard speaks in his *Sickness Unto Death* of the "about-face" of despair. But you disperse pity from the face (the soul- appearing-surface) across organs and objects. In cages cross-sectioning the case consent is as escape or "primeval consent" (Susan Howe). Accident proves incident cause.

Every animal needs an attendant as every mortal its name
Every name its angel as every angel its spirit-body
Ours is a true appearance of spirit seized in harm and dissected in grace
Ours a mannerist dignity of dice, a dicey proposal of remains

A blackened bulb
Thoughtless purchase
Misplaced description
Foreclosed reflections of things being similar

Embodied instants
Suspended cause
Throwing forth
Teeth without mouths

Umbrellas for heads
A color for shadows
Dissymmetry of the preformed
Intussuception

Substituted abcess
Determinate excess (a jet)
Presentable affect (the cry)
The sound always sealed-up in the cry

Carnal vantages
Sense for sense-of-falling
Aspect-flows (brush curve)
Resurrected drives

It's true that we are meat and it's true this training
It's true the experiment's not thru never thru yet it's true
It's true we are only rings not to jump thru but to be
To be only in the sense of being-in in the sense of a draft

Of color itself falling thru our bodies
The pity of both before and in
The cage drawn so to the animal crying out its face
The cage confined by what makes us us

I knew this at once when it painted itself
By itself the appearance of action in the things we create
We cried a lost dimension or indiscernibility around an endangered body
What felt necessities sighing this body is the soul

Every animal needs an attendant as every mortal its name
Every name its angel as every angel its spirit-body
Ours is a true appearance of spirit seized in harm and dissected in grace
Ours a mannerist dignity of dice, a dicey proposal of remains

The fly makes its eyes for the spider's web here
What remains is the frozen refrain
A dew like a thousand eyes in attendance
Which vanishes in this experimental.