Fuck Death

For CAConrad, his actual resurrections

"he wrote 'I have AIDS
and kissed the wall'
X marked the spot

I wrote 'I'm not afraid'
and kissed him back
wherever he is"

~ from CAConrad's "R.S.V.P."

"And since I could save none of you I let go more of me into what can't contain such want."

~ Rob Halpern, from "Beside *The Funerall* of John Donne"

"In order to put oneself to death, to give oneself death in the sense that every relation to death is an interpretative apprehension and a representative approach to death, death must be taken upon oneself. One has to *give it to oneself by taking it upon oneself*, for it can only be mine alone, irreplaceably. That is so even if, as we just said, *death can neither be taken nor given*. But the idea of being neither taken nor given relates *from* or *to* the other, and that is indeed why one can give it to *oneself* only by taking it *upon oneself*."
~ Jaques Derrida, from *The Gift of Death*

"...of which implies the necessity of the integral return of the whole series."
~ Gilles Deleuze

We fuck death put it there ostensibly where some
Feast was committed in your mouth fisted to speech
Made obedient in song at first gesturing death's
Its own challenge to fuck or to forget it is to not

Make us go away into whole things objects we are
Not tantamount to not paramour enough nor a
Color theory alone will do what the word separates

The names of things Paul Valery would go about for-
getting for the beauty of the thing itself what Hannah
Weiner prized for its health so swayed by forces
Beyond evaluation what elements of twice dying

Suck face filtrate and funnel a funereal blood down
Where NOT was only salvageable the mouth was taken
Up as a thing of degrees as desire's ways are only
Its own and we are not one subject yet death is not

The present after all so fuck it we are only bodies
Sometimes and oftener subjects turned on by object-
ivity parsed to places explained away for this so try

To explain this the outline the stench absented on
Our lips as such enveloping a nation's self-assured
Boundaries if sovereignty is also a body or even just an
Allegory for a more permeable country what erupts us.