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.

The Spirit of the Beehive (II)

At this mirror stage
Blowing on bees
The terrifying l'enfant
Terrible of more precious

Memories to kill a cat
To be born or bled
For resistance is a matter
Of perception whether

Or not we see ourselves
For the imaginary
Relations being born
Of this Hollywood

Monster seen in a mirror
Or the lips reflected
By blood there is want
To work from this trauma

Through travesties of bees
What the image proves
Us to be when we
Are not ourselves

For love is like an image
Before images had names
Or spirits their place
In abandoned houses

Of experience the screen
Throws up its light
Through fog the honey-
Combed lattice ripples

In the child's eyes
Where she was ever thrown
A nation for itself
Is dethroned

Sovereign divorced
From mutual powers
But drones must still
Live the fire froze

Into stiller images of them
Leaping not able
To catch up with
Whatever they'll be

Seized by their
Involuntary society lost
Where innocents
Were caught.