“Horatius’ Bad Day”
Adriána Kóbor
DAWNEDOWNED
Hopper ate the pies with marmalade […] — hope operating on a plate,
undissolving distance, a fading magenta and the dissipated blue.
My shoulders and my thighs that tighten and widen with
the conversation at its unease. Release!
One street further: my best friend.
[…] Nothing out of the ordinary;
barely the screaming bivalves in the mouth, then deep into the throat:
a perfect permanence in the tight order of a procession.
“Crack the sound inside me,” I tell him, while he is mesmerized
by his own thoughts.
Coffee.
At this undecent hour our bodies
should touch, deep, beneath the ice sheets. “Operation Sunshine”;
“All your plain ol’ sweetness,” of the rape flowers, a seeding of
the imperfection you are searching for in the nowhere,
undetectable.
The hormonal fluctuation in the disowned:
“you aren’t mine,
and we are no longer.” The canvas strips itself from any meaning.
Cracking layers of crepuscular bodies unthought.
A specific submarine
under the specific sheet; ice-glazed paper and
the smell of bubble gum and cotton candy and marshmallows.
I am in your pocket, rummaging around for the meaning.
You are keen on syntax, so syntactic pleasures aren’t
excluded from the dictionary you often open,
but you would never think about tearing me into
pieces, as I would do with your thesaurus.
You remind me of:
people, random poets, a poking object in the destitute space,
a word order in a disordered world, our views, off-topic,
the kindle version of your own, some blond jokes,
I am kidding your away,
pulling the strings. […] Miles off my coast:
a steelhead, a tin soldier
plundering the waist coat thrown on the heap of rubbish,
taming kangaroos with a sweet Southern Italian accent.
The dialectic behaviorism of the dyslectic disc,
turning between the bone, the essicated nerve endings and
the cartilage
You are in a capsule: travelling unease.
In the corner of the room
a toy submarine radiates
the glow I measure. In your face: mine with the highest albedo,
to suck in the most light.
In the QED vacuum, your particles hop into and out of existence,
My black body photons dissimulating the simulation, […]
or the carbon particles stuck in the Arctic ice sheet. I heat up.
You are a magnetic monopole. Our triangle shines with the force
of the frying sun. The cliff hanger is being mangled by
the putting off of the receiver. Our phones are talkative.
The resident permit I shove under the phone, then
under the door of a hotel room
you stay at. I photograph myself close to a phonograph.
I am amusing like music that flows in and out of
our discreet inertia. You put your hat on, I switch off the heat,
and this unwelcome space could just as well mean the end of
a nerve ending
and a new beginning,
while we travel under this sheet of ice,
maneuvering the submarine without a compass.
No compassion behind the untamed eyes of a frog, evolving, splashing
into a puddle where he/she is stuck. “You could as well
capitulate,”
I hear his distance voice, oblong and obstacled, his maundering smile
inside the machine with the rusty cog wheels examining his
equipment. As if it wasn’t part of. You and […]
me […], a floundering couple
in this Minute Maid juice —
with a smile ajar, develop smiles to ease the system.
Our minds in overdrive and out of control, yet well guided
through a speech about
the freedom of thought,
and expression. We are writers. So rigidly and clumsily trying […]
not to crash into the North Pole
from beneath, during and after,
the operation arrested. We might be a succession of failed flails within.
The rusty gears in a submarine’s decaying body, well-aligned with
the Black Sea shore.
It is put at rest
with the sunshine
flickering on its surface. This is our clearing,
where we have almost steered clear of this steep mountain ridge,
where we will
die
unattended
on the Hillary step. It is impossible to detect a man
dying in such a distance — now that we are
in the Death Zone, “like a giant fish when it
has just been hauled from the sea after
a terrific struggle”.
Your lips are rock holds,
and I get a grasp of them, although I can’t hold ‘m, as the north face
crumbles. Devoid of our dying, distant creatures of the Big Blue,
diving within, perfectly capable of dealing with the underwater
pressure. […] Skiing down from the mountain straight into the Sea,
a body of water
tepid enough.
The mourning sunshine of our radioactive fall out.
You spread, I become green […],
so ever: a glow forever. The cornice and the rock.
Bluff.
Such a precipice.
I don’t own the recipe, but I put you in a shaker and
am shaking you till you would become a cocktail.
By the swimming pool
good girls show us their swaying edges, all that matters
like induments will fall down into a deeper dawn and dusk,
in order to remember the thoughts wasted in an ethylic vapour.
“We can wrap it up,” you state, and I couldn’t have agreed more.
Allowing you a fade-out of my own attachment
up till the last line.
The last line that will commemorate the future,
yet to be handed over […] to the coming generation
composed of the individualists’ no ones.
Full and continuous, I repeat, as I am wrapping you in
a titanium sheet,
munching on fools’ gold.
Another morning with its great calm arousing me with its calmness,
telling me that there is still time to become. My unthoughts
are the manifolds in this balance vacuum.
Regardless the matter, I unfeel.
The bedsheets on the shelves look at me, and I see an elf circling.
My circulatory system is in homeostasis, as the spies of the day
devolve on the virgin snow, with the excruciating light
that increases on the sheet of paper.
“Blinding Lights” and a witch’s edges well-maintained by WD-40.
Don’t write God’s name on it. Put some sun cream; grapeseed aromas
mixing with the bitter smell of the grape leaves. I write his name
sevenfold as I unwhirl my smile of the eternally white
knowledge of the now,
still happening.
Then, I repeat the operation, and feign as if nothing
ever happened.
Terneuzen, 29-05-2023
DOWN
The commercial value of the momentous cover he pulled over himself, has divided him into two entities I won’t name. The screws in the lamellae in the agellation as a dismal distance, have illuminated his aluminium face. The onions, also part of the story, had dissolved into pixels. He stood there with his face chopped, kiss-dissolve, cross-kiss, kissdistance. He had made his importune fatigue into an octopus’ tentacles touching on my disbelief of future knowledge. He was one, chopped by his oneness, further de-evolving into the machine he had created.
He, or a lumiferous ether, calling himself the anti-God of the centuries, is yet to de-evolve into a more or less opportune creation, whereby the creature transcends its creator. We lighted no candles, or: we no longer lighted the candles, but switched on our speakers, states Steiner, and as if the unpoetic was non-apologetic, dissolving into a much more natural and casual metric, it was doomed to turn into a brabble. The pop culture had gotten into me. Kiss crash. Michael was sitting on the bottom line of this map, and when I was looking for him, he wasn’t even there. So, I practically had no other option than to fall in love with his absence.
The subject of my love got further compressed. The more I have detected his absence, the more I fell for this nothingness, with my masochistic trait turning into a habit. How can one so much love the ‘nothing’? Michael, you, or I were developing or de-evolving ourselves into the faceless entities on a crumbling time-line, yet to be drawn on that which the graphic of the seismograph was registering as a graphic in real-time. The continental plates weren’t more restless than our current society, which sticks out between 54.6 cm to 272 cm from the Earth’s surface – with the tallest and the shortest human beings. Yet, we were actually capable to detect absence by quantifying it: hence death, hence living, weren’t we?
I apply a shortcut and the person is either deceased or deceived. I look at him through the gadget’s screen – where he still is – , until the very moment the connection will be broken. You can hang up on the matter. Quitting a conversation is a similar case. Switching off one’s thoughts results to be more fastidious. Being in love with someone’s absence is literary bullshit. Yet, the man I love the most has never yet manifested himself to me in real life. Now I can create “the perfect man” for me, I can even disregard this thought, and create this male equivalent, whom I would love the most of any. I will be falling apart in a slice-glitch kind of representation, if I would want my own disintegration, at least within the digital space.
I can cut myself in pieces. So, the species that are evolving had turned the machine into the lengthening of themselves to reach other possible heights, or: heightened realities, still implemented into human history. Just like the female sitting over me at the table has put on her glasses. We are capable to obtain the protrusions, either flesh or machine. The machine can read into Broca’s area, a machine learning mechanism can visualize the thoughts in language via the electrodes attached to the right neurons on the cortex. Soon, mortality won’t necessarily take place. Intellect uploaded in the cloud. So, what does my operation to un-be and un-think myself and to investigate nothing should result in?
Can I send you my submission of a blank page where the absolute silence would regain its territory, […] or may I tell you about my spiritual journey and my linguistic journey coinciding – but aren’t likely to merge – , as I have been thinking about it throughout the years? My career, the content-carrier, the unloaded freight train and the loaded freight ship, shan’t be considered by anything else but their loads. Am I, intelligible, through the blank page – I would be so eager to submit –, as an answer to your question, and all the questions alike?
How dissatisfactory are we with the absolute starting point: ‘nothing’, which is not even a point, nor a temporal escape from the knowledge we earn while finding the ultimate metaphor […] on all of us, for the people, […] finally exiting the stage, dissolving into not even an absence but pure nothingness? Inexistence. Where all the isms melt like gyzm, the only ‘self- contained force’ triggering the female egg, and the host’s body, will carry the promise of a human life we can abort (?). As life doesn’t speak for itself no longer, human might as well become ‘unspoken’, ‘untold’. The complete silence will be this compressed nothing in each line, each word spoken, to be-come un-spoken. The object line can be thus left empty.
I can’t send a letter to a non-object, unless it is someone who is dead, however I can still displace my message. This can be impossibly done in an email. I need an address to be able to send a message to, but I oddly don’t need an addressee when I scribble a writing on the paper. Do I? Am I supposed to be read, and are you supposed to read me? How could all this information get lost, without being undone? The scrolls are rolling on the floor, and I am rolling on top of them. My body is becoming text, as I unfold in the physical space taken and begrimed by the letters. I want to un-be me. I have no other choices left than to finally get rid of myself.
If not in the name of love – where two identities merge, and in so doing – , my identity could dissolve in the other person. Maybe, love is the last old fashioned straw that we can hardly hold onto, being suspended in our struggle for survival in this mainly stochastically arranged, deranged system. Life is devoid of logic. Life lacks coherence. Writing lacks coherence. Love is at least aiming for ‘some’ coherence. So, we cross-dissolve into each other like two slides, as two mirrors being shifted one over the other, without our surfaces touching. “Keep surfing, and enjoy your holidays”, I read it on the imaginary postcard my mind has just sent me.
Nothing is impossible, but some thoughts are more improbable than the nothingness I was referring to. Why the words virgin and white and light communicate the same ‘spotless’ quality, if it wasn’t our purpose to get back to the empty? Maybe, the empty is the only space we can ll up, regardless the form. Maybe if we miss out on our chances to have any silence, any vacuum, we would have impossibly existed. Nothing is the only ‘split’ where something can begin and end, almost simultaneously, and there must be a moment in time, where there is absolutely nothing. We will always have a hard time to perceive such a thing as nothingness.
So, instead of providing you with the empty document, I will send you this writing […], so that it could be torn into pieces, so that there will be something I will put ‘out there’, for it to experience the further decay. Maybe, I should just advance in the opposite direction, and oblige myself to get back on the spiritual path undertaken, from experiencing the wholeness within a fragmented shape, that is: I must re-become text and thought. Can a rebirth be this painful, whereas the mind and the conscious had already taken the leap-of-faith, so irreversible?
What if I have already unbeen? What if I was already unthought? And what if re-appearing in text would no further define the shape I exist in? What if our self-worth wasn’t dependent on the shapes we take and the functions we hold? Could we evolve from these robotic and utilitarian human beings into something more than the machine? Are there such things as feelings? Or shall we go on pondering what is our right to exist? Why we even should?
OWNED
Shout the letter!
scream screen!, and as the scientists had
established earlier:
use a sunscreen. Bettering my uninvolvement
I revolt the revolver in the hand. I am going to dissolve into this crying
thing on the touchscreen, waiting for your fingers to touch
the screen of the gadget. Unreal as a being can be, you are.
Unreal as a being can become, I am. The heartbeat
is one of those things,
I can’t hear in our talking.
Through the body I evolve,
and through the body of him
I could be what — I most inherently am.
Messing with realities,
identities,
I am being further tortured into this future, I consider
as non-future. A crying glitch, a scarred face. You couldn’t even behead me,
even if you wanted to, in such a distance.
What you are now,
is what you truly aren’t;
I pick up
some fragments and get back to reality, which is as surreal as I am missing
a concrete block to stand on. Lacking a place,
being in love with an absence.
Other abscesses
on reality’s veil,
yet: you are a person, and I am working
towards an unbeing,
tired to talk and
tired to share my
feelings –
in a world lacking and maiming them, nevertheless.
I don’t know what is worse: the benevolent lie, or the disruptive truth.
I know what I would have done to you,
were you near.
As we continue the journey,
we hardly cared about the other,
on the screen: a past, the past
blinking belligerently –
at me: past, the other,
all these passings, to remember:
who you were, who I was – in the only thing
which
isn’t and is
momentary,
two surfaces touching in the
depth.
Operation Sunshine
A submarine under the North Pole’s ice sheet: “Operation Sunshine.”
I don’t care where you are at, but at some point, my exhibition
has become your exploration, and your exploration
the exploitative madness I’ve regained.
Cowboy boots and spaghetti with ketchup.
What kind of a belligerence would retain all that which we have lost?
The machine is munching on odd money: old bills, boards,
the silence of the rubbish of the happenings,
the non-happening. The boredom one experiences in one’s thirties:
a hell of a path travelled to the best extent, nel mezzo del cammino.
You are in the middle (of). The world does turn, but doesn’t turn
around me. Men direct their gaze to the shop windows,
and I am free from the glazes of a freshly born chicken.
To some extent, a woman in her thirties is slimy fried.
Kentucky fried or fresh like a Frisco?
We all have some the nostalgia for the other we were:
a sweet sixteen in a pyroclastic flow, “I don’t mind the fumes, either,”
he would say, being extinct as a volcano. Going on this submarine trip
to prove oneself better than the Soviets, and most actually
succeed, isn’t a failure. One could even think of
the Cold War was the most peaceful period – full stop. Unintending,
we are munching on explosives and weapons, in the world where
peace (…). I look at the screen and I know you exist,
but I might not arrive to same conclusion,
as time goes by. Listening to your voice coming from other centuries…,
you might as well become a writer, and I might as well
give up on the word, to let you see the empty –
the only beginning, the only ending,
decent enough to be considered. I could fall in love with your absence.
You do not see me. The surfaces would touch in the deep.
I could not detach you as I’ve done away with the weights
while diving, following the straight line, going deeper
at a constant velocity. One can feel the pressure.
And the universe opens up – just like when travelling into space,
so familiar and so uninhibited, uninhabited –
the timeline
crumbles, and the wire gets detached. Would I really be there
to resurface, I should change the old habits,
dying, dying, dying.
I can’t remain calm in the calmest of the calm…
There is a road I am yet to travel, even though
dying from the accumulation of nitrogen in the blood.
Do you think I could solve this with a Calippo,
and simplify things, look at the sunshine that
will fry me – and accept the future?
A future that never came, but has determined me to the very bone?
Go to a psychoanalyst and talk about the anal expressive part
of some of your practices. The pathology of being creative
lays inside the world, in which one could never establish
the real life consequences. The true crisis of being
alive, and staying alive, is that of the unability to un-be.
Whatever you would murmur into my ears,
my mind would convert into a metaphor.
I don’t cease being a romantic with a nihilistic glow.
Much like a radioactive fallout, I don’t expect reality to be radiant.
And the lack of that which is becoming truly pregnant…
I might as well crawl back to the womb, that is:
the womb, the alphabet, rewrite it all.
I couldn’t change the facts and I couldn’t alter the course.
The midline isn’t the beginning. I truly need to cope with
the trajectory, which hardly ever made sense,
so that I started to make even less sense,
with all that which wasn’t aligning with the submarine in question.
Sunshine set in, nevertheless, and the operation
was completed. So, take me Hawaii,
leave me exploited, let me derange!
I am only an ice sheet you wanted to get under. I do not manifest
the presence of all that frozen water, turning me into an iceberg.
Don’t you mean, me being mean, sordid sounds of the crackling
and the cracking, and the water should break through…
I am the most confident about that, and my lungs
are being filled up. Unable to breath. So that the thoughts and
the dialogues would be arrested, on the exact split of nothing,
Poetry can die within a person, unless she would be there to become
poetry. The only sense I can still make out of all this flow of –
all over the same circles I am drawing,
nevertheless the wish to get some kick
into – the motor. It’s high time we made it kick-start,
regardless the weather and regardless the circumstance.