Shaughnessy - So Much Synth

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We hope you enjoy these poems. This e-book edition was created through a special grant provided by the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation. Copper Canyon Press would like to thank Constellation Digital Services for their partnership in making this e-book possible. Table of Contents

I Have a Time Machine But unfortunately it can only travel into the future at a rate of one second per second, which seems slow to the physicists and to the grant committees and even to me. But I manage to get there, time after time, to the next moment and to the next. Thing is, I cant turn it off.

I keep zipping ahead well not zippingAnd if I try to get out of this time machine, open the latch, Ill fall into space, unconscious, then desiccated! And Im pretty sure Im afraid of that. So I stay inside. Theres a window, though. It shows the past. Its like a television or fish tank. But its never live; its always over.

The fish swim in backward circles. Sometimes its like a rearview mirror, another chance to see what Im leaving behind, and sometimes like blackout, all that time wasted sleeping. Myself age eight, whole head burnt with embarrassment at having lost a library book. Myself lurking in a candled corner expecting to be found charming. Me holding a rose though I want to put it down so I can smoke. Me exploding at my mother who explodes at me because the explosion of some dark star all the way back struck hard at mothers mothers mother.

I turn away from the window, anticipating a blow. I thought Id find myself an old woman by now, traveling so light in time. But I havent gotten far at all. Strange not to be able to pick up the pace as Id like; the past is so horribly fast. I. EDGEHOLE McQueen Is Dead.

Long Live McQueen There were seven colors of mourning, one was lilac. That kind of blossom always has its crowd, fanned out, surrounded by crushing likeness, smell of itself. Fabric has to breathe, at least 2 percent, like skin. A little milkfat, elastin even in the gravest print. Not knowing how to grieve can poison like a directionless dart. And although fabric has been known to swirl and clasp, be clasped without mother theres only art.

To hug the body: a swath, anathema, magical, 70s lace and spacedust, all too far gone to truly love. But to twist it, to learn to hate-want. To sway, tear, burrow, be borrowed, everybodys animal. To float like water seeking its own, stampede like buffalo, seeking its hide. Face painted on torso on horsehair on chesty silk its a deathmask for the stigmata slashes of the models body. I dont think I understand what studying is.

I listen, I read, I remember, I absorb. I let myself be moved and changed. Is that studying? Never five-fingered, you never use them all, gloves will be like hooves, split-footed hand-stitched. When concept perceiveda womanly gist, lets say, or a curve of mindis more than itself (surpassing, all maw), I make it part of me. I take it in, drink a corrosive. I let it overtake me, change everything it can, lip to tip to rim.

My eyes just drink the fabric that covers each surface of this world. Suck up the plastic through a polished straw. Everythings inspiration: trees reflected in windows on buildings, distorted buses, endless frames, all too glass, so much lens, textures so tall, and once you start to see things this way, visions a performance, shocking and true after all these centuries, a Shakespearean volta, like nectar is poison to the occasional queen bee. Everything actually is blurred, not just how you see. Glasses and shoes are solutions to problems that are real problems, that of blurred world, that of touching the ground. A glass corset for the heart to see out its chest.

For without glasses, the eye better sees the wind, by feeling it and closing against its grains, its grasses. For without shoes, my feet become shoes. When I am really feeling, I get very tired, I fall asleep for the seventeenth time on the unfinished skirt of glass eyes and lemon zest hemmed first, grown last. I experience the world as infinite invertedness: no wholes broken, just potential fragments straining, skull-like, at the seams. Anything could give. Ive been trying to write the words, I cried. Ive been trying to write the words, I cried.

Cried really and wetly, and for good. Old-fashioned writing with intense excitement: the spell of quill and ink spill, quelled. What is beautiful, what is terrifying, what is absurd in me? Every possibility that colors are believable, various not that mirage I thought Id seen and can be held apart as unreal, too exterior, distinct from each other wildly as sparks to seaweed or flower to meteor. It collapsed, cant draw it, cant cut it out of itself. There is no color but whats already inside the eye, no power or invention or new way to wake up in the morning outside the seeing mechanism, our own orbs. Yet I cant see myself.

I can never see you again. I can only see from inside my skull and when I look down I close everything not just my eyes. I wrap my own tender nether flesh in calfskin leather so buttery, melted back together like so: a newborn softened in its own mothers milk. I awoke in a panic (no ma no ma) to the smallest day yet. I dreamed I already dreamed all the dreams Id get. This morning I dressed in my last dresss last dress, fit only for a genteel gothic murder, covered up wellairtight, would only fit the stabbed one, after bloodlet.

Then, like a glove. Who wears it and where? I will, from the bed to the chair. Headrest, clotheshorse. Designer and model: mutually orbiting the best metaphor for bodiless idea. Amorphous, amorous, amoral, immortal. Red is dead, said blue, to you too? Hindquarter-gauze with silver faceclamp and sickened ears pulled, unskulled.

Broken backpiece. Shadow sensible by other than sight. To smell a shadow. To strike it. To trace it later, to measure a body by its line. Lights so quiet.

Youd think its cuttings, its edge-hole, those mousy children, would squeak at least a bit. They run like a stocking down the leg of the mind. Why not quieter then? There is no body without life. There is no mind without body. There is no without. Last Sleep, Best Sleep Life, this charade of not-death.

Amnesiac of our nights together, overheard talking in some other voice. The great fruits of my failure: silk milk pills with little bitter pits. Who talks like that? Says we are ever-locked, leaving everything petaled and veined the way nature pretended. Synthesized within an inch of its life. Oh the many faces of facelessness, breathing in the dark as if we could shape softness itself, mold it around us like yams mashed against a trough by a snuffling snout. Our own.