. ... . ... .

Something reminds me of you.
Some twist in a comment posted on-line
that suggests a dark-cynical side.
I'd rather forget. But it sticks
to my skin like bicycle grease.
I push it around and let it resound.
Like Lady Macbeth's "Out, damned spot!"
My relentless insistance at working it out
is like adjusting derailleurs; the clink of the tools.
The precision of chains shifting gears
(as they glide between sprocketed wheels).
And the beauty of such a machinic slide
making the ride so so fluid.

Leads into another 'you' poem.
But this is catharsis.

I write:

After drawing your name across newsprint
with one sssssssqueaky marker,
I watch all the letters stand up
and sssssssssscurry right off the page.
A centipede-thought that escapessssssss.
Set loose at my feet, scattering past shadowy corners.
They brush against skin like fish under water,
retrieving a childhood adage:

"N e v e r stick your feet off the edge of the bed.
Or the monsters-who-live-underneath will bite them (right off)."

So I tuck in my toes and take a deep breathe,
exhaling after their alphabetic retreat.

It's always a question of when.

As I recall,
you were light on your feet,
pointing your toes like an elf
and demanding a tension.
Laundry Room dancing
while weaving poetic entanglements
that tug Lovely Hearts
into a Den of hooks, lines and sinkers.
I love that cliché, by the way.

That was you.

But that is as far as I get (with my poem).
Negativity does not sustain me for long.
Like smoke in the air, just watching it drift
til it lets itself go.

Beleive it or not, I do wish you well.
Even if knowing you was like slicing the soul
(of my foot) on a fresh shard of glass.

The uncontrollable force of your words were too big
for your body (of knowledge).
And those erratic explosions became so exhausting to watch.
You-being-you, like the fly currently trapped in my window
who will not accept help, but keeps bashing its head
on the glass til it drops
out of sight.

Next to my love of pure calm.

I doubt you will read this.
But if you do, I want you to know just how much I learned
from your H-bomb prosaics packed into a D&G warehouse.
Words wrapped up like presents: trapped tools.
And how! you launched them like pin balls
bouncing around between parts of your self.

But if held up to the best possible light,
you are an epistemology of impossible absolutes,
placing everything under-erasure.
Re-inscribing things with paradoxical fireworks.
Like the wick of a flame, burning to
REplace (an epistemology of) absolute centres
with (an epistemology of) differance,
Aporetic undoings (of Western tradition).
Your contra-dictions, inspite of my Derridean frame.

I think of what the word epistemology means.
A branch of philosophy that explores the possibility,
the origin, the nature and the extent of so-called knowledge.
An effort to develop an adequate theory-of-knowledge
(which dates back to Plato).
Epistemology dominates Western philosophy
(since Descartes and Locke).
And what a dispute! between rationalism and empiricism
(or a priori and a posteriori origins).
Traditional philosophers squish it into the center.
Just as traditional writers elevate canonized literature
to the peak of Mount-Everest-writing.
Imagine the altitude.

But this epoch of our episteme is a burning arc.
As if 'knowing-it' is the only thing that informs our being.

Post-modern thinkers (like Derrida) find a reprieve
in a notion of (re-de) con-textualization.
Of knowledge being an inter-subjective process.
A flow that refuses the philosophical chauvinism
of thinking what any traditional philosopher-as-ethical-judge presumes.
Instead, they ask how philosophy (and literature-as-language)
can (re-de) scribe itself back into the margins.

Like you,
there are sorcerers in-wait at the edge.
Monsters lurking under the bed and slithery letters set-loose.
Always haunting the fringes, war-machines-looking-for-reasons.
Not episteme, but an inter-textual dis-course.
Derraileurs. There in the shadows.
Not to vapourize tradition,
nor to advocate (the tradition of) totalizing theories,
and not even to practice the futility of fixed-meanings-in-words.
But instead, they are meant to ignite a vice-diction.
And tripping over your anger, you search for that, too.

Unlike the homogenizing limits of dictionaries,
Derrida's neologisms supplement his ironic path
back to linear logic
(and its suppression of possibility).
A line that travels past five thousand years
of Western thought, reclaiming;

"...the line [as] the suppression of pluri-dimensional
symbolic thought...[producing] thesaurization,
capitalization, sedentarization and the formation
of ideology by the class that writes or rather
commands the scribes" (Derrida, 1976).

His line traces the ideology of hierarchy,
challenges its exclusivity
and calls for 'the end of the book'
by slicing right through it.
A-linear thought, like the history
of non-linear writing, has always been there
and reveals a quest, to find new ways to read past
the power of canonized words, to

"...read what wrote itself between the lines of the volume"
(Derrida, 1976).

From tangents and pluri-dimensional readings,
from hypertextual navigation and a-linear text
(which opens the way for new re-de-con-texts
within each subsequent reading)
to Derrida's neo-epistemology.
His anti-episteme-differance
has no originary truth
outside-of-writing.
A perpetual search
for what follows.

The supplement.

Emancipation
follows these centipede-thoughts.
When I see the light of their lessons
by facing a shadowy fringe,
by writing to learn,
by untwisting the twisted,
I remember to let them all go.

These
are
my
exhalations.