Light as violence

Light as violence

Light as violence

Light as violence

LIGHT!

 

You do not necessarily need to ‘see’ something to be a witness.

Implicate yourself in an ordeal

through oral connection by means of

conversation with your inner voices

Self-reportage bestowing upon you 

a certain involvement and moral dilemma

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

 

I sleep with a glass jar on a table by my bedside

Inside live my two eyeballs

 

How can I now see anything more beautiful

than when I saw you read your poems?

The contours of your face dazzled in strobe light

Every facial nuance embodying the beauty of each word uttered

I have seen it all, there is no more to see

The years of struggle it took me to find and accept me

Seeing you humble at work, a man so in love with his craft,

not realising their power, not as bullets or bombs

but your words pricking my imagination like tiny little mapping pins

made the struggle worth it

 

The smallest prick can create the biggest explosion

 

Now, you can see me, but I do not need to see you

because hearing, listening to you is enough

You don’t need eyes to see, you need vision

 

Blindness as enlightenment,

yet Oedipus blinded himself,

as he no longer wanted to be duped        

But you did not dupe me, for that I am sure,

unless your smile conceals the devil

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

But if one of those eyeballs should accidentally fall

 

I do not need to ‘see’ something to be a witness

Implicate myself in this ordeal

through oral connection by means of

conversation with my inner voices

Self-reportage bestowing upon me

a certain involvement and moral dilemma

 

Radical listening, deep listening

There is no escape from sound

It reaches us from everywhere

and works upon us without pause.

Living with the conditions of blindness, 

my radical sensory deprivation

My relying on hearing alone is permeated

The sounds of my body,

creaking of the joints,

cracking of the teeth,

thumping of the pumped blood,

persist and insist

I live in my body, rather than in the world

It is a particular kind of body,

a body given compelling

but impermanent shape and volume

by the experience of sound

which establishes strange continuities

between what is inside and what’s out

 

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

My two eyeballs hanging on the wall

But if both those eyeballs should accidentally fall

 

You caused my sudden blindness

Blinding me with your pins

pricking my eyeballs with each stanza spoken

Penetrating through the cornea to the antechamber

right through to the lens, narrowly avoiding the pupil

and then the last line entered the retina

but the final word you uttered

ripped both my eyeballs from their sockets

Orbits cut loose

Decapitated from optic nerve

My two little disembodied eyeballs

landed on the floor and started rolling around

And at that split second, I became a witness

A radical deep listener of your poetic pins

 

SEE ME, SEE LEE

My personal history of seeing and not seeing

as working-class queer British man

to confront the politics of seeing

To underline how validating seeing can be

As well as the difficulty of not being seen

 

Discover the same other

whilst under the cover

I got very clever

very clever at seeing without being seen

 

Smuggling copies of Gay Times

into my teenage bedroom just to see guys like me

Creeping downstairs whilst parents asleep

to watch bad straight porn on Television X,

just to see a man naked

 

Fancying men, being called ‘one of them’

George and Danny, all my teenage crushes

Sexy male schoolteachers, adrenaline rushes

Balls and sports, men in shorts

Football with Dad, both happy and sad

Dad watching one way, me quite the other

Nothing beats a good tackle seen undercover

 

I have learnt what it means to have a body,

to be a body, to inhabit the world here and now

See me through. No. See through me. No.

I am not that transparent, I am a body

A complex historied well

of senses, emotions, proximities, and encounters

A body that has learnt resilient being whilst

developing tactics of seeing

I would go back to former me and tell him

to prolong my stare at the handsome bear

and not in the least bit care

 

The ubiquity of light within social life

We want to see everything

with total punishing clarity

Light as violence

Yet, for me, there is an attraction to retreat into darkness,

of not being able to see,

my reaction and profound need to hide away,

think differently, and not be seen, to be invisible

 

Trauma is stored in the body not just in the brain

Thinking anything that we are observing or learning,

we soak up in the body, accumulate

those neurological and physiological connections

Now my body, learning to live with the trauma of living without sight,

learns to swim in the pornographic pleasure of radical deep listening

 

You have taught me that haptic is not just touch

but also, audio, its frequencies and air

As your poetry enters my ears,

it tests the boundary

where the sonic and the haptic begin

Your poetry is beyond the visual,

the purest production and transmission of affect

Both phenomenology of my body

and reawakening and break with

any understanding I previously had of perceptual experience

Body constructed ‘in’ and ‘of’ the world through movement,

as Maurice Merleau-Ponty suggests,

breaks down the dualist idea of the mind and body

‘inside’ and ‘outside’

Your poetry is movement, a speeding pin

 to my body as porous, as permeable material of the world

 

But this affect, this desire must take an involuntary respite

when standing in front of you

You will see a man whose heart is tied in knots

Conflicting with my queerness, my resistance to teleology

I must have a conversation with myself

whilst now presenting a version of myself to you

in conflict with all those voices

coming from within

 

Transmission of myself to you now as a poet

whose internal thoughts, unheard, whose joy, unseen

You see me but I can’t see you

Yet we can both hear each other

Listening to each other’s oral remediation

of what is going on inside of you but inside me,

I navigate an ordeal, a conflict

The mismatch, the incongruity,

The moral dilemma

the war between thought and share

External assimilation of my feelings 

may rip, may cut, may hurt you

So, I minimise the narrative

Straitjacket those feelings

Deny showing you the alchemy of my flesh

 

Coming, the ejaculation of seeing you

Those moments of fleeting bliss and physical transcendence

Cumming, physical, out of body, non-sovereign

The most prized money shot in pornography

now seen only by my internal audience

Only I, as I try to pin this down, will bear witness to myself

I see me cumming from within.

 

Light as violence

Light as violence

Light as violence

Light as violence

LIGHT!