Listless

A poem from The Criminal for Monday

Listless 


Waiting in the tiny room soon became a problem.  She was annoyed by the back 
and forth motion of wheels on the floor’s surface.  Held
and made to watch.  Without protection for her eyes.  An old feeling, waking up 
to magnetic rocking, a coating on the skin. 


a slit 
in the center             swollen              oddly shaped
aperture 
where eyes watch  

                                   sometimes she can remember and sometimes not   

Elongated shapes hinge at the edges of a round object.  Not wanting to be touched. Quivers
light on skin and glands.  Impressions. 

Exaggeration of features.  Water-tight. Narcissistic.  

Voices cluster                white 

                                                                       slur gloat on the rapid 



Max Wolf Valerio; 1986-87; San Francisco

waiting in the tiny room soon became a problem

“Listless” is from my book The Criminal: The Invisibility of Parallel Forces (EOAGH Books, 2019). I don’t like to say too much about each poem… but here… There’s a suggestion of confinement, of waiting, of boredom and an inability to sense the world with immediacy and without constriction.

Reading it now, in the first lines…. I can see the beginning as a memory of infancy, or a time of dormancy and then — an awakening as eyes are brought to seeing — yet through a slit. Vision is still constricted, memories are not entirely lucid… the world is experienced then as tactile, and yet — touch is refused “not wanting to be touched”. There is an enfoldment into darkness… At the end, voices are heard, as though underwater — but they are slurred and gloating, even as anxiety rapidly escalates.
Waiting continues — or becomes unendurable.

The language here hangs together by perceptions and threads of imagery.

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More to come soon—