Ariana Reines
ALL I HAVE TO DO IS LOOK AT YOU
All I have to do
Is look at you
To know. I can see every ejaculation
That’s come from you in want
Of company hanging in the air
Around your head like a dingy veil
My heart makes a small movement
Toward your predicament while other parts
Within me turn away. How could someone so beautiful
Be so alone. How could someone so beautiful be so alone.
Apparently God wants us all revolving
Around the same question, as though that could make me
Forgive him, maybe it could, the jealousy
And spite and rage and lust his loneliness first loosed
Upon the world
The harder thing than forgiving
Would be desiring
You whom I now pity
You whose secrets of taking my breath
Away are now arrayed
Around your sad halo like so
Many rusted tools
My genital hardens and rises and flops back
Upon its belly again, almost believing that awe
And forgiveness could physically both sigh
Out of a single breath while another eye
Inside my eye turns away
From you & back into the hammered copper
Blackness within myself where it pools
And foams into a velvet upon which
My heart rocks backward
Like a warm rock
Falling back and back and back
Onto the ground where anyway it came from
STILL GROANING UNDER ALL SHE OWED
Still groaning under all she owed to men
She turned toward the wider world
Where loathing was trumping
Love to great acclaim. Where nothing
Possessed vitality but loathing
The wind beneath the wings of Satan
Whipped by the sadistic silly putty Pegasuses
Of the snarling enormous Satan
Whipping her stupefied head til
She bowed down, rapidly cretinizing, visibly
Exhausted. Whose mind
Are you for? I’m sick
Of these colors she answered. So
They did the only kind thing.
They took out her eyes
from NINE NEOCLASSICAL POEMS, a book accompanying PUBIC SPACE, a 2016 collaboration between Ariana Reines & Oscar Tuazon at Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London, UK