LEWIS FREEDMAN Five Poems

I Want Something Other Than Time

The aim of this writing is to show that
I does not disappear. Even when I disappear
I does not disappear.
If I should achieve this
will I feel more or less isolated
in the continuing progression
of a paralysis I can only pathologize?
It’s not a mask &
the time over which it closes, that’s not it,
not some chopped-up tension b/w
solitude & collectivity, not that.
I disappears into my own voice below
the confrontation with anonymity we
might’ve imagined here.
Better delirium than drift in
my representations.
Better anticipate
a congealed posture or
else be effaced as
the object
of knowledge.

I Want Something Other Than Time

My way of proceeding
in which I no longer hear
the voice aside from its echo
might’ve become banal
even to me.
Like my incommunicable remains
form a barricade against unity
but this time it’s not news to me anymore.
My tie bares a picture of death for the whole
office to see but it can’t even be called
death b/c its significance has been abolished
(it’s a tie).
It’s a window that, having withdrawn entirely
from the outside it had asserted itself for
centuries to separate, now conceives of any situation
as an enlargement of “every place
is in another place.”
My foundation has become my modesty
offended by my living mouth.
There’s nothing clear to the dare
I feel in Nietzsche’s words,
“I am dead b/c I am stupid.”
Horrible.
But now at least
the page
feels full.

I Want Something Other Than Time

Is it knowledge
or is it magic that
encompasses everything in
my life?
My ego looks to the light of my ego
& presides,
providing forwards as though my future
identity had already come to me.
The sock, incapable of rational knowledge
once removed from the foot can find no reason.
Does it lie there in total relation to itself
overloading the ground?
Because my encounter is clearly somehow about
loss, about what I must’ve in the beginning
turned immemorial for this intuition of
what will come next to remain,
b/c of this, b/c the other dimensions of
light around this light will regard
but not surmount it,
I’m too wrapped up to speculate
on the result of this thing,
to care for its render-
ing of me &
poem srsly
who
cares?

I Want Something Other Than Time

I’m like building
a model of my ghost,
like the relation is to
my ghost, not the world I’m
building it in.
I repeat, I can’t put myself, or us,
or the world this is in
in my ghost’s place.
My ghost doesn’t care if I remain an ego,
am I making myself clear?
Everything is already form except for my ghost
who’s nothing to me perceptually but a glimpse
of some grimaces covering the formlessness
like some kind of mouth-void.
The inhibitions & the lifting of inhibitions
around what I can say
put & return my parasitical ghost into
each event that happens to or as me.
There’s a condition of failure to
all of this: I’m allowed to possess nothing.
In my next incarnation
I want to be ghost instead,
to be schema at the expense of content,
I’ll balance a beam
with middle my
mouth.

I Want Something Other Than Time

Not later, I find my
self asking myself,
how do we resist recognizing
only our self in the experience
of our emotions?
Please don’t touch me, I whisper,
apple crumble crumbs scattered around me to
retrace my steps.
I destroy everything but the wish for no more
interiority. Meanwhile, an interior sign predicts itself &
comes to pass, & beyond that
something like the analysis of a glacier’s regression
threads its measurement slowly thru the entry of what.
And I’m hoping this isn’t just fragile, isn’t just a
phrase into the verge of vanishing, or
interior to sit by interior as
this is just a place I mostly wouldn’t
want to live rolls by.
No, we tell our self, it shadows our suffering
under a cataclysm to come,
an impassable burst of striking thru not
yet struck.
And I’m against myself, as though our confusions
could make our deaths happy, to find myself
saying instead of don’t touch me,
I elate in the mystery
of my
disappearance.

—

Lewis Freedman is the author of Residual Synonyms for the Name of God and I Want Something Other Than Time (both from Ugly Duckling Presse) as well as many chapbooks of poetry, including Am Perhaps Yet (Oxeye). In addition, he has authored several experiments on the form of the book including Solitude: The Complete Games (Troll Thread), a collaboration with Kevin Rydberg that will take several years for your computer to read, and the book within a book, Hold the Blue Orb, Baby (Well-Greased Press) which interleaves notebook facsimiles with poems on the practice of notebooking. He has taught creative writing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Oklahoma State University, and served as Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Carthage College.