�In the Garden of Gore� cover art and text by j/j hastain an UB mini chapbook undergroundbooks.org nyc 2014
In the Garden of Gore j/j hastain
She I am a martyr for a cosmic cause that’s only barely coming into clarity. Dying both before and after cause is ever fleshed out into clauses. Dying means waiting on more meaning. Dying is another version of holding more still than usual.
I perch myself in the upturned and continue attempting to peel the skin off of my own hands without any touch: I’m not touching and neither is someone else. I am trying to be political by way of my third eye. My heart and my hearing can both exist there, together, as hearth. What else could prove a certain kind of human body legendary? Don’t shut or shunt a tender body. Particular human bodies are a quiet skill that never need be stopped.
This is not a dry avocation for reincarnation. I imply this explicitly. A post-apocalyptic Eve might or might not come back to life. I might or might not come back as something capable of being signified by another’s signifiers. I depend on the garden now. In the garden there is no polarization, no wish for something else nor wrath due to Adam. I had to let Adam go. I admit to you that though challenging, it felt good to do so.
There is no such thing as general gore. All gore is explicit. It is possible to grow by explicitness, without girding without holding grudges. The unseen, but impending gore is what gets me off now: subliminal limelight being courted into form, counted on.
There is honor to be made on behalf of the delicacies of the garden. They present as dense and ephemeral. Imust honor. Flow is onward-honor. What connotes she? If given light unconditionally, a prism is a constant dialogue with itself.
Moonwalking in the Temple Premeditate by mantra. As much as a mantra can be space’s needed decor, it can also act as a relief agent. Sometimes a song is in you from before you were born. Sometimes you were born as unevenness in form. You can’t name it any other way. There are parts of me that are not from here, so “I’m starting with the man in the mirror,” with what I’ve got of then, now
Do the walk that is most natural to your body: a walk that moves forwards and backwards at the same time. It is a walk that reminds you of awoman in the moon (instead of The Man in the Moon) and it floods any stage on which you perform. You hope to walk the labyrinth of yourself, humming and channeling, until you die. To render yourself the temple that you are you work with reflection as a way to change fate. Mantra can be used to mediate, to smooth twitches in human storylines by the sounds that come from within you, possibly from before your form in time.
When he sat across from you during relentless rehearsal, with that studded belt in his hand, what was he trying to teach you? Or was it about using your song, your intuited relationship to steps as lyrical, to benefit him? The incessant vomiting that occurred at mere sight of your father indicates your fear, pain, lack of safety in your own body due to him.
Maybe your song is the most safe body you ever thought you could have access to. Is that why it seems that it lovingly folds itself around you, turning the ground on which you tread into clouds? Are you a living embodiment of cloud nine?
As he whipped you and criticized you did your father know then and there that he was taking your adulthood from you? You would eventually have buttons on your favorite jacket: buttons which mirrored the trinkets which once hung off of your father’s erect and abusive belt. You would, of course, have debilitating nightmares, struggle with body-hatred, chronic sleep issues, and feel isolated.
The swagger that was present as you walked your way through your own voice is notable. Your falsetto was a hero: a way and a place for tomboys to wriggle. The aggressiveness of your growl, that hiss through clenched teeth, both reveal that you were courting unseen forms of rehabilitation.
You wanted to “make the world a better place,� buying land in Santa Ynez, having your kid through artificial insemination with the help of asurrogate mother, so you would never become your father in relation to having had a child in the same way that your parents had you. You wanted more tenderness than that; you wanted tenderness for you and your child, both.
Suave can revert struggle.
During the strip-search the police violated you. As they were looking for the dark spot among your pink, between your legs, some of the rhinestones on your glove outright died. Your own magical hand was dying before your very eyes, while these surrounding men watched on like voyeurs. You could not believe this was happening to you, to the world. In that instant you had flashbacks of your father. The sweet and sonorous self-madeglisten by which you lived, continued to fall off at your feet. You were the only one who could see them, the dying rhinestones. But your friends believed you. They knew that they were really there.
Your anorexia worsened. The afterlife neared.
In the afterlife the temple is hormonal; it has mood swings that hold you in all of your own swings. Moods and fluctuations are a type of map, a way for the lucid walk to stay lubricated.Tears and sweat in gyration, produce ample rhythm: flood the road made of foreskin.
The luminous skin that you chose for yourself has to do with the way that the full moon makes you feel: not with a desire to be a white man. You never saw yourself as a white man, no matter how many surgeries, how much change.
Your rhinestone glove is soaked. As the full moon reflects, your gloved hand floats underwater, partway below the surface of the wetness and part way above the bottom of the sea.
Not so Simple as Before and After--but What Remaining Authenticities Continue to Come After After? He passed after his surgery, but he remained refusing to be a man in the American-Man-as-procurementand-fulfillment-of-the-AmericanDream sense of the term. He was never, in all of his years, trying to be his father or any other Chief-ofStaff, Head-of-Stead.
He hated the idea of being on top of. His transition did not place him on top of the world. In fact, he was not a top at all. He liked much better the feeling of being an abyss’s tip: a far edge of its emanation and expression. Yes, he had a dick, but he was also a resonance who would use his dick in that way: as a wand, treating his wife’s body as a scarred scape in need of scrupulous healing.
She kept telling him that this part of him was a blessing for her. She could only proceed by way of that shape on him. Endlessly snapping and unsnapping his lover’s corset, day in and day out, he would always take his time with her,notice her as he pulls her apart and then puts her back together by way of his dick, of what she declares so desperately that she needs of him.
They wanted their life to be a form of meat, for it to feel like outstretched meat-curtains even though they were both longpracticing vegans. They considered themselves the other halves of things: half-moons, halves of watermelons. Veganism is political: restraint from an aspect as a form of giving life to life, as a way of filling things out. As they threaded their diet with food combinations and non-meat proportions that would keep them feeling full, he perceived them as incessantly sucking off the muse.
He read his wife’s writing as ink being poured over vegan forms, ink pooling in the meat curtain, the cosmicity of folds. Bardos could be surpassed in this way, he thought: being the thing as opposed to consuming it.
He strokes her hair as the light in the room changes how it feels in his hands. They talk about how hair is slow-motion-time, time as a rich expression of the agency of lovers: the only type of time that they can believe in.
UB mini
There is no such thing as general gore. All gore is explicit. It is possible to grow by explicitness, without girding without holding grudges. The unseen, but impending gore is what gets me off now: subliminal limelight being courted into form, counted on.
UB