The Phallic Gesture

Not Present and Not Absent

What appears? The dead on a footpath. Gone and yet returns to haunt. With us toward the clearing. But what is the effect of truth to a dead thing? Are the dead hungry (Salah, 80)?

The Spook

The dead rise up in Wanting in Arabic, Phoenix-like, the father, whose name is daddy, the boy who once was, the suicide, the first love, the third sex, the wandering dead, the dead by orchids, the dead unspoken, the dead end, the easy dead, easier than the last.

The twin is dead, Ghalib is dead, Orchid maybe, maybe not.

The Repetition

Like a semblance the Repetition haunts. Strange, uncaused, rampant. Deed done, subject departed, trace of its passage remains.

Girl repeats: the little girl who is daddy’s, the girl who forgets what to make of her body, girl as pursuit, parabola, question.

The girl who is nervous or indifferent, the girl whispering lezzie, fag, lezzie, the girl with a voice like home. The young girl with breasts. Thracian girls. The girl becoming a girl, the new girl, the girl not ever like you, the girl flung aground, the leatherfag, the girl on girl, the bigger girl, the beautiful girl (she was determined to be). Fawn, a cool and composed girl, lupine, supine, bovine, feline, canine, ursine. The scared girl, the girl to die for (missing in your body), The Girl for 2000, the girl so fair as if snow, an army of girls.

The girl verging towards the boy (in straight boy drag) and the boy always dead repeating, reappearing, returning.

Boy: The small boy who was his father’s daughter, the boy who falls, the boy who is like a boy, who is treated like a boy, who talks dirty like school boys do, the straight A student boy next door, the tough and swaggering boy, the boy who verges, the virgin boy, the boy cut into a girl, the boy who takes the long view. Choir boy rouged, the crazy boy in NYC, the boy before the girl with his seduction experiments, the eleven year old who must have been a boy, Patrick, the boy with round fingernails, queer girls.

What Does the Phantom Offer?

Sheer density of absence (18), the opening of meaning. What can’t speak or can’t be spoken. Not knowing. Speculation.

Despite the dead the body continues, sometimes as tomb, as ghost, as bones, as eulogy, as pain, as Eros, in parts, half open lips, eye, breath, skin, cool wrist, spine, pussy, small of back, hair, possible arm, throat, thorax, shoulder, knee, cock.

The body as fantasy, as struggle, as politics, as narrative, as relationship, as child, as saline, cut, and blood.

As technology. The terror you fly to. (86)

The Narrative About One Goes Like This: There Must Be Two.

• There is still one. (44)

One is always a memory.

• The romance is always two in a bed and in another room, another. (61)

        Being for the other.

Once we were but now, she comes and goes!                                                                                                                           

Scene of Two (Voices). Fort! Da!

First voice:           How diminished are the great dualisms (and their specimens):

                              high/low (universal/particular),

                              reason/passion (mind/body),

                              subject/object (self/other/man/woman/occidental/oriental/straight/gay),

                              life/death (being/ghost).

Second voice:     This over that. Those words make authenticity possible. Make

                               adventure possible: an expedition between extremes. Hierarchy. Oh

                                know your place! Enjoy your lines!

First voice:           They are Cartesian, exact and catastrophic. 

Second voice:     Oh the guarantees. The repression. The romance.

The Repetitious Ghost of the Third: the Middle Term, the Law that Rives the Two, the Lack that Does the Same

The three that had no idea, the three sexes, the tangled bodies’ heat, the three in revolutionary coupling, just the three of us, three surgeries in two hours, the fragments of three, the vectors of that triangle, you-we-they falling away, the three languages of Dana International.