George Quasha: from “Speaking Animate”

G. Quasha: Axial Drawing – Dakini Series 2012

1                                              words under pressure bleed original sense

The trouble with paradise is you never want to be away from home.

I make what calls me out.
All gone before you know it.

Words may drop passing color yet seeing you here now are born again, and again.
Closing a word in the mouth feels the sound until the tongue can’t stay still.

To unmask is to go silent.
Language makes no promise to communicate.

An articulated sound has it own dream in the ear.
Her presence in the room gives aroma to the syllables I voice.

Now she’s ready to draw eros from foreign bodies.
It starts by focusing on the sounds beyond hearing, still felt.

By she I mean who speaking animate configures.
This is the time of alternative obscurities to see through.

Through thoroughly, as a word weighs.

2                                                          a voice scape landing

They’re playing the perfect music for our movie, Rushing to Meet Anima.
The rhythm’s spacious enough I slip in the back door without a trace.

The drama is gathering soundless. It lives like that.

I never let go of her hand in my other world.

This I learn from you who read me back.

They say ancient Irish saw serpents where there aren’t any.
I descend from there to here where I see what I say even unsounding.

Writing I extinguish my voice but there is calling you hear.

Falling apart is syntactic.
Writing at the edge of collapse is surrender.

Saying depths in a tongue all hands puts the cards on the table over the edge.

Time to stop asserting order where it’s already in waiting.

Write this off as of a poet or one inspired by being written through.

3                                              time has its ins and outs

A sacred grove takes refuge in the voice.

A language hasn’t come through to itself if being inside isn’t self-instructive.
Syllable by syllable earwise spreading orders the cells.

What configures signs, time switching subjects on the line like my life.
It seems the same is saying there were no same.

A journey ever worth taking records itself within your hearing even now.
“I will always have been here before with or without you.”

Gnoaxial poetics, for want of right naming, finds pulse in grammatical drift.

The more she says the more I find configures.
The new singular noun soon plurals.

I’m beginning to recall the forgotten adventure, long since signed for.
The time of our playing recalls us back together.

This very time turns into space in our search for self true north.
Her tone is dissecting the next move out before.

The tense is two timing us.

The experience beyond reportable experience is self sensing.
Real work is indefensible.

4                                               seeing through hearing

Now to dowse the poetics of the poem to come.
We hold these principles to be self evident—in order to be self evidence.

Configuration is parthenogenetic. 
We’re talking fate here. 
High flying biology. Bios mating logos. 
Flowering, percipiently imaginarily auto-erotically speaking. 
It sees and knows what it’s doing not a moment before.

We call back to our other us through the air pressed into sound.
I’m just trapping animal life in its resound here.

Our group gives the dream time.
A date’s charge belongs at heart to anytime.

Our only mythical bird is fleeing the page as we speak.
It makes a very very very fast line out.
Sculpting hands in the saying.

Not every finger is instantly intelligible.
Signing principle, it calls itself, and hands itself over.

5                                              undesigning music

Watching your dancing feet is its own dance.

What if everyone talked funny at once.
I’m willing to avoid special pleading but ignored distractions will have their say.

Sudden behaviors may be of unaccountable origin.
Tongue the surface long enough and you bleed old demons long in exile.

Learn from the dog to dig up old shame, then bury it where you want it.
If you find a guy’s personality be sure to send it back.

Meet you where we know each other.

Beautiful music takes me away rather than throwing me further in.
Clamoring lines cannot disguise the sound of one mind slipping.

The center is holding just fine, yet the periphery is forgetting where it is.

Freudian slips of the hand put your mouth on your money.

Also note paradisal memes at the tip of the slip.

Life goes on … off … on … off.

6                                              scared sacred

What am I hearing with these other ears?

Prepare your mouth with pre-carnal intentions.
Poetry valorizes childhood because children make language.

First language.

It gets you little again to be verbal.

I can’t deny my excitement upon reaching the threshold of carnality.
No more hovering over secondhand bodies.

The heart is the organ of consorting.

Life is intelligent means it knows where it’s going but I don’t.
Fearful asymmetry.

Contacting the word’s core intent to mean itself is poetic insistence.

Logophagi know that certain morphemes are more delicious than others.

No truth behind the poem, only forward in its own before.