japonisme: can you feel his disease?

15 May 2011

can you feel his disease?



YOU LOVE, YOU WONDER

You love a woman and you wonder where she goes all night in some tricked-
out taxicab, with her high heels and her corset and her big, fat mouth.

You love how she only wears her glasses with you,
how thick
and cow-eyed she swears it’s only ever you
she wants to see.

You love her, you want her very ugly. If she is lovely big, you want her
scrawny. If she is perfect lithe, you want her ballooned, a cosmonaut.



How not to love her, her bouillabaisse, her orangina. When you took her
to the doctor the doctor said, “Wow, look at that!” and you were proud,

you asshole, you love and that’s how you are in love.
Any expert, observing
human bodies, can see how she’s exceptional, how she ruins us all.

But you really love this woman, how come no one can see this? Everyone must
become suddenly very clumsy
at recognizing beauty
if you are to keep her.




You don’t want to lose anything, at all, ever. You want her sex depilated, you
want everyone else not blind, but perhaps paralyzed,
from the eyes down.

You wonder where she goes all night. If she leaves you,
you will know
everything about love. If she’s leaving you now,
you already know it.



Brenda Shaughnessy


Brenda Shaughnessy,
“You Love, You Wonder”
from
Interior with Sudden Joy.
Copyright © 1999
by Brenda Shaughnessy.



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5 Comments:

Blogger lotusgreen said...

when the fuck did they start putting ads on embedded videos? any fixes? weird, though. i can't figure it out. like on the gaga, the first time i tried watching it from here there was a hideous ad on it, so i went back to youtube to see if there was another video of that song. there was not.

so i came back & played it again... no ad...!?!

15 May, 2011 19:50  
Anonymous evan said...

Love the poem...sort of a twisted Rumi...and the images...well...I tend to repeat myself...the images, as always- inspiring.

16 May, 2011 09:33  
Blogger lotusgreen said...

isn't she an amazing poet? i just discovered her and read a bunch of poems and they were amazing

16 May, 2011 11:18  
Blogger Fifi [Feeling is First] said...

I really like this post: the juxtaposition of words & images was thought provoking and aesthetically satisfying [not easy to combine those 2!!] Thank you!

21 May, 2011 20:54  
Blogger lotusgreen said...

thanks so much, blue. that's the intention.

21 May, 2011 21:29  

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hi, and thanks so much for stopping by. i spend all too much time thinking my own thoughts about this stuff, so please tell me yours. i thrive on the exchange!

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