I’ve kept a diary, writing in it virtually every day, since 1976. Beginning on November 30, 2012, I stopped keeping a diary, and started instead a series of trance notebooks, as a way to transform my journal into a higher pitch of ceremony, an occasion for intensified, unmoored consciousness. A year later, I distilled the results of my aleatory experiment into a sequence of 34 assemblages, which I call The Pink Trance Notebooks. This poem is one of these trance notebooks.
***
Trance Notebook #17
[the lake and the kink]
every time I kiss
Thomas I grab his
face to feel the stubble
________
dreamt I was on stage
with Liz in Giant or Cat
on a Hot Tin Roof, a
new live version, I
could tell (from her perfume)
that she was epic
________
dreamt I
tried to buy liquid
paper but the bottle
broke
________
rock diva’s eyes damaged
by too much plastic
surgery
________
Hydrox cookies, sister’s
cravings
________
did he leave
his hairy belly exposed
especially as a feast to
taunt my eye?
________
spike has 3 meanings,
all are (St. Sebastian)
site-specific
________
nonstop
frequenting of tearooms in
Albany, at 16 years
old already a pedophile,
internet whore, identity thief
________
voices of men in
the army are
abdominal he said
________
Commie scares
in mandarin orange
sections
________
his balls unremarkable
for a rocket scientist
or a card shark or
a literary charlatan
________
la chambre
est une veuve, the chamberpot
________
(fable
of the delicatessen’s id)
________
il marche avant la
guerre, he memorized
Costa-Gavras’s Z
________
il arrive sous la terre,
a wire is loose
________
il pleut
dans la chute, it
pulsates and churns
________
on peut
rester ici sans angoisse,
we can stay here
thanking the insane
________
I did an
inadequate still life mixing
the palette’s colors
to compose an
innovative gray sometimes
dominated by brown
red or green
________
a father’s spittle
landing on me though
I’m not the spittle’s
intended object
________
brother blowing his nose
without kleenex
________
pink tourniquet
unfolding
________
a mnemonic
device leading me to you
________
mackerel after standing-
room Boccanegra
________
our baby
tortoise behaved,
our train
survived radiation
________
his father-in-law’s
severe sunburn a
joke for decades
________
the burnt patch
on the waiter’s arm and his
reluctance to serve me
________
attempting to paint a
strawberry container but then
it turns into an Easter egg
________
will eating an apple be
perceived as asocial
behavior?
________
movement is
aphrodisiacal and non-
movement is stultifying
________
confessing my invisibility
and waiting for them to
correct me and say “you’re
not invisible”—
________
disgusted by
filial piety and night’s likeness
to day
________
disgusted by the lake and
the kink
________
by the arm and
the fossil and my
capacity to love fossils
________
by a smile
covering his jealousy like
a condom over Zeus
________
by trumpet teachers
and hairless chests combined
with tattoos and Thin Mints
________
disgusted by cemeteries
and think tanks,
crenellations and tadpoles
________
by mother’s oscillation from
life to death and her semi-
permanent position on that
threshold
________
by her rectum’s
appearance in
my litanies
________
disgusted by
my imitation of
Auden and her teeth’s
participation
________
by my
Auden imitation’s
resemblance to a lesion
________
by my
reliance on one father’s
homosexuality, and that
father’s suddenness
________
by my reliance on the
homosexuality of many
fathers, and their ballads,
and their descriptions of
ballads
________
disgusted by
goldenrod’s invisibility and
by song
***
Wayne Koestenbaum has published over a dozen books, on such subjects as hotels, Harpo Marx, humiliation, Jackie Onassis, opera, and Andy Warhol. His latest book of prose is My 1980s & Other Essays (FSG, 2013); his latest book of poetry is Blue Stranger with Mosaic Background (Turtle Point, 2012). His first solo exhibition of paintings took place at White Columns gallery in New York, in Fall 2012. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center.
THE HOME SCHOOL 