So this book, Lyric Sexology, it's composed of,
I suppose, folios based on archives of representations
of sex, whatever sex is.
It's beyond.
It's in between.
It's limits.
It's delimiting.
It's race.
It's construction of gender.
It's class dimensions.
It's pathologies.
It's eugenic logics.
It's biography of deviance.
It's autobiographies of people who would rather
not be deviant, polemics by feminists who had good cause,
still do, queers theorizing, trans people
noticing themselves disappearing in various ways
within the theorizing, the polemics.
And of course, we enact our own exclusions here, there,
and everywhere.
So this poem is from the "Anthropologica" section.
And I suppose it's about monolingualism and slavery.
"Tiresias as Cuir on the Run.
Dog, the time you take home, the time
you take away from home, the insistence, the instance
worried out with your thick tongue
stink because of what you found on the ground
and put in your gut, hairy as in beset or beast,
to beast on their terms, their territory, gut knotted,
pulled, entwined to an internal clock, drape over the occasion,
sleep on the mat at the metre's foot.
Cuir poetics or not, monolingual,
but your poets are.
Queer, cuir, cure, cure misery, not confined
to the nation state but spread by road trip hash tragic opera.
Idle vials can be convincingly propped
to suit the man you want.
To be issued forward.
Quote, "the food that always remains," end quote.
Esteemed.
Cuir milieu you want to tableau.
An apology for discovery, accident.
Scales already weighted, reviews in stone, long-buried time.
Mainstreaming long-buried time, root as per root,
ocean as per root, sleep as per root.
On the couch, at the urinal, a woman,
a race with a use value for the revolution, for the dead,
for women like me without documents.
When the ocean is rooted, one criticizes, less guilty.
Parting documentaries as love letters, cursive, sans serif.
Queer poetics root for, if not abstinence,
then the mainstreaming of prophecy
and the dispute of Tiresias.
Part ocean, part dog, nine parts of the nation state,
a wight kills for pleasure and gold and land and slaves.
Tiresias was a wight and not a wight,
a queer speech trafficking like vector surveillance,
vile night unending.
The simplest equations are subtraction.
A dog never loses its savor.
Arab slavers.
Fawn smear from the mouth, eye sockets.
Tell me about your history, the one to come.