IAN U LOCKABY 




Contact and Piss Odes/An Organized Whole

                         “All art in this sense an unconscious self-betrayal, but it is not
                          necessarily an awareness of the self betrayed…”


                                    -Herbert Read








CONTACT EPISODE, first session



Therapeutically, one-with and without me

Morning scum inside a telephone pole

Under-hooked by phonic

Secretions, none sundered tonically but

Lotteries of gotten rot, not laundered not

Another way of angering the art like

Ought on the wall of the therapist




                  [Note, on the wall, the piss of some artist
                  taken out by the rest of the décor—
                  a fake plant bobs softly in the waiting]








CONTACT EPISODE, second session



Inside a brick a simple brake

Windows, ordering every wind

Like winding up is an angering in

After a warding off, a wavering in

Muscular answers which’ll atrophy

Only afterwards, ev’r amply and

Rot in the wail of the therapist




                  [room, in the bathroom, for piss bouncing
                  off the porcelain to make your ankle, wonder what
                  what means outside of you, and in its return]








CONTACT EPISODE, third session



“Best organs ever” tag or gaining on

Yourself in a bathroom stalling out

A telephone number aging

Latches lording and fingering in

Wait for the eyes to pass

The endless nature of endings is

Not in the wares of the therapist




                  [to reach you, contact even, piss sprinkling
                  over episodes that shape you, what is
                  owed you—resolved within to ask again]








CONTACT EPISODE, fourth session



Low of proximity, low in whole

Aggravating in an audible angst

Inside the wholes in your head

Withering with the weather’s

Magic eyes crossed against

The ability to find shapes but still

Sought in the cauls of the therapist




                  [inside these sessions, where you try
                  to cultivate awareness of betrayal— pissed
                  off with the possible and necessary organs of]








CONTACT EPISODE, fifth session



The piss is a projection, baby, tossed out with

Its bathwater reality, such shattered hydrations

Of the self being everything in

Between the episodes

Not inevitably non-contactful

But inevitably pissed, to intuit that

What one knows of oneself is one self




                  [and the fake plant bobs in the sweltering piss
                  of the semi-automatic atmosphere, auto, er,
                  gonomic, soil of the self, auto-soiling swell]


____

Ian U Lockaby is the author of the forthcoming chapbooks: “A Seam of Electricity” from Ghost Proposal and "Defensible Space/if a crow—”  from Omnidawn. His translation of “Gardens/Jardines” by Chilean poet Carlos Cociña, was published by Cardboard House Press in 2021. He lives in New Orleans and edits the online journal mercury firs.