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.