"The Part of Me That's O" by Tory Dent

The Part of Me That's O


What assembles a locus for understanding cracks at the foundation,
a fountainhead of a troll's facade, against which all means of identification
flee, Haitians from their homeland, or become troll-like in appearance
as I regard my face distort accordingly, my pink hair, a shock of radioactivity,
my flattened nose desensitized to olfactory tethering, my red eyes like a rat's,
panicked and immoral.  But inside the werewolf I am the same, though smaller,
diminishing inside the bell jar of this werewolf body.
I experience the tumult of my isolation like a kicking fetus
who accelerates its growth on a trajectory of delineation,
becomes more, not less, ambiguous in gender, its limbs more
a blur of purely molecular congruency than the aestheticized flesh,
than the Giorgione cameo that wavers in lakeside twilight,
profane by virtue of what it lacks in profanity,
a purity superimposed upon a purity like a testudo
forming a bulletproof sky which ultimately fails to protect,
as art fails, to provide shelter from the mammal in us:
from the carnivorous, the banal, the rupturous, the pitiful.
There will be no birthing, but a series of swallowings
until gaunt from longing I will have settled into a state of impoverishment
normalized finally by some property of physics that adapts
the disassociated to the hemisphere: like E. coli in water, I will live.
My erotic impulses curtailed so many times that in ringlets they will lie
like sheaved hair, as fertilizer fulfilling its wishes
by fulfilling the wishes of others
for which I will not receive pleasure
for which I will not be responsible
for which I will always be rendered impotent by this surveillant privilege.


Source of the text - Tory Dent, Black Milk: Poems.  Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY, Sheep Meadow Press, 2005, p. 33.

TJB: This chant uses long phrases, fifty-cent words & tight cinematic images to utter a cry of life coming from the person within a failing body.