Uncharted Multiplicity

"A feminine text cannot fail to be more than subversive. It is volcanic; as it is written it brings about an upheaval of the old property crust, carrier of masculine investments; there’s no other way. There’s no room for her if she’s not a he. If she’s a her-she, it’s in order to smash everything, to shatter the framework of institutions, to blow up the law, to break up the truth with laughter.

For once she blazes her trail in the symbolic, she cannot fail to make of it the chaosmos of the personal--in her pronouns, her nous, and her clique of referents.... On the one hand she has constituted herself necessarily as that person capable of losing a part of herself without losing her integrity. But secretly, silently, deep down inside, she grows and multiples, for, on the other hand, she knows far more about living and the relation between the economy of the drives and the management of the ego than any man." --Helene Cixous, The Laugh of the Medusa (1975)

Uncharted Multiplicity

lost
lost like Atlantis
not to be found on any map
never existed
never will
yet still deserving of a name

I am writing
forming this moment
like a vase shapes water
but vases are often illusions
so this dissolves

a spilling moment
sent by my touch
cascading
down to you
you read
posses this moment
till it passes

the self is indefinable
yet still I seek to define
myself
my style
my future

I am afraid to name it
even whisper or jest
lest this be interpreted
as circular angst
superfluous drama
poetic feminine fluff
and judged

written off

as female
and nothing more
it has happened before

but maybe
maybe this

this moment

is important
so what?
it doesn’t conform
to that ancient map?

they tremble in fear
of uncharted territory

here there be dragons

clinging to old traditions
like toilet tissue
on the heel of a shoe
an ugly worn shoe

"Surely without this
rigorous,
analytical,
methodical,
precision,
we’d all be lost!"

but without this
personal
poetic
mystery
how would you know where you want to go?

don’t think for a minute
that being creative
one cannot be analytical

woman
is multiple
is complex

for example
take me
I can

cook a meal
shine my sink
observe nature
analyze statistics
make any hat look good
compose a poem
solve an equation
earn an income
sew a costume
learn a lesson
hypothesize
be a lover
a teacher
a mother
a prophet
a bitch
while I
smile
and cry
and above this chaos
even fly

all at once

because
to be a woman
or just being
is ubiquity

some poems are riddles
requiring careful construction
thanks to all of those
who unknowingly helped
to build this one:
to Jenny for giving me Cixous
to Marla for teaching me to fly
to Randall for telling it like it is
to Erica for finding Lynzee Strauss
to Stelios for handing me Les Sabines
to Ms. Piggy for singing with pride:

and most of all
I thank you, reader
for your patience in my absence

(yes, if you are curious, it really did take me two weeks to create this poem/art/enigmatic essay)