TOUCH ME

JOSEPH COOPER

BlazeVOX [books]
Buffalo, New York

Touch Me by Joseph Cooper Copyright 2009 Published by BlazeVOX [books] All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without the publishers written permission, except for brief quotations in reviews. Printed in the United States of America Book design by Geoffrey Gatza

First Edition ISBN: 9781935402190 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009920865 BlazeVOX [books] 14 Tremaine Ave Kenmore, NY 14217 Editor@blazevox.org

publisher of weird little books

BlazeVOX [ books ]
blazevox.org
2 4 6 8 0 9 7 5 3 1

To My Family, Friends, and the Goons

As when death infects life, when poetry infects fiction, identity, system, order is disturbed. The text stretches out before us, spasming and bleeding. Dodie Bellamy, Academonia It appears that there is a certain point in the mind wherefrom life and death, reality and imaginary, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable cease to be perceived in the contradictory way. Andre Breton, The Second Manifesto A way to describe my body. I didnt know where I was going. The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane. Bhanu Kapil, A Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

TOUCH ME

GAMEPLAY Simon was launched in 1978 at Studio 54 in New York City, becoming a pop culture phenomenon in the 1980s. An electronic game distributed by Milton Bradley, its slogan was: Simons a computer, Simon has a brain, you either do what Simon says or else you go down the drain. The game consists of four large buttons divided into colors red, blue, green and yellow, each designed with a harmonic tone: A (red, upper right); A (green, upper left, an octave higher than the upper right); D (blue, lower right, a perfect fourth higher than the upper right); G (yellow, lower left, a perfect fourth higher than the lower right). The buttons are lighted in sequence, playing a tone for each; the player must press the buttons in the same sequence. It begins with a single button chosen randomly, and adds another randomly-chosen button to the end of the sequence each time the player follows it successfully. Gameplay ends when the player makes a mistake or when the player wins (by matching the pattern for a predetermined number of tones). The game has three variations, set by a switch on the front of the case, with a second switch setting one of four difficulty levels (Wikipedia.com).

GAME 1: SIMON SAYS The player simply follows along as described above with four difficulty levels requiring the player to match a sequence of 8, 14, 20, or 31 tones.

RED Threatened. Narrative miscarried. Thighs agitated debate. Shutters

Carcass architecture arrests you incumbent nude.

thrust apart discharge. Drip grapefruit down her pubic bone. Veins strained as chipped paint. Stirrup strapped wrapped in hospital gown doused in host spittle. innards. Nurtured immerse. Thread extends from her to end. Residue depressed under futile

GREEN Elle is dislocated between pre-life and protest. She imagines her belly translucent, a tiny albatross circling her glaciered fallopian tubes. Her biological monitor statically garblesgaga futurism pales the penumbra. Expose corrosion. Quarantined breach broken water streaks imperceptible ink. Freezing moment as rain strikes windowsill. Washbasin by the door, heeding. She is memory you. Her long neck craned under a curl of hair stealing punctuation from her cap. tongue. Language is compensation for a Dialogical glance. Lips perspire kiss. Drenched and misshapen, mouth my Face pressed against a mirror dissolves. prosthetic threatens idyllic skin. Is there not some solution, her mouth dreaming saliva? Some eroticized attempt at incensing hemorrhage. Sensual, acrid press her bowels, resisting utterance. colonial script. Elle is kinesthetic disruption of a wound. Quiet tremors the cusp. Her riddled division of praying fingers, a netting of speech and behavior on a borderline subject. Face strained wayward. Exchange elaborate stories through visible house walls. Lovers mimic games of executed travelers. Operations vie methodical lines. Hospital bed creaks inside the curtain. Sheets smell elderly under the transference of phobia. Disparate breath savors expiration. Elle and Simon prop tin cans against the wall. Dialogue cuts, listens. Pulse quickens. Her first memory is delicate

There is that in love, discontinuity. An interruption mimicking memory made of water and metal. Tie stretched around the collar, a dismissal. Wrenched vesicle stifled. Attempt another procedure. Haunt fragmented bodies of unappealing ghosts. The monster I love, her Novocain veridical. Transplant my machine voice into echoes. Mouths rebounding discharge. Tongue bored with menstrual blood. Brave a lighthouse sentiment, a lustrous buoy. Telephone rings and she answers.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL 1 Dear Player, The last time we played you were heaving up sonnets. Thick sentimental meter covered in textual goo. Your throat a negative mechanism and time again, measures. identity. "Laugh you crazy bitch in the mirror," the spliced tape whipping. Short circuited, she pretends to walk down the aisle tonguing a chocolate frosted spoon. My nonreproductive decision-making cut her gaze to gush whispers. My stomach pangs have returned. Sympathy pains. Hold, own your threat. Rarely does Elle accept symbolism over authority. Make a keyhole of your lips. This is what she always wanted. She wanted to begin. Teabags Despise her pubic hair. dried onto our windowsill. Gain Artifacts of my beloved fraction defaced. unspoken function over diabolical results. rummaging through her foul delicates. discoloration, stale fumes playing games. untranslatable. Rank and stale lips privilege intermediary. Subject castration wears a rubber mask. Let me suck you over a condom. Pants cuff thighs in muff lunge. Eye sockets mold delight; lingerie soaked under thrust of menstrual fiction. Suffer unattractive bones. Begin breathing. I am guilty of Elle is crumbling Terrible secrets are mistaken for postcards. Elles harebrained staging of a miscarriage demands misplaced You woke up at four a.m. on the verge of panic.

Erotica chewed into mouth.

I breathe expulsed

Between two powers the recourse of anal eroticism doubts castration, the caginess of anthropologists. I only wanted to be the center of attention. conditions. Once upon a deconstructive surgery the proper body terrorized virtue. Insist on this missionary form. Stick your finger in my ass. Fetal delegates crave harmonic rhythm. She used to suck me off and push my hands away when instead I tried to fuck her. A loathing ritual converges, a sense of guilt slips elliptic. Invert a love affair. Each speaking being has corporeal altercations with climax. Falstaff smeared clitoral spasms. Queen Elizabeth, Bernadette Mayer, (that is sexual life). Rhymes sound church bell resuscitation. Cheek-flats honeymoon her lower body. Strung between paranoia and poison, sustenance feeds on organized repetition. Body of nails begins a mother-speaking being. Maternal body is nourishing, murderous, and fascinating. Serrated errantly her blouse stitched hormonal derangement. Chiropractic embraces. Explain once again your genitals hemorrhaging with paternal function. Intimately nocturnal struggling between the bodies of two women is the incentive toward defilement. Jalapeo thumbprint smothered cock lips. Light my cock ablaze and inject it into eyeball. Umbilical cord constricts wrists. Cannibalistic libido pulverizes fantasy. Labia glisten. Her dress around her waist preyed obliqueness of pre-memory. Learn her birthmark. Elle swallows until there is nothing left: Lead into cage. an epileptics reentry. Argue and persuade. Immediately relate to the unclean thing. Appearance is similar behavior pulled by gravity. Neither tears nor sperm are

Differentiate between sophisticated restraints and decaying

symbols. Unavoidably diluted, I will have my complimentary altruist. Elles hands curled around a chalk-drawn wastebasket wait for pyrotechnic epistolary. Nips and hisses speckle back an epileptic audition. Suture this languagescape. Clean amplified mystery and self-destruct. Within this architecture we are eroding into spatial intimacy of other, an eager mouth, a body-bound thing. The designated punch line complains of violent spasms. Think of my lovers face covered in marginal comments. Operate on a subordinate function pulling it fragmentarily into a nearby sentence. Despite apparent chaos you are alien to original purpose. Sincerely, Simon

BLUE When I was a child I traced my left hand on beige construction paper with a red colored pencil. below pinky and drew upward. mind beginning to fray. The sharpened grains [Arouse and beckon delightfully feathered my pensive skin. I began at my palm, just surrounding flesh]. [I miss your bones]. Red resembles the I imagined my grandfathers hand shaking my own, a steel crane clamping a soft-shelled snail. BATTERY LOW: Mrs. Keyhoe. The name alone imprisons small children in damp sheds before they dig backyard graves. Grade one she made an example [unclean thing I will receive you] of Simons American flag coloring project, illustrating to the class the importance of always staying inside the lines. The red stain against his skin remembered him. Simons flesh pinked from red grains. Appetites swollen pulse. Blood pains when rushing back into veins. But there is intimacy in this touch. Strike a cryptic visage. Pretend his hand is anothers. Metaphysical transmutation; the body encased itself. A fragile container borders collapse. Brain claims liaison. Even as a child he was familiar. Thumbs slip with sweat. Fingernails anticipate tepid feast. Apprehensively tremble remembering a film. An Asian man

dressed in black, fingers spread widely, severed his index finger as a demonstration of allegiance and honor. Human brain is digital floating signifiers of natural language. Upon reaching his wrist Simon became momentarily bewildered questioning how to trace it without losing position. He imagined himself

prosthetic and guided red across his arm. Slight prickles snipped then slipped.

DIFFICULTY LEVEL 1 Dear Player, Literary engravings decorate limits of opinion. Receive instructions stimulating discrete space. The abject referent is in discourse with dreams. Adorn yourself clean and proper. Elle is pressed face down into sweet wet hay. Build exclusively for delight. With pursed lips she positioned herself, a curvaceous doorway suggestively selling modernism. In turn for which boundaries become social contract. Tickets for Anselm Hollo: Private Eye1, are now available in the quad. "But what about this week's episode of, "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" Enunciate static. Interrupted. Reject preconceived meanings. Suffer when new information has been introduced. Elle collects torso coat hangers, various sized hosiery forms for socks and stockings and flesh tone vertical hand stands (fingers up) for gloves. "We never talk about me anymore." Past-tense form never has a helping verb. Trap in a room undressing for a drunken metonymy. Oral history still has its original tags. Im tired of being an incomplete thought. Are you watching yourself yelling at me in the mirror? Reflect on human activities that precede language. Rare flashes before horror. Remember to breathe, and
1

Andrew Peterson, Anselm Hollo: Private Eye, 2007.

then reappear. Harmonize pathos and bile aestheticizing empty forms. Say something Elle. Say disconnection is an overtly Point out brutal separation. Note something of defilement. nervous restoration. Pulverize her labia into appealing ghosts. Sincerely, Simon

GREEN Swiftly wake from cannibalistic dream head between stained sheets. Fabric strands gasp and apparition. Perimeters of nosocomial thought volume everything that has happened. Between the shapes of our interrupted bodies is the consequence of skin. Elle straddles the corner of the bed2 examining her Food baby, she calls it. Then she breasts in the mirror. She pushes her stomach forward coddling an imaginary offspring. pressed a nipple downward and plucked an ingrown hair. Emigrate abdomen, invented living. I am not writing of myself as a vegan entre. Precede umbilicus. This is where conception resembles artifice. Provisional membrane injured thread. Flush of ink and patterned sentiment. Formula is chemical process of integration. The feeling in my forehead burns subliminally. The borderline patient is laborious, barricaded and untouchable.

Hold and hide. When Elle confiscated his pornography stash she left a torn page of a half-nude. Her eyes focused beyond the perimeter of reach. Lips pressed in discomfort. Yet more prominent is the illustration on its backside, a woman in bed fucking a plunger, her husbands hairline split, clutching his trousers with a hard-on the size of a briefcase.
2