Artwork © Ira Joel Haber

 

Lacan Encounters a Vanity Mirror

O’, enormous latticework of lies-
Sing to me with dry lips,
And charming slips, and low sighs,
of Bethlehem and
Sodom and Gomorrah,
All that
              Free jazz-
                               y
mythology,
Flinging psychic boundaries
Through my skull,
Separate my id and ego,

Like fat and gristle,
The butcher’s low whistle
Reminds you of a tune from long ago-

Something subliminal,
Impressed with a minimal
Effort into that
Context you call a soul,
So fat and droll
With fulsome personhood that it spills over from its stanza and fucks up
          the whole rhythm of
what had been a pretty harmonious piece so far.

Traipse on down
To some bar at the end of town,
Wrap your lip around the ambrosial oblivion
Of forgetting the world you’re living in-
Where was I?
Oh yes, it’s not hard to guess-
You’re always where you are, in confusion.

To an ape, this sea of definition,
The illusion
Of is and isn’ts,
The stitches in the tapestry of the clandestine
Realm of the conceptual,
Is really relatively navigable-
The simian disposition
Is not so agonizing- when there’s bugs to eat.

It’s only with man’s sophistry
That things get all confused,
By too many dead voices all at once your muse,
Vying to rule the thoughts in your head-
Ancient ideas
     pin-
             balling
down
               the
centuries
                  To push you in a certain direction-
To hold your attention,

To fill you with the conviction,
That you are what you are,
And not what you’re not.

Foolishness.

For awhile,
You were a perfect mechanism
Of pure potential, an impenetrable
Egg, but once you pecked
Your pecker through that shell
And emerged bedecked in a turgid swell

Of palely translucent observable phenomena-
It was already over,
No need for the ball to drop
Let alone the heart to stop.
You were dead on arrival.

Shimmey illogically and jive
An ellipsoid trajectory,
Which actually
Was the only option the whole time-

Cut the line-      up
                  -jam         the works.
That’s not how it’s supposed to go!
That’s how you know
Something’s true-
Because in a dream everything makes sense,
It all feels intentional, but in life you’re

Sacrificed nonsensically,
To nothing and no one.
Like the Heaven
Promised you by the old man of the mountain,
The path of righteousness
Is just narcoleptic largess,
A lifestyle of casual conquest-
We all, wretched sinners, live in Heaven now.

The Old Man of the mountain
Baptized you in a fountain
Befouled with blood, and said
“Nothing is true,” and you believed him-
The pure water turning opaque, and dunn.

There’s no God left alive to demand a son
Or an ox or a virgin of you, enthusiastically
Urging you to right a wrong
When the whole world’s

Out            Joint.
          Of

You shout out your point,
But no one’s available for comment,
They’re all tied up- tongue tied and tired,
They’ve no reason or desire to lament
The paltry poetry of your misery.

The suffering to which you are heir
Is a surging guilt which only mounts
Ever higher on the sweltering air
For the fact that you’re alive.

There’s no tragedy left for you, I’m afraid.
The suffering you’ll endure is purely man-made,
And you affecting Klytemnestra
Waiting in line at the DMV does not drive
Home any point. You’re just

Sacrificing yourself at the altar of yourself,
Like the rest of us.
As a citizen of global democracy,
It’s your absolute sworn duty
To be mildly dissatisfied
About the evil in yourself.

O’ enormous latticework through which
The rays of God are divided
And cast different shadows on
Us
    All
         Separately.

Let me not peak through your
Mechanical interiors,
Multifaceted like the diamonds
You make us all pretend are rare.

Watch this peripatetic,
Onomatopoeic,
Step-two-step
Glib little
Sound iconic
Hop/jump/skip through
Your infinite corridors.

Where the fuck am I?

Trapped in
Too-tight
Scansion,
Spondees
Of overly voluble outrage that constrict as they spool outward over
          genealogies of
Who knows what.

Big words count for so little
With people who know what they mean

 

Siah Berlatsky: “I’m a trans-femme poet and award-winning playwright based in Chicago. In my poetry, I explore the relatedness of sound and meaning through wordplay, entendre, and rhyme. I enjoy developing broad ideas which flow and shift amongst metaphor and allusion, to create pieces which investigate truth, reality, and ideology.”

Ira Joel Haber was born and lives in Brooklyn. He is a sculptor, painter, writer, book dealer, photographer and teacher. His work has been seen in numerous group shows both in the USA and Europe and he has had nine one man shows including several retrospectives of his sculpture. His work is in the collections of The Whitney Museum Of American Art, New York University, The Guggenheim Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum,The Albright-Knox Art Gallery & The Allen Memorial Art Museum. Since 2006 His paintings, drawings, photographs and collages have been published in over 300 online and print magazines. He has received three National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two Creative Artists Public Service Grant (CAPS) two Pollock-Krasner grants, two Adolph Gottlieb Foundation grants and, in 2010, he received a grant from Artists’ Fellowship Inc. in 2017 & 2018 he received the Brooklyn Arts Council SU-CASA artist-in-residence grant.