(This work is an extract from a longer poem of the same name.)

This is a site for production. This is a site for presentation. 

What is to be produced? What is to be presented? 

This is a site for the production and presentation of a particular kind of subject. 

A subject marked by its pursuit of liberty, by individualism and collectivity, competition and cooperation. By the sophistication of its speech. 

This is what we do with our comfort. 

This is what we do with our plenty. 

You are watching me, and I begin to watch. Rather than using the gift, I reflect upon it. Cobwebs.² Among the cobwebs, there, gathering in the corner of the doorway, a form persists, a tool, a silence, towards cleaving, carving, separating us from one another politically, aesthetically, socially, so that we may create a demand for these things we make, that appear here, that we do not yet have a name for.

Minds are bending to the shape of this walking stick. 

This is a violence that can be overcome. 

What stick or stone is at hand to jam this twentyfourhour self-improvement, self-understanding, self-actualisation and total education? ³

Imagined public space 

imagined public law 

and in the air 

experience and habit float… 

experience, he says, is the way through danger.⁴

I wait for Him to come 

And I am nothing outside of this. 

While waiting, I swim, 

stalk the interior. 

One way to move through the world among many. 

I surround you in my way of moving, my becoming – 

monotone address, edge and end 

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 minutes 

2 

Two words – 

equality and equivalence 

these are frequencies in the expression 

of chronic fragmentation and chronic totality. 

I didn’t want to individuate 

and now I am nothing 

but a self-interrupting whole,⁵

a memory full of holes 

haunted by the unpolitical. 

Someone said that this is where our obsession with voice capital V comes from. And that listening instead, is grounded in our experience of the sacred. It is our first speech act. The sacred has to do with the most intimate and profound identity of the community as a whole. It leaves its traces in human hieroglyphs.⁶ 

It has also been said that humans have a weak and vulnerable faculty to express themselves politically, that it is easy to destroy and difficult to cultivate and can disappear quite easily in history….our collective personality trembles in search of it.⁷ 

We have been listening for a kind of writing, 

searching human inscription all life long. 

¹ Linguistic and musical device. Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe

² Lewis Hyde 

³ Fred Moten, Michel Foucault 

⁴ Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe 

⁵ Eric Santner 

⁶ Davide Tarizzo

⁷ Antonia Grunenberg