the march goes on

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DEATHMARCH POETRY
oakland, ca
angela simione,  january 2015


this image and this text gains potency in these times of brutality.  the imperative to keep making this work, to keep making these marks, to always have a big black marker at the ready, grows and grows.


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nails

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this is a poem.






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one slow stitch at a time...

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untitled (i want to hold your face in my hands)
filet crochet curtain
angela simione, 2014




i need a much taller window.  :)

the full text reads: i want to hold your face in my hands but you go on backing away away away.  the text is from a poem i wrote over a year ago that will probably never see the light of day, save for this excerpt.  and i like that...  the secrecy of it...  which is very much what this work is about. i like the idea of hanging my secrets in the window, allowing the light of day to use the twists and turns of my private thoughts (and the hook that has given them shape) to make shadows sigh and heave on the adjacent wall.  i like the tease of it.

this piece taught me a lot.  it's still teaching me.  not merely about the method of production and where i failed and where i succeeded in using it, but also how i want to use light and shadow as materials themselves...  transparency...  absence and presence.  in this regard, this method is very much like drawing.  the emptiness of the page is just as important as the mark.  it's poetry.  the things that aren't said add weight to what is.

it's hung up in the window of my bed and i stare at it for a little while every day.  i finished it over a week ago and i'm still so bowled over by it.  it's a new "first step".


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2am

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DEATHMARCH POETRY
58th street, oakland CA
June 23rd, 2014
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you

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there's some place in me,
untapped,
that i thought only i could get to

but i go searching for your picture
in the middle of the night...

i want to be wrong.



it's not enough to lay at your side.
it's not enough
to be the patient girl
who stops talking when your business line rings.
it's not enough anymore
to be your weekend fun.
 
when you spoke of god
with your cock in me
i wanted so badly
to be a believer again.

how many beautiful choruses i would sing
if you'd leaf through the tears in my heart
like a hymnal

as eagerly as you did my genitals.



i want you to know me and not look away.




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I WANT TO BE HOME FOR THE WORST PARTS OF YOU

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this is a horrible picture of this piece.  this isn't even how i think this piece should be displayed.  it's simply that i want to live with it for awhile.  i want this net of poetry falling all around me, encircling my bed, greeting me in the half-light of early morning when the brightness of the day first spills in through my window:  I WANT TO BE HOME FOR THE WORST PARTS OF YOU -  my masochism sunning itself in the twists of black yarn, stretching its limps in the slow patience of each stitch, as pleased and self-satisfied as a cat.

these games of exposure are sticky.  how much of this ends up being Persona?  how much of myself am i actually exposing?  how much do i want to expose?

the level of redaction i employ when culling phrases from my diary is steep.  i look for poetic turns of phrase, a nod toward a particular shadow of self.  i tell the truth but not the whole truth.  these sentiments are divorced from their original context.  entire paragraphs and pages that flesh out the original meaning and situate the phrase in a more complete environment and atmosphere have been obliterated.  one sentence remains.  a fragment.  and that fragment is let to sparkle in the rays of sun that come filtering through the broken blinds above my bed. 


a tease.

a hint.

a half-truth?


lying by omission?


my banners wave, endlessly endlessly, in the soft light of fantasy and desire.  in just such a light, it is easy to fashion whatever truth one wants, whatever truth one needs.  i can be whatever you need me to be.  my desire, a chime that beckons yours.  




a spider's web.


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under the overpass

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deathmarch poetry
oakland CA
angela simione, 2014

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1am in oakland, california

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DEATHMARCH POETRY
angela simione
january 26th, 2014

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born to die

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over and over and over


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ugly

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ugly little angela ugly little angela crawling like an angel so wholesome so hopeful so hopeful my horrible shapes somehow manage to elude you your beautiful wide eyes somehow stumble into a diamond of blindness that damn bright blue of heaven spilling over the eager ugly inches of my deformed form every inch of me more horrible and polluted than the inch before each lick more bitter than the one before slap my face slap my face i'll beg you to slap me until the ugliness falls away leave me red and wanton but without want without that atrocious longing for beauty wipe me clean of all the lessons i was fed slap the adjectives out of my mouth yank my head back spit on me scream at me and for one moment i'll know at least one other human being sees me.

all i want is for one other person to know me.

know the worst of me and don't turn away

all the things i cry about in the dark, no mother at the end of the hall to come running
to interupt the nightmare, smooth my hair back and kiss my forehead, no angel crawling at the foot of my bed

i'm the angel
the spectacle
crawling, open mouthed
begging, blue eyes open as bruised legs

ignore the gleaming smile that greets you
ignore the image
the way i walk so tall
red lips and long hair
high heels and dressed in black
"that's a bad bitch"
ignore it all
even if i am that girl
i want you to see me stripped completely down
see me beg you like a prideless dog
and choose to stay til noon anyway


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i can say anything here.  i don't give a fuck who loves me if you don't.  did you hear that?  i said i don't give a fuck who loves me if you don't...  and all i can do is hope that this feeling will pass.




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what aftermath?

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wash my whites.

take my pill.

"don't forget your shirt"


hungry to reminisce
my bad deeds
the things i've done that would make my mama hate me
determined to earn it
she hated me for no reason
never once made it a secret thing.



i hold my breath
i don't want your death around me
i'm familiar enough

but put your hand around my throat

i want to feel a real fear for once
it gets tiring
being afraid of nothing.


keeping busy

chasing all the ugly names.

some type of hurt that is honest and sure.

some type of hurt i can't explain.


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DEATHMARCH

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never forget your big black marker at home. 

the way you need to be loved

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16th street, san francisco CA

angela simione

THE WAY YOU NEED TO BE LOVED

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Telegraph Ave @ 49th
Oakland, CA



sometimes a poem only needs one line.

then suddenly, a moment. then suddenly, a means.

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Because it's Oakland and because I'm feeling a bit poetic and because I just so happened to stumble across an abandoned mattress when I just so happened to have a magnum Sharpie in my bag. Because the world needs more words. Because the world needs more poetry. Because the world needs bravery. Because the world could benefit from the influence of a few more brave, poetic girls. Anddddd because I've been drinking tequila. ;)

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once able

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it is beautiful to be able to sit naked on a sunday night with a cocktail and a favorite book.  i haven't read poetry in so long it seems.  it is a life-blood that returns to me.  i flipped open Ariana Reines's THE COW and read the first poem that my eyes happened to find.  of course, it is the perfect fit:

 

that last line, the refrain, is such a brutal chime.  an ache that rings through me in a language i understand...  a need i understand.

to be fully oneself.  to be honest.  to be unafraid of the ugly.  to be unafraid of becoming ugly.  to be afraid but to move forward anyway.  to be lost and uncertain and choose to see it as Freedom.  to be able to create a well of courage and move, finally, like a king.

it has been a week of sleeping on ice packs and trying my hardest not to let negativity take hold.  finally, this afternoon i was able to pace slowly back and forth down my hallway without appearing feeble and deformed.  my disk in finally slipping back in to place.  i haven't taken pain meds in days and am finally on the mend.  and i promise you, recovery cannot come speedily enough.  cabin fever is a motherfucker.  i loathe laying around in general and this week of being confined to bed nearly made me cry.  i love solitude but only after exercising my love for being out in the world, in the surge and throng, in the heat of work and play and exploration.  even boredom is better outdoors than when locked away in the room at the back of the house.  it has been total agony in more ways than one. it's one thing to lay around out of sheer laziness or exhaustion; it's an entirely different thing to be confined to bed due to such severe physical pain.  the pain itself makes one depressed.  the fact that it seems unending.  the fact that one can look back over the course of a week and still not be healed.  the fact that one must sit and deal with the fact of the fragility of their own body...  how easily it can be broken...  how easily it can become a cage.  

still, there is always a value.  i've made a pile of yarn bombs to drop the second i can get out of the house and resume my artistic adventures.  i long for the wide open expanse of dark city streets in the middle of the night.  i long for the glow of street lamps and the headlights of cars cruising slowly by.  it has been such a practice of patience and endurance to withstand this stillness, this degree of physical inability.  it breeds compassion, that's for sure, as well as providing one with the somewhat uncomfortable opportunity to perform a deeper self-investigation than one might have undertaken otherwise.  i haven't been able to run my fears away or burn my sadness down with work and excersize.  i've been forced to sit here with them.  i've been forced to sit and look at my ghosts.  i've had no choice but to recognize when my feelings were dramatic and unwarranted, based purely in the pain of my situation, and when they were a normal, natural outcropping of a hurtful event.  i have filled so many pages in my diary and am coming face to face with the core of my needs, the remainder of my naivety, the necessity to emerge from this site of safe repose (once able) and rush again toward the life that is waiting for me in the ecstatic hustle of art.  i am newly aware of a bevy of mistakes i've made and i aim to repeat not a one.

i think of Simone Weil.  i try to obey her.  i try to not struggle against my suffering but to endure it passively, to let in polish me, to allow it to create a new beauty within me.  it is a hard task.  an exercise in endurance and  the ability to tolerate anguish without becoming bitter.  

i need to discover a new definition of the word LOVE. 

i need to make room for the creation of a new face for GOD.

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DEATHMARCH (write your heart out)

Mein Gesicht an dem Kissen

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some sort of unknowable pull.
some sort of intoxicated desire.
some sort of gross need.

some sort of unnameable itch.
some sort of gasping breath.
some sort of gaping mouth.
some sort of begging bitch. 

what fire?
what spit?
what fuel
burning across this livid skin, this apologetic pink?

what name?
what prayer?
what immoral ache?

see me
as if eyes had never found my face.
see me as if i were new.

what of all this anxiety and demand?
shut your mouth until it's time to kiss.


your face in my telephone.
your torso rising in my bereft and lonely dreams.


some sort of answer.
some sort of opiate.
some sort of comfort.

some sort of eager whisper across the knees.
some sort of fever.
some sort of austere hope.
some sort of home.

what fire.  what spit.  what fuel.

your accent tonguing the tips of my syllables,
polishing my silent cowboy edges.
in your mouth,

my name
my history
my fearful disbelief
never had it so good.



some sort of mirror.

some sort of reckoning.


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last night while walking home from the train i left some poetry on the street

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each night, i die
text on abandonned mattress in Oakland, CA
angela simione, 2012

something to keep you warm while i'm gone...

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a poem and a song:



keep your guard up, little one.  the fire is here.  it's already at the foot of the bed.  keep your eyes opened wide, little one, and be ready to jump. be ready to run. be ready to lie to their immaculate faces in response to the damage they have done.  Truth has the benefit of being historically endorsed, he tells me, but maybe if we look close enough we will see there are also positive attributes and outcomes from the telling of lies. then he held me tightly to him in the white bed.  the fire was at my feet.  he said LOOK AT ME.  he remembered then something i'd said the night before about wanting to have my face slapped and up went his hand.  keep your guard up, little one, you've already taught him now how to love you.  keep your guard up, little one, you've told on yourself.  your secrets are hanging half-way out.  put your tongue back in his mouth, whatever it takes to keep you from talking, whatever it takes to keep you from confessing.  confession is the alter of love.  keep at a safe distance.  that isn't what we've come here for.  back up.   watch him, if you will, swell inch by massive inch and don't let go of the beauty of this impressive view.  high and hard, little one, keep your guard up. keep your eyes opened wide.  keep your tongue out.  don't blink and don't explain a fucking thing.