UNDERGLAZY

oki sogumi

I.
LIVING
ANYMORE
NOT YET

on living anymore

part I: suicide
is suicide the staking out of autonomy or is it murder by slow poisoning (patriarchy, capitalism,
prison, etc take your pick)?
is suicide the ever-resistant final fuck you to that slow poisoning?
is suicide the best star, the prettiest girl, the tightest beat we ever danced to?
can i literally kill the cop in my head, burn away civilizations noose?
if one takes down ones enemies with them to hell, does one have to also drag those bodies down
a river like a horse on fire?
i went to court to deny my suicide, my perpetuation of suicide, i refused to answer their
questions which
they took to be a sign of suicide

part II: housing

they couldnt find a place to lay their head
there were more than 80,000 empty beds in the city
there were people forcefully removed from their apartments so they could be renovated
families died from carbon monoxide poisoning; they were burning their belonging in the middle
of the
room; they were found huddled together
red circles around the Quartier Karl Marx
they killed the landlord then they lit the house on fire and swam into the middle of the heat
prospectors gathered around the charred foundation
were busy capturing the sun, they said, opportunities arent forever
you sleep, you die, they said, thats the business

part III: debt

the story of my generation was the story of debt,
i bought 1,000,000 dogs,
but the investment didnt pay off
everyone else had 1,000,000 dogs
some paid more, some paid less
many dogs died in the process, as prices were haggled, raised, and forged into debt
in private i wept over my 1,000,000 dogs but the dogs paid no attention
finally in public we built an army of dogs-the re-wilding of our debts

part IV: belonging

i am exactly where i need to be, lost and on my last 50,000, my last $400
i have hurried past the city of my suicide into something brighter and more gone
the ruins of this architecture are dazzling
were running in the grass; its ruthless
ours ways of being, numbered and cast away
the grass cuts, like all intimacies
we are intimate and fighting and thats all i need to know
all the knots in all the grasses and then we throw the net up
i believe in no world,
but i want to trace every bit of it with fine lines of no hope

(for gi-hyeong do & others)

tendons lived and tremored

rings of they were here
radiating from megacity #5
the curtain opens to flat trees
one of them is you, body forgotten
leaning against the floor
tears in the screen looks like
scribbled hangul
the interrupted laugh
the memorial names all the names
mouths lick and suck at the stone
to honor the physical against lack
but every day
the animal with a black leaf is
still left at the back of the theater
evidence is the wrong way
to carry something around
think of what is never admissible
then: cadres who distributed failure
grain to the commune of bricks
medicine to the commune of snails
mostly: empty shirts which lost you
draped on chairs which once contained you

the table, the sun, the testimony

today: waiting for the village bus
lines where you dragged your shoes
pools of clear, dangerous water

Untitled

The edge of a pony sleeps

rolling in wind
a seesaw we built from the pony

We trace a container
the mouth holds canines and enamel chips
opening in the dead mall
Ponies ran

against a download
against it
chewing just wheat things

Anxious ponies pick up rocks and turn them

Over and over in their pockets.

The law for ponies was no extra pony

ponies who can brush themselves and go to work
should & what about the ponies who now love the taste of Fritos
& chasing pigeons down long corridors?
This is a feather cut into some small parts, we look closer into the fluff:
the fluff structure, the fluff regime, the precarious pony with built in
ways to discard pony
pony legs were worn down to soft brush

they paw with the fibers

they try to put power into the nubs
they sit by the heater turning into acrylic lump

Anxious ponies pick up rocks

Notes about Saturday music

Roscoe Mitchell plays in notation for future people

(futures that dont fuck with pretty or ugly
But everything we thought of that way is
Full of holes and carried like a flotilla
To disappearance)
From below inside the Empire
Pieces of birds inside the fingers
Feathers wet with spit, stuck
Up on the walls & up on the pitchy
Sadness. Lets celebrate the facts,
Like, a weapon just knicking your
Spine or the ant in the ear, making
It bubble & froth & scurry against
The canal where the hairs now rise
Visible, huge as kelp trees hitting
A minor ant. This is our basement
Away from the major ants of the kingdom.
On a street corner of the Castro,
The Space Lady sings, in her light
Up viking helmet playing Major
Tom. A casket painted with scenes
From the wizard of oz fills with dollars.
Ben whispers
Something to me about her Casio MT-40

& dancehall music & Eddie Cochran but

I am too tired to understand preset
History. A man runs up in the middle
Of a song to yell, Youre back! I
Cant believe it. Turns to no one
In particular to say She hasnt
Been here in years! & I am smiling
At the gray dog who looks like
He is dancing a prayer for Laika.

Should I stay or should I go

Shall I stay to hear Danas ecstatic piano?

Shall I go to stand with Sharmi under the new moon?
Shall I stay to go be in a pouch with Wendy?
Shall I go and become a little fuzz as Rola said?
Shall I stay with Jacks pale lilies?
Shall I go toward Lauras trees that hang heavy with coffee?
Oh, oh, always the same crisis of being,
Of long days of missing you, and then the road,
Of should I stay or should I go?
Shall I stay and babysit more baby drinks?
Shall I go a thirsty way with boys of summer?
Shall I stay and dance the stupid sick night?
Shall I go and dream the dirty hair away?
Shall I stay and let the honey eat me?
Shall I go and let the mama get me?
Oh, oh, vague love sounds, goodbyes, and lies
Holding faces close, holding them afar,
Saying, should I stay or should I go?

A plane carrying a load of crystals

I filled my mom with water and told her

You are alone
I filled my dad with salt and told him
You can go now
I filled my brother and my sister and my tiny soul with light and we strolled into Los Angeles
strip malls to eat thai food
We slept on old mattresses with no bed frames and wondered if we would fall off onto the floor
We slept on floors and listened to trains hitting dogs at night.. Whining.. Whining..
We went into the grocery store and said we would meet somewhere in the middle but the
refrigerated sections threw off our sense of space and geography, let alone fractions
At night sometimes the neighbors screamed
The screaming drove all the math out of my head
Finally at dawn, the roosters would begin, and ants would start on my legs, crawl up to my
underwear,
and I would know it was time for a shower

In the shower I chewed on tapioca and tried to get clean

I wavered like bent plants
Somewhere between too much eyeliner and avoiding eye contact
Somewhere between the water of my mom and the salt of my dad there was a sink
Salt dispersed in the water
And I carried that saline container
Put up against the light, it became liquid quartz
I pressed my eyes there, in weakness, I wanted very much to see
That dark green of mugwort pounded until its angels darkened my gums

Filled in the holes in my teeth, the putty of garbage hybrid

I ground the ink so dad could cover me in the brush
Characters I couldnt read
I took off the teflon coating to scare my mom
She checked on the birthmarks that appeared after we got on the plane
To make sure the evil did not grow
My sister helped me cover them in beige foundation
My brother cloaked my feet which were the most marked
Swollen with ant bites

In a cathedral in Boston I met a sweetheart I showed off my marks under the light
A modern dove with modern hair
But they rubbed off with salt water
And the sweetheart couldnt see me
In a storm drain in San Fernando Valley
I softened into an earthquake
And threw up earth
And my hair was tangled with the earth
And I couldnt get up
The Santa Anas kept knocking me to the ground

I was a ton of construction dust by the time I got to Oakland

I became the China with long black hair
I ate the way toward health
People put their hands on my comatose body
To get healing

I woke up later and blew one holy bubble on May Day and said goodbye
I got on the same transparent plane that imported my kind
I filled my mom with water and told her

: New year, new play

I didnt live through the dictatorship, I wasnt yet

A paranoid I wasnt yet
Held to the oily flames I wasnt yet
Beginning this round of yut nori I wasnt yet
Repeating a bridge scenario I wasnt yet
Live fire, birdshot, yet
I didnt know about blindness yet
Nor about the consequences for what I fought
& I fought not for

The democracy flooding the arena then

I still had not started the game of yut nori then
But even a nascent idea could spark investment then
I wandered that German campus thinking Im urs if u are who u said u were then
Our creditors might find us but flesh had been credited long ago even then
What I mean is the North Atlantic already existed then
Before scrollable scores there were plenty marks made on paper then
It was understood people fell off buildings, objects
& objects attached themselves neatly to

The economy improved under protectionist measures by which is meant

Under the duress of tribunals, isolation of riots by which is meant
Collaborators, people with their backs turned the wrong way, by which is meant

The game begins, sticks are cast, dog-dog, two-two by which is meant
Predictably, the intended result, by which is meant
Any corrective as an obscene gesture, mother eater, by which is meant
Boiled culture, with water dear, by which they never meant
Any of it but its not intention that undoes the paving
Pavements press down on people to make way for

The money horses moving toward the Seoul center or the Busan corner so
This is how the game continues getting stuck on home so
The center & corner need to fall out at the same time so
I hated her but in her universe love was more violent so
Non-violence wasnt a real option just violence deferred so
We found others hiding in the hypermart dressed in vegetation so
We unearthed all the dying before the chance intersection so
Necessarily no future resides in a place
All notion of a good option deferred

No more advice, no
Innocence as requirement, no
Remote crime reports, no
Profiteers of small utopias, no
Hills, at all, no
Sincere tropical vacation, no
Ramen hotels, no
Mostly everyone is the enemy
As long as this is where we live

World generating, KIA Motors

Girls traded in embarrassments, while glossing Fly Emirates
Crawling on the floor in pain, the pain of others cant be clearly understood KIA Motors
Yet it is possible to act, without intimate conversation, just Fly Emirates
Vital stocking up with fluid organ fermentations KIA Motors
un-diagnosables bled, cut, gunned, shipped, Fly Emirates
DO NOT STARE SO HARD YINGLI SOLAR
Like you are alive, DO NOT

Like we all have two arms, we dont, do-we

Im sitting in the corner with tentacles, no arms, we dont, do-we
I cooked up the recognition you deserved, but we dont, do-we
This is not our house, we dont have a house, do-we
If once I held you, a version of you, but we dont, do-we
As Ive been saying all day they can call me a girl, but we dont, do-we
More like monstrous, do-we, do-we
Our dying, our dying, like the monstrous die
This is ours

Libert, galit, Beyonc, in it

A glitter graft, insect babes posing as seeds in it
If we call it love what we might get away with, in it
If you dont call me, just forget those particular years in it
If you dont text me, I might just have to hack another way towards living in it
If unraveling, if worrying the degree of whiteness in it

If your body becomes another baton, whats in it

No one who survives the elevator survives the high rises
Erupting as too many mirrors

The palace in which I might find you, is an infection night

Full of spreading investigations, a spiral of time screwing away night
From the immolated stars tipping from the high rise edge night
The house where we met was a near poisoned night
Not only because of borrowed minutes, but by night
Looking at the footage its obvious we died that night
Or else we committed murder on the authorities of night
Theres a disappearance which finds no convincing camera
You say you saw me: I didnt, not living, not yet.

II.
FLEXIMOB

FROM SMEAR

This one is supposed to be quite a bendy, a flexible one.

All the elastic qualities, all the fleshy leftover.
This one supposed to be the accommodating bridge.
Meant to soothe the angst of the periphery but not live there too much.
This one is called a traveler, but this is not the traveler who interprets and translates, the
translation goes in one direction.
A plastic part, slipped in between, to smooth a transition, a cheap conduit, a replaceable thing.
This one has a house inside of it, or a dream of a house, every aspect of it so sunken in, so turned
inside out, so broken, it is more like a threadbare house-shaped pocket.
Paranoid fringe which frays out, puffs, a lace made of trash.
This one is gonna look the part of properly spangled, a big gilt letter, flung loose and whirling
through the charred tornado.
Book -knife- cake: what friends are for, against love.
This one is in love though, soaked in it, a pineapple bath upside down rum flamb of love.
There was a particular music to the sound of friends names, and that was because they repeated,
then suddenly wanting another atonal noise.
This one is flat and lacks personality, refuses to perform, just hides all coy in undefined
eyebrows.
Can a thing be said to have friendship, thing looks upon the book, the knife, and the cake, wet
with envy.
This one lives in the closet as a dog, or else in the office as a plant.
The dog or the plant are routines for making better workers, plugging in data into a template, an
architecture, putting biscuits inside a mouth, pushing pellets into a soil.

This one is a loose scholar, full of soil, grit all up in the pen, the eyes, the holes, the creases.
A poorly welded crease in the conduit is leaking all the juice and all the goo and all manner of
odorous.
This one tried to believe in smelly music, tried to tear more conduits open through this shadow
optimism.
Plastic parts can become its own junk river, its own oozy smear upon the earth.
This one becomes its own junk vehicle on the junk river which sings a junk song.
Ownership gets melted and gooed too, an oil that moves slowly toward fire.
This one says there's a whole lot of brushing against, glasses clinking lightly, but what of the
movement of the smears?
Dirt vehicles are being wheeled into a showcase, all marked with their special number, brushed
with pineapple glaze and told so lovely, so lovely.
This one holds up the letter with all the names of men who are threatening to sue, declares it is a
letter from the city, declares it a record of the arrested, and it is burned.
A micro-scene is not the economy, not a city, not a jail, it is hardly a place at all, yet this one
circulates in it, yet this one languishes in it, yet this one dies in it, a scene of two, or a
polyamorygooglecalendar, or the brutal ice rink of a bitter town, its all circling and scraping at
the ice.
This one refuses to call the letter burning and what may yet still come anti-violence, the odor is
acrid, the junk counter-cuts, and the floppy lace is invasive, refuses to promise safety.
Wildly external, wandering and carving and whipping the place up: destroy the scene.

TO MOB

The butchers sat down to dinner. The table was covered in silk damask, strewn around were tiny
rubies, meant to look like glistening drops of blood, to whet the appetite. Those who had their
heavy hands on the table got rubies stuck to them, leaving ghostly marks on the skin. Their skin
washed as it was in blood, so many times over, and had stained. They were rubbed with a cream
of snails, and then dusted in pearl powder. This was allowed to set, and in the candlelight, they
glowed of subdued blood. They were butchers not vampires so it was right the blood was
external in this way. Their boots were still covered in the sticky oil of the rivers, and the sludge
moved throughout the course of the dinner, off of the rubber and onto the floor and the carpets
and mysteriously, even to the curtains and the crystal ware. Later in the evening they would be
set upon the world, but for now, they ate carefully, cutting the organs with expert precision,
their knives knowing what was sinew, what muscle, what would give away and what would
remain stubbornly wedded. Each wore a gold necklace, on which dangled the words bad bitches.
As they ate, they became vessels of all the organs and all the cuts on the organs, which were now
obscured in the dark glass of the butchers' bodies. Tonight, the butchers whispered to each other
in total conspiracy, tonight, they said exchanging kisses and bites, tonight they would swallow a
light into their vessels and run together into the town.

& BACK AGAIN

she sat next to the river so tired she couldn't move her arms to cover her eyes from the sun
above so she closed them and peered at the sparks of her eyelids she sat next to the river and did
not watch the junks pass by but knew that they were she pushes her fingers against the knotted
muscles on her face from grinding her jaw from too much coffee from being on the phone she
moves her bad shoulder to make its clicking sound she sat next to the water and felt warm a
savory warmth like she'd just eaten a hamburger all of her body was softening like trash she
couldn't feel her hands her hands were dispersed foam puffs lapping with the edge of the river
just riding it if she stayed here long enough her body would become rose-colored estranged from
the rose if she stayed longer it would get covered in husks blown out of a buckwheat pillow then
she might look like a natural thing a passive place like they always said she resembled her
insecure architecture was showing they said while she peeled and applied a sticker on her
particular spot by the river when she was younger she had to wet and wring a small towel and
put it by her bed so her insides would not dry out and sicken she had to chew boiled greens that
were covered in tiny thorns so she couldn't chew so fast but had to chew enough to go from
bitter to sweetness all along that river all the river

Some problems in trying to tell you

For Anne Boyer
im catastrophizing/a series of catastrophes are blowing up all the tender things,
im being grim/a lot of shit is grim,
im weaving this narrative/the narrative is warping the character fabric to become me,
this girl is traveling to another time/she is trapped in a clinic being drained of blood in my
dream i am jealous, bodies are laughing underneath a blanket, their outlines speaking to each
other
in the dream i have no eyes and cant possibly be seeing that, but the dream is telling me what to
know, saying you already see dear feminist affective categories, the psychic pedagogy of envy
I was a young asshole too once is a way to assert youth invalidates a politics, somewhere, these
people say, is a properly political subject: curious how it shifts just out of sight, far, comfortably
away from their social sphere, life.
in the clinic she hold her vacant eyes in her hands, these will not be taken
she is traveling through the blanket, all the bodies melt into the blanket, in the clinic bodies are
growing thin, thinner than any I can hold
the centrifuge spins her blood out, but separation doesnt save her
the periphery is still a place in relation to a center so how to undo the relations
underneath the skin, more skin, full of knowing stuff
inflaming all that stuff is all the time already sold
street hawkers dance to the clacking of severed falcon beaks

theres not enough words anyone can say to speak truth to power
Anne and I talk about how there arent enough Enlightenments to confess
or provide mental lamb-as-victim pornography for
that cant end well!
nobody want to look you in the eye when you say xxxx, but everyone still wants to hear the story
to judge for themselves
when you begin to tell, you become the one who tells,
but whether the girl gives or is taken for blood, she is carelessly leaving blood everywhere, she
was born bloody, born in a clinic of suckers
"The beatings do not work, the accountability processes do not work, banishment does not work,
forgiveness does not work"
"The fact that sometimes a XXXX chooses a violent response suggests that of all the impossible
choices given to XXXX, XXXX has opted for the one that express the actual degree of hostility at
the level of the social group-- that is, the hostility of XXXX as a group against the domination of
YYYY as a group. "
girl becomes the point of catharsis in her telling, but catharsis shaped not by her actions: an
extractive way
how much blood the clinic needs, how many clients are thirsty, she fills out a form, is asked
invasive questions, waits, bored watching the clinic clock as they slap suckers onto her skin their
slime covered exoskeletons shuddering with contact
a stunt girl, jumping into a multi vocal plain, a sea of alien bodies glittering like walruses, shored
up on this death beach, their bodies already rendered bounceable, surface-like
recall a poster reading "WE ARE YOUR FRIENDS YOULL NEVER BE ALONE AGAIN" as you
sit in the clinic, holding your own hand, phantom fingers sprouting from the wrists, to scratch at
the palms, stuck between the telling and a bad place

Ratioed

"Above all else she wanted to be far away from volcanoes,

tunnels, stray dogs, rapists, and anyone who might desire her
or want to sleep with her, regardless of their good intentions
Mohamed Choukri on Jane Bowles

society calls them ____-sexuals, we call them friends

society calls us ____-sexuals, we are friends, but not with society
we know each other from the moments we can recall
the geography of our togetherness, which might be a plaza, a square,
a sudden cache of rocks
from flashpoint to flashbang: In an instant everything has become connected.
we were falling
ill
health is a problematic concept
like is it healthy to be born in flames
I want to be in that light
I want to wear a robe of starlight that kills rapists
Im caught up in that rage/chill dichotomy again
the megaplex bleeds when stabbed, jump cut to the deflated silver flooding the parking lot
& also, fuck the guy who breaks down why the thing he does is fucked up in order to keep doing
the thing
the logics of all worlds we fail to comprehend are going to kick that guys ass
& he will have no way to explain it

you might recognize my need to nap all of a sudden

cus a surge of sugar and chatter, rediscovering why a candy was good
cus the last look i cast in your direction, sadder than i meant to,
our similar tired, our need to circle back to this conversation,
"you just dont want to be looked at"
sometimes a haze above a crowd is it a collective steam?
what is the ratio of friend? what is the weight?
it helps to be not liked by enemies
it helps in deciphering haze
it helps in the blockade of everything

beautiful fighting girl

Ana pours bicarbonate soda into her fathers drink, to send a letter to her mother. A child
doesnt know how it got so fucked up but she still knows how to send the letter. The
transmission is fuzzy but in the end shes found a way to kill him, to sashay at the bottom of a
drained pool, to find a way towards living. (porque te vas, porque te vas, porque te vas)

Sophie hides her illiteracy from the Lelivres. Alone in her room, she gestures with a stutter
hand, following the illustrated boy in her secret book, his blank smile and easy mouth circling
the letters: clench, and let go, clench, and splay out, clench, and pull the trigger.

Camille fingers a music box. C lounges in a hotel room of Francis Bacon pink, all fleshy. Camille
in a black velvet dress, black velvet gloves, gesturing over the face, glancing arms, lifting up like
a passage through the club, caressing the blue walls, like they might let the body through (on se
croit d'amour/ on se croit froce enracin/ mais revient toujours/ le temps du lien dfait)

Cabiria pounds the ground full of dead leaves, emptied currency. Cabiria emerges from the
forest. She walks besides revelers, they shout, they spin, they strum, she receives their smiles,
her eyes flash, wet with tears: she looks into the camera. (ma la vita continua)

(ghost: Maggie Cheung as Ruan Ling-yu goes around the room to kiss her friends goodbye. She
eats poisoned porridge to die. Her friend stand around her porcelain body, her hair is wet with
snow, the snow dusts her sleeping poison face.)

Materials toward conspiracy

<Plasticgirl.gif> spins around

You can turn her over and do what you like
Some are more flexible than others
This one manufactured in a plastic landscape
Developed quickly to turnover
This other one has lumpy arms
They grow heavy with rocks
She is immobile, until the moment these giant arms swing up and out
Like a wrecking ball

In the Oxhide films, Liu Jiayin is a glitch in the room

Hemmed in by walls, broken conduit becomes shimmery
Shows its digitized edges, the limits of an avatar
What happens when the figure of employability small hands
Is unemployed
Dumplings get made
A hide is slowly scraped and stretched in the dark laboratory
Everything turns into a fucking epic
Very few cuts means you watch the plastic ooze in near real time
Warped by the desire for the cuts and then acceptance of ooze, its obscurity
Many animals were harmed in the making of this

The pessimism stored inside the glitch may yet turn itself out

Petroleuse-style
A mistake often made when putting a plasticgirl
In your pocket, in your house, in your city:
A plastic parts trojan can explode at high velocity
When the femme fatales and the gumihos finally get together
They dont just want your heart or phallus to eat
As plasticgirls they want the whole thing
Snuggled up in the cellular space
And spread inconsolably
Like big drippy tears
As the clinic clock ticks