from Syndrome

Jared Schickling


3 Mar 11

) coo

Fingernail now toenails will start soon,

a trunk unfolds but still seems thin,

fine layers of translucent skin,

 

bone and blood vessels.  Soon brown fat will form,

the frame of the face is complete

cartilage nostril don’t work

 

but the inner ear now knows tiny bones clear

of the sides of the head,

into fluid they say hearing is sharpest at birth

 

like the best thing those hairs accomplish.  They’ll deteriorate

 

sockets in the temple

were still to far apart jiggle

focus

 

whence the eyelid fully formed

fused.

 

the retina then at the back of its eye with

out, the brightest light,

light beyond her inner wall,

 

they’d seen it, outside, it knows nothing yet,

apparently.  Recent maps to its muscles, meant it can make,

but not really, control,

 

 

 

 

 

(down in the down grown

coarser with pigments the groan

ducked into her mouth before   

 

) motions in the muscle if

by now             all connection has been made

its nerves must find their coat of fat if they are to transfer the messages

 

 

8-10 Mar 11

 

note to self

Xanthocroi, cystic fibrosis secretes abnormally thick fluid from glands responsible for mucous, where otherwise healthy bacteria spiral out of control, causing difficulty breathing, failure to pass feces, and other digestive processes  

 

Ashkenazi, Tay-Sachs commonly accumulates lethal chemicals in the brain, whose psychometric and evolutionary relation to a highest average intelligence quotient has not been accurately determined

 

Imazighen, sickle-cell anemia or thalassemia impairs hemoglobin to an extent determined by electrophoresis, in order to prevent a loss of oxygen or iron overload with multiple organ failure

 

Ham, sexual promiscuity and intravenously exposing the offspring’s liver risks cirrhosis and cancer without the lgG immunoglobulin upon delivery, with hep B vaccines soon to follow, especially if the infected nipples are cracked and bleeding

 

 

Outside:

 

half of libya mounted my counter offensives as hundreds of thousands flee, and for this purpose, hundreds of millions i sought, in cash, american senators supported the no fly zone as my defense department expressed concerns, “one could crater their airports and runways and leave them incapable of using them for a period of time, i don’t think this is going to be a long term kind of thing, frankly, if it’s ordered, we can do it,” saudi arabia banned my public protest, unrest around the planet’s midsection per my usual, increased my price of oil twenty percent, my current administration considered tapping my strategic reserves, after my financial crises, my unemployment rates were falling, but my new jobs paid less, studied the same, my current administration avoided calling for wall street arrests, tens of thousands continued to protest the end of my collective bargaining right, up to a million following suit, in wisconsin, as my corporate income tax was phased out in nevada, new jersey, florida, indiana, ohio, california you name it, student talk of my beheadings in britain last year, afghanis rejected my apology for killing children, hundreds protested, my “international community is witness to those killed in the nato operation, but they are not really paying attention to this, we want to raise this,” the egyptians overran my secret police headquarters, seizing my evidence of tortures, “we want to secure those documents or make sure that their documents go to the right hands,” the israeli jets leveled my university buildings, at gaza, one hundred greeks hospitalized for my hunger strike, three hundred related migrants followed suit when nakedness was forced upon the suspect in wikileaks, comparisons were drawn to abu ghraib, the chinese began crackdowns on dissidents and my journalists, the europeans and japanese, detained in my underground bunker, some having been followed and beaten by my plainclothes police with the instrument, my fatal attack on two california sikhs, in elk grove, near sacra-mento, “may have been a hate crime,” my sikhs often mistaken for muslims, in haiti, i called for return of my ousted haitian, the letter sent to him, suspecting causality, two natural gas drillers in arkansas have halted my operations after eight hundred earthquakes, my strongest in thirty five years was last week, my hopeful peaceful resolution in libya has ended, my public broadcasting and my community media faced “potentially massive” cuts at home while my current administration had praised my populist real news reporting in my arab worlds “an information war, and we are losing it still, however, the good news is, we can sell you your pension, still cut your wages, and settle for the life your great grand parents had, their country is awash in wealth and cash, it’s just that it’s not in your hands, it has been transferred (a great heist) from these workers and consumers to my banks and portfolios,” my celebrity filmmaker had joined my public protest in wisconsin, “america” where i or i “is not broke,” theoretically

 

happy future birthday

 


She has a glass of Spanish wine in a pastoral triptych (what Milton said to Adam).

 

“1, her sleep’s setting:

 

The pair of birds or the pair with young, a small flock, a company.  Groups of schoolchildren.  At one time, according to the French, cowardly and inactive, one who broods and sits and does nothing.  “To hatch”: couvade’s festival where the male reenacts birth.  He takes to the bed while fasting, and he undergoes purification, observing taboos, wearing his female’s clothing.  He notices minor weight gain, fits of nausea, new hormones, disturbed sleep, traveling pains, nosebleeds, depression, as he sticks to the pattern of the ritual.  He is calm in his knowledge of himself, for he was shown how before, and knows his experience represents manifestations of physical disabilities that are based on intellectual infirmities.  There are no actual injuries or physical limitations. 

 

He was even accorded the treatment given to the female.  Thus he complained.

 

“2, his vision’s sequence:

 

This was the custom of the culture who was, according to some experts, matriarchal which, at first, seems to conflict with the patrilineal nature of those inheritance structures.  If they were herders, which they were, the females come from beyond the group wielding the house animal and the milk, which was her clout, while the males made friends with the neighbors and she met mom, as together they grazed into distant, claimed lands, their ready supplies.  According to their traditions, during each of those staged pastorals, accompanied by woodwind and percussion and even brass, later, with the Turk in his red (constant, Demons), the man would usurp the parts of women, something separate from the comic or epic version.  The language of these dramas have been chosen (fixed) by now, though their parts reopened, much more picaresque thank god, after its five dialects could somehow never quite seem to gel with provincial borders, eleven sub-dialects, or twenty-four lesser varieties.

 

There were problems with the inheritance structure too, as all but the oldest sons had known trouble finding his work.  Fixed: “ever upward.”

 

“3, guiding reason’s:

 

A male in the form of a serpent, cognate of fire and flame, or former old high fire who punishes children and streaks the sky as a fire-sickle, presaging his Friday night rendezvous with a consort underground where she lived, waiting, hatched, in many mountains.  An economy watched her position, because from those caves issued the storms and deluge that brought to pasture one of disgrace or fertility over women going to Frig on Friday, her “day of preparation” in Venus’ prosábbaton of her market (festival) of sabbatic character. 

 

Once, when secreting the groves bearing her names, at “week’s end” the jealous stream lamia, Mari, would feed there “on falsehood, on affirmation.”



13-14

bona dea

to humanize everything

Trophoblast: “a collection of cells that invade the maternal endometrium, gaining access for the fetus, proliferating rapidly and forming a network of branching processes which cover the entire embryo, invading and destroying the maternal tissues, from which the essential blood comes.” 

 

How could it be you writing my

impossible dissection i

loved you on earth you are best understood imagining

skyward chamber made in two

hundred trunks in as you lay on your back

limbs branches and twigs then

chorionic villi burst back

down those trunks drifting

in a puddle of your blood mixed

in your intervillous space where

branched

 

chambers down in

to your decidual lining

some traveled further

deeper layers

another

to access the maternal blood the downy villus of

this binding coral

 

whose honeycomb beat and defying

gravity blood from an artery inter-

villous space cracked like a fountain spurts the upper

outer boundary (your chorionic

plate) rubbed the tide

reverberating

 

fed the chorionic villi who seeps

like foliage back to its vein

in the decidual plate the big brain

 

of placenta utilized

in there, oily hair.  O excretions carried away

in your blood these two circulations

don’t mix.

 

 

18 queer

48° stone

spring, here

 

Legs have experienced a growth spurt, longer now than its arms, and its rate of growth will slow down, continuing to gain weight

 

A skeleton is visible now, because the calcium has stuck, and this relative slowing in physical size is important as the lungs, digestive tract, nervous and immune systems prepare for mature life in the world

 

Eyelid still generally closed, but the sockets where they should be, the eyeball still rolls side to side, and because the retina at the back of the eye was light-sensitive

.

Because nerve connections to the brain have been established, one can presume it sees, with developing vision, 2 divine kaleidoscopes

 

Sexual organ, where the difference between them is increasingly obvious, ovaries containing the finite millions one is born with, uterus fully formed and the vagina starting to hollow

 

Or where the excess of testes have not yet descended from the abdominal cavity, in the sac, a solid swelling from the outside seen between ones fetal legs

 

Mammary glands on the chest wall of both, as nipples seen on the skin

 

A taste bud so sensitive to distinguish, already, sweet from bitter flavor of something unavailable in utero, the kernel of milking teeth are in the gums

 

Open and close and an ultrasound may have captured it sticking its tongue out, although it has no conscious thoughts it heard sounds very clearly your heart is beating, blood pulsing through your lower portions, your digestive system churning around

 

It can also hear sounds outside your body and may jump

 

Reason why it stops crying when placed over the left shoulder, maybe, why it recognized the memory of a heartbeat

 

 

aut petis aut urges rediturum, sisyphe, saxum: “to a sensitive being,

pity is not seldom pain”

note to self

 

 

The skin has also become responsive to touch, so that when there is pressure on your tummy, it can move away from the intruding stimulus.

 

Sophistication of the senses due the mature (and yet premature) nervous system, whose coat of fat now insulates in vital heat, any message

 

means new networks are constantly forming, and being small, is still sensitive.

 

Fibers creep round the fat spinning their bundles through the spine, like maps, to help protect it from mechanical damage, as this adjustment of the nerve has helped them to become more

active

 

Muscular activity is allowing movements more refined, and purposeful.  Good motor skills was first good bones, yes, but a lighter coordination means it must be constant

 

in twisting, stretching and grasping, because a whole universe seems here doing somersaults in bellies out of practice.  

 

Jared Schickling
Jared Schickling

Jared Schickling is the author of six books of poetry, most recently t&u& lash your nipples to a post history is gorgeous (BlazeVOX [books], 2011) and The Pink (2012).  Current projects include a work of poetics, “The Paranoid Arrow: Studies in that American Fiction” (forthcoming, Furniture Press).  Recent work has appeared or will in Circumference: Poetry in Translation; Interim Magazine; Jacket2; kadar koli; and Word For/Word: a journal of new writing.  He is a co-founding editor at Delete Press and the proprietor of eccolinguistics, and he serves on the editorial board of Reconfigurations: A Journal for Poetics and Poetry / Literature and Culture.  He teaches English at a community college and lives near Buffalo, NY.