david wolach

WRITING WORK*

If dis-ability is work
Then I'm writing
On the clock, no
Compensino. Never

Didn't have a job
So this is my job
At present it stands
To reason–

a) I have a hole in my mouth (2nd mouth)
that says "no over time" and one I sleeps
a little because of it (2 hr shifts).

b) I have a creditor on my back who calls
at all hours; its machine keeps pro-noun
cing my name "Wow-lack" and so

c) When they say if you're you
keep listening I don't and this
takes work.

d) There's a premium on alienation
in the poetry ghetto. I'm used to it,
my vestigial organs still need stimulation

but also: binding arbitration
and that one year the EFCA
wasn't a congressional watering-
down-hole. Now I keep asking:

will this do? Lateral self-pro-motion
from kitchen to desk over-looking
a baseball diamond, where at night
older kids go to skateboard and fuck

* * *

VISITORS1

In your hole I am a depreciable asset
Next to me with your metal scaffold
Facial souvenir we can nearly touch

What's with the disappearing act of your
Eyeball how it loathes its fear indicates
All potential and all future primeval real

Estate flesh of other than this yes we are
Depreciable assets you said the days before
The moaning wave none of this would have

Happened fragile cord wraps its gag on
Me the bipartisan tradeoff of our languish
Two papertrails spent and drifting for worth

*

     we tried to contact you by phone
    but have not been successful
    you will be successful

    when you develop the compulsion
    to connect the dots
    to speak with others for whom

    this occurs
    to belly up your desires
    submit to all your alienations & call a general

    meeting
    success will come when you trace
    your phobias back to the locus

    of this call, & remember that your body
    says "i" reflexively & to know the name
    they gave you does not always produce

    the correct address

Both poems are from david wolach's book Hospitalogy (Scantily Clad Press, 2010).

david wolach is founding editor of Wheelhouse Magazine & Press. wolach's first full-length collection is Occultations (2011). wolachs next full-length book of poetry and essays, Hospitalogy, is due out from Tarpaulin Sky Press in May 2013. Other books include the multi-media transliteration plus chapbook, Prefab Eulogies Volume 1: Nothings Houses (2010), and book alter(ed) (2009). Recent work appears in Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics (2013, Nightboat Books/EOGH), Jacket, Augfabe, Try Magazine, No Tell Motel, and Little Red Leaves. wolach is professor of text arts, poetics, and aesthetics at The Evergreen State College, co-curating the PRESS Text Arts & Radical Politics Series there, and visiting faculty in Bard College's Language & Thinking program.