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Neurasthenia with photojournalist


   


It is not the eye

As much as the pressing,

The graphic over-writing

Of light, that sickens you.

His secretary-hand that presses

The button to send

The electric-elevator body:

Your ride of shame.

Horse-electrons pull it up

With their power and

Transport you to the bottom level

Id-garage of insecurity.

Man’s elevator has no

Down button.

It has trundle-bed speakers!

Costco condoms that

Heatforherpleasure!

Modern automata

For modern sexology.

He overlooks.

It is the centrality of Feeling

To the Production,

And yet. He overlooks.

He knows.

Over-wrought bed-work

Is done by women

Who want to lie like

Reanimated cow tongues.

American hospitals had a physician

Named the Electrician

Who attended more than

Matters of the heart.

The West cure and

The Rest cure ran

Through the Electrical Department

And its many shunted-bodies

In need of galvanizing.

The soft pressing suggestion of

Abuse in influence.

The ungloved hands

That magnetize women

To have somewhere to flood.

The skin is a poor

Conductor. Call attraction

“Animal magnetism.”

As if All of Communication

Is a Horse in Need of

A Man with Horse Sense

To Throw a Harness Over it.

Poets sought magnetic treatment

To become more sensitive

To the mesmeric trance.

Some called it “interpenetration”

To be overpowered

By a flower’s emanations.

Some still seek

After interpenetration.

A kind of perfection.

Celerity coupled with

Word economy.

Every photojournalist

Tells you the afterimage

Is made in motion.

The afterimage of

The photojournalist

Is light sick-printing

In the stomach. It scatters

And regroups and scatters.

It is the loop that rides

Bed to Bed

Bus to Bus to Bus

In reverse. The transit that

Abstracts electricity.

It is the medium.

What for you extends

Rationally:

For you: nothing.

For you: nothing.

But for a medium-big dick.


Marnie Ritchie was born in Boston, MA. She is an Associate Professor of Communication at Pacific Lutheran University in Parkland, WA. She is enrolled in the Rainier Writing Workshop there. Her poetry has been published in Five:2:One, Juked, Yes Poetry, Burning House Press, Moist Poetry, and Moon City Review. Her chapbook is entitled Hatch (dgp, 2022).