Excerpt from “The Eyelash and the Monochrome”

Tiziana La Melia, The Eyelash and The Monochrome, 2016. Installation view, The Rooms, St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada.

Tiziana La Melia. The Eyelash and The Monochrome, 2016. Installation view, The Rooms, St. Johns, Newfoundland, Canada.

“The Eyelash is nothing.
And out of this nothing came a kindness.”

You read the sidebar ads to me after a Gmail conversation:
Picture of my Evening
we don’t need that
the popcorn was beautiful
Stucco sparkle like Authentic Li Lash
Distance healing in Edmonton…

It’s all in the neck, at the neck at night
leaving a face around the shirt collar
cursing our edge
blanking and teeming and wanting.

Emotion with no motion
ethereal and new we cuddle
the eyelash blinks on the chaste white page.

Across a screen
coming to the world’s delay
response to the present

wind in my hair
I walked to the pond.

On the third day of my meditation,
my monotony was interrupted by
a grinning voice
that appeared carrying an hourglass:
“What is wrong?” asked the voice.
And with no sympathy added:
“tomorrow I expect you to begin.”

Makeup lures you close, like the stamen wand
and the bee. Information potpourri and still awake
with sponge like tongue with feet that taste
shrink from perfume
good and vague
spooked by the sky
the grin in the word is one aperture

 

Later, I type Thoreau and                a simple reed

personifies the landscape
describing the earth’s eye; looking into its beholder
measures the depth of his own nature. 
The fluviatile trees next to the shore are slender eyelashes which fringe it,
the wooded hills and cliffs
around are its
overhanging brows.

 

Cute fringe of reeds describes the distance between wet and dry.
Makeup is a mode of refinement, to be fine, to make fine.
The cosmetology of the slur.
A jubilation of emptiness.

I noticed in your cosmetics bag
sitting on the toilet
a gold plated eyelash curler
caked with dry mascara.
We wore it
conservatively,
and I knew
you were my clown.

Well, even with the Eyelash trimmed, it’s still seductive, and bows
the beauty is erasing, trace blur in hd with casual confidence of this is the way it’s always been. Eyelash plus puppy dog eyes can make you feel contrary and muscular.

The blank in the blink that is a space for an alibi.
Was the blink a wink and now think of the room as a mattress.
Not unlike a whisker, it vibrates, an odd state of mind.
“Neat stuff”
that drap de lit
that drab
trail of ejaculate
narrative and stuff

in slacks like skim milk

vaginas and keyboards
two things to smear and swab
by doctors and border guards.

Innocent curtain, like a horse’s eye, batting lashes.
It tickles.
The Eyelash is silent.

Th’ Eyela’la’sh fake and fake makes me feel better than nude. Feel the lash under the mat’tress’es? The loose lash is an instant. It is a cartoon, ‘n exaggeration that turns fem into something –ty is it suggestive maybe grotesque and knotted

“The voice above the eyelash is your monochrome.”

A kind of saliva, something sitting, for breeding,
tanning in the sun, us the missing and fanged sentence.

The eyelash and the monochrome is a symmetry cemetery. I need to elaborate on this.

Symmetry not fair
that fearful symmetry thing.

 


Acknowledgements:

Mercer Union, Toronto; Rachelle Sawatsky, Yellow Snail; Parc Saint Léger, Pogues-les-Eaux; Paul B. Perciado, Testojunkie; Henry David Thoreau, Walden; YYZ, Toronto; Gibraltar Point, Toronto Island; Organism for Poetic Research, New York; Karen Barad, What is the Measure of Nothingness? Infinity, Virtuality, Justice; Daphne Marlatt, Self-Representation and Fictionalysis; the tour guide at the Judd Foundation, Marfa; Annette B. Weiner and Jane Schneider, Cloth and Human Experience; Anne Sexton, Transformations; Anne Carson, Variations on the Right to Remain Silent; Aloe Massage, Vancouver.