Cartographer
on hysteria

in a garret:
a sourmashed mapist
making stills
taking note of the winding:
the homiletics of points 
and the way the land dries up
a stagnating signal. 

lines and divots
cross roads and a loss of space
of highways
and confusion over footing
falling 
landing
on the pear in your pocket
a pear sized bruise
you press when you’re nervous.

do you see it?
do you see what i’m talking about?
this is where it lives.
this is where it comes from.
do you see it?
do you see what i’m talking about?
i made this
from here.
and here.
do you see it?
do you see what i’m talking about?
this is the mapping of here and here.


fingerknocking wood
soaked and tepid
into shapes:
archipelago
shapes:
colonial 
sodden shapes for intrepids

he sleeps nighttime
dims lamps
sees maps

(three cups ginned and a cinnamon stick
sucked and stuck to the roof of the brim)

marble mouthed lesions
three beats over the limit
drowned in a brine
aged perimeters 
a rumble stomach
an unmappable mind

Ever see a man repaint a map without looking?

dreams are quiet
if you woke to clangor
you would  never sleep again
because you cannot map the peal.
but the backdrop
it’s riddled
a line
a divot
the way you
can dream 
places and people
any way you want.
I only liked you
before your mama died
before you
left me 
sour,							there’s no such thing a lost.
mashed, and mapping. 					there’s no such thing a loss.

 conduit
can’t leave this place until conduit
a foot or a channel 
can canal switch the brush to re-paint the ocean
I’ve invented oceans. 
I’ve tugged the waves moonless and 
fed their fish. 
can’t see strait 
a waterway or a way for the water 
to lose its space
babel 
reinventing babble
a channel 
a re-re-working of the ocean.
why can’t I?
can’t i eat the fish from mine?
From my own ocean? 

shots to burn through lesions
to burn through skin
mucked up to grime
keeps one lucid
an acute lucidity
a sense of one’s own hysteria1
three cups gin and a cinnamon stick
sucked and stuck to the roof of the brim

behold
beheld
see india
see books about india zimbabwe is a country 
roads country africa is asia antarctica never been. 
never seen. 
australia never spoke afrikaans 
eurasia is australia 
is continent is country is 
(a pear-size bruised)
goodbye africa
goodbye india
goodbye olivia
can’t stay awake 
goodbye daughter went to college in 
N – Y – C – N – Y – U – N – E – W  
new filament synagogue counties made of cities 
made of buildings 
and re-buildings of -alities & re-.
i re-ality. i 
re-build. build i -alities. 
i	build.	Irelatere--	I	     		am				  	maps.










1.	In dreams, you can remember places and people any way you want. The way your body moved in synch, succinct. You can remember her oily hair, smell it, feel it through your fingers and when jilted awake, you can map it. Hysteria is the body the way you cannot remember it: a refusal to acknowledge condition and the conditional, the temporary. The body post--

cartographer: on hysteria

Viciousness in the kitchen!
The potatoes hiss.
It is all Hollywood, windowless,
The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,
Coy paper strips for doors
Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.
And I, love, am a pathological liar,
And my child look at her, face down on the floor,
Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear
Why she is schizophrenic,
Her face is red and white, a panic,
You have stuck her kittens outside your window
In a sort of cement well
Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.
You say you can’t stand her,
The bastard’s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He’s a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.
You have one baby, I have two.
I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.
I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.
We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.

Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.
I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.
The smog of cooking, the smog of hell
Floats our heads, two venemous opposites,
Our bones, our hair.
I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.
The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.
Once you were beautiful.
In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: “Through?
Gee baby, you are rare.”
You acted, acted for the thrill.
The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.
I try to keep him in,
An old pole for the lightning,
The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.
He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill, 
Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.
The blue sparks spill, 
Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!
That night the moon
Dragged its blood bag, sick
Animal
Up over the harbor lights.
And then grew normal,
Hard and apart and white.
The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.
We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,
Working it like dough, a mulatto body,
The silk grits.
A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate
Up to my neck,
Thick, thick.
I do not speak.
I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,
I am packing the babies,
I am packing the sick cats.
O vase of acid,
It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.
He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate
That opens to the sea
Where it drives in, white and black,
Then spews it back.
Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.
You are so exhausted.
Your voice my ear-ring,
Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.
That is that. That is that.
You peer from the door,
Sad hag. “Every woman’s a whore.
I can’t communicate.”

I see your cute decor
Close on you like the fist of a baby
Or an anemone, that sea
Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.
I am still raw.
I say I may be back.
You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

Lesbos by Sylvia Plath

Prod: Cam O’bi, Phoelix, Saba
Additional vocals: Phoelix, Akenya, theMIND

Artwork by Nikko Washington
Mixed & Mastered by Elton “L10MixedIt” Chueng

Yesterday

Poetry and prose by Philadelphia performance poet Maryan Captan. 

Lesbos by Sylvia Plath

Maryan Captan

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