Swag Shop

Where God isn’t an emotional necessity – desire for union is our most perfect poetic flight. Your blood and circus upon my neck. Lying flat against my gorgeous dreams, you were perfection, but no less a failure to music. All of life’s contradictory and painful symbols running into the juice of our loins. We are deaf to them, our waking selves sleep and squeak in the shadow of sex on top forty.

You were a galvanizing riot. In this newest wake I set out, again, to write the longest love letter ever written. Art no less than the atomic fruits of a fixed gaze. I strive to make this explosive force tilt and bulge, but in this language I only find split sagging corners and dead ends. Scraps and pig skins; mothers, matrixes, circles of hell and quicksand exorcisms. The grayish corpses of genocide, slavery, crucifixion, suicide and beguiling lack. Your love was a decentering force, a drum beat, a polyphonous hymn scraped by the balm of the wicked and powerful. My blackest soul traversed by a corrosive and unrelenting day dream of you.

Your soft, gratuitous kisses grew into suffocating, glittering foliage and flashes of light. The image inventory goes to the devil! Whirling vortices of vaporous phantasms collapse and collide. I admit nothing. I do not call you by your name. I do not call you by your number. I swear by my obsession. I long only for more, for now, for diamonds. I am cartwheeling back and forth for hours (into assimilation, into alienation and submission, into the warm laughter pooling at the crevice of your gapped tooth). I am hours swimming circles around your tender inquisition fighting off poetic skirmishes, fierce, raw and uncooked salves. We are skating, we are ‘passing,’ we are kidding and seeking sexy rust, lusty rot. We are a call to arms at the gates.

The eternal return of the same, the Poetic flight! Our skins, our methods are porous against these copper flights. Fear is dust. We live in exhilarating disorder; feedback loops, floods, foams and slimes of failure and song. We lie soaking in boredom, ears hot for tender codas, whispers, cookies and shards. The neutral and the exotic chords, pulled taught to entice, to bind, to receive, to refuse and meanwhile make booms and black spot bursts of the soul.

Beastly's Choice

Neuroses is a modern form of Romanticism, and the internet is its golden apotheosis. It stems from the same source, a hunger for perfection, an obsession with living out what one has imagined, and if it is found to be illusory, a rejection of reality. A heavy block went resting over my fountain, my spring. It was the weight of language. And pictures.

The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used
as a body. When I play with perfection, perfection plays back. Hair curled and pinned, fur trimmed, lashes unnaturally long, shades drawn – I was your decorated darling and you my invisible king. Our contract was a floating wish-dream soaked in nightly sun.

I am the dirty skirt in the sludge of desiderata. I build traps. My selections are only stiff and taught. They crumble and bulge. Submitting all my fattish poetry to a greedy cell, drowning in shrill paradise fugues sewing new dresses for new boyfriends. I’ve already burned through that term. Language has destroyed me I have destroyed her back. I turn shit to crack without a wand. I boil kryptonite without poison. I am the conductor of the pain singing in my spleen, my liver, my bile, my Gavin folding back on Gavin folding back on Gavin.

But the fairytale wears a gown that makes a breeze, makes a space between
the feet and earth, wood and rust. I am a girl with my fishtail dipped in the mermaid. He is my garland of calculated danger. My love illusion, my game with syllables and pixel sticks. Gavin folding back on Gavin folding back on Gavin. The disease is the lover. The mind married to itself, copulating with its own inventions. The body is an instrument which only gives off music when it is used as a body. I do not steal from her, I only live in concert with her abyss*

The further I soar into fantasy and live by my selections, the more I
feel the suffocating hand of a nameless anxiety. The further I soar into life the more the tears break through like a quiet, gentle wave. Drawing myself out of the swamp by the pigtail. Sixteen years old in the California mist, sitting on the fencepost, feet dangling in jellies, counting the number of cars just like yours. 1, 2, 3, 4, the promise of protection, 5, of union, 6, intimacy, 7, the promise of 8, the promise of 9, 10, 11. Control as the locus of the bouquet, adrenaline sundaes, ribbons of poop, dead fathers.

Fear of the world produces crystals in writing, crystals in writing produce gems in heat. Art is the great sterilizer. My work is the glowing edge of my disease.

Scrape the gloss off avoidance. I am a great explosive force. I have such freedom in me, such fearlessness. But I build a cell and I decorate it. I never let myself explode. I put all kinds of obstacles in my own way, they are all obstacles, lids, restrictions, all my loves are devotions, services, keeping me from exploding. I almost have drowned my strength. I dipped into perfection again, I came back with scraped knees and the film of betrayal on my palms. I came back with a lesson: Fantasy is towards death. My gown is towards death. She is towards infantile satisfactions and magical authority. She is the tortured cunt. She is release through excess canalized by game rules. She is dirty notes played back in a dazzle shelter.


*Material in italics is taken from Anais Nin’s Diary Volume 2, 1934-1939

Jolt Box

I raised to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had soaked a morsel of the cake. No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory – this new sensation having had the effect on me which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me. I had ceased now to feel mediocre, contingent, mortal. Whence it could have come, this all powerful joy? I sensed that it was connected with the tea and the cake, but that it infinitely transcended those savours, could not, indeed, be of the same nature. When did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it?*

For a long time now I’ve wanted to tell the story of that winter in which I began by forbidding you to speak. I made music of your silent and foreboding body. Your leonine stature became my vain dream of life. I wanted you just close enough to absorb your sulky, circumfluent luster, its mystery crawling up my spine slowly, gaining momentum and eventually, rising furiously with a hot tight spark at its tip. That jab of intoxication I popped like a morsel when finally, through two beams in your eyes, your horror was directed at me -

It was summer by then, my hair was trimmed neatly, falling at my shoulders and tangling up into the wind as I made my way north on my bike. I saw you first, making loops into the intersection where we were both stopped. You looked back as if to say something to her, your girlfriend who was now right behind me. I was there in her place, my beguiling scent and gem-like glance, it took but a moment. I had beaten her to her place unexpectedly and swallowed you up into my aura, my poetry. My face round and plump and glittering with the light in my eyes, it reminded you of a cake on top of which a place has been kept for a morsel of blue sky. You looked at me in surprise and disgust and I received your gaze with a rush of choking glee. Both of us rushed forth and parted without an exchanged word.

It happened slowly, A little tap on [my] window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, like grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: I found something I wanted more then those shrill unconscious longings for you. A huge crevice opened up and in that space empty of you I could neatly situate the urges I had experienced again and again during our gruesome pact.

To release in words the burdensome version of you violently masquerading as my fuel. I speak, I rub my memory clean. Extinguish you who I spent months feeding off of.

You who were a solemn stock and when you snagged, where you snagged, I retreated, watching sap trail down your legs, your thighs, ribs. You, the fountain of danger to which I was most devout – the object of my shooting, rising, swiveling anxiety; the cold delirium blanketing my mind with soggy trash. I was always holding, keeping, shooting high as a kite and clinging to that memorized you that kept me gliding, cannibalizing, synchronizing you and you and you and you, my anxiety’s sweet crescendo ringing out so loudly through my perfect golden solitude. We had our mutual, volatile, criminal scopophilia; cheating or way through each minute, holding fast to a dangerous distraction that was purely aesthetic, purely instinctual, form without fracture, as animal as language went.


*Material in italics is taken from “Remembrance of Things Past” by Marcel Proust (1871-1922)

Post-Capitalist, Feminist Toil

I was recently featured in a show in one of the School of Visual Arts galleries, where I am currently a student. The show, titled "Social" featured 7 artists, all current SVA students or alumni. When asked to write a short press release describing my work in plain language, I submitted the following:


Katie Cercone deifies and destroys lost expenditures. This is feminist, post-capitalist toil. Excavating at the threshold of cheese puff and pastel lawn chair abjection, she situates domestic baubles - toys, bed sheets, hair clips and food - into her personal, hypnotic rotation; exploiting their rapture value and relinquishing them of their original power.

Unfortunately, this registered as pure jargon to the curator. I stuck to my guns and refused to bring the axe down on my own practice. If someone was going to write about my work in a format that was accessible to the other side, it surely wasn't going to be me. Tell the public they can wash down that glass of peanut butter with a milk sandwich. The official press release for the show read as such:

With a keen eye for composition and color, Katie Cercone assembles discarded consumer products including toys, bed sheets, hair clips and food, creating wall sculptures that critique our bourgeois and patriarchal culture. Cercone is a student in the MFA Fine Arts Department.

At the risk of sounding like a rashly disillusioned and reactionary feminist politico, I'm going to point out that they replaced "Feminist" and "Post-Capitalist" with "Bourgeois" and "Patriarchal." Under the guise of making my jargon more intelligible, the new copy reframes my position in a way that reaffirms the status quo and blots out my utopic exclamation. Might I add that all written copy that is associated with the school and earns the SVA logo as it's seal is required to go through an unabashedly totalitarian communications department that edits the text and sees that it conforms to strict regulations concerning font and text size. When I sought confirmation of this from an SVA adjunct faculty member she remarked that the word "failure" was once edited out of her course description.

If there is one last right we should maintain as artists it is our right to fail.

Phantom Limb

to the nursemaid who has loosened knots, burned through blocked passageways; musicated the very milk of my organs. what old rot having died off completely can come back dressed in sumptuous disguise? my very dangerous limb, where the soul cuts clean the mind sticks; there in its quilt of checks and balances, its illusions - imagining the imaginary - my limb awakening, like a phantom.

what better defense against the death instinct than the false self? shelter the symptom, sabotage my well-being in order to maintain the jouissance of anxiety! i was a disciple of dead thinking, icing the wound of a lost limb. the fable i wore on my body neatly eclipsed the larger myth, the myth of my singularity. it was my spectacle, it was me, confronted with all the pressure to conform to this notion of an embodied, higher social unit.

the imaginary - she is constantly sewing back and forth, tumbling over lines of motion in reverse, building thick ridges, she is always in exultant, intimate revolt. to what service would i direct her? to what height would i let her sublimations reign? she is the damaging of any single meaning. she will rush lengthwise along my nervous system until the signifiers begin to sing on their own.

she is the subject-in-process/on trial, stirring, sweating, singing; giver of a new gift, of parousia, love as a non-reciprocal, disequilibrium. if i clear her the room, she will provide nourishment that is never fixed, a line that will run through the body fashioning a lightscape, source becoming source, low and sweet, floral, rapturous. that feeling of serene mastery few physical things in this world have the power to produce. perhaps the sea? art as a secret exercise rivaling the wide blue sea and its way of extinguishing my thoughts so perfectly, so sublimely.

i constructed a purer fantasy; my mystical solution baring strange resemblance to the bitter root of my original malady. there had to be another way, a thorn pushed into my side in just the right place? you, my love, my shackle, my sticky leash,

whose terrible blood hit my skin and clung, shining like a diamond. you - beastly, bloody, unyielding, driving to the very highest pitches of happiness. a reminder of the animal world calling from outside my calculated solitude. were as all my mortal preoccupations wound tightly like a rope snaking down my throat and through my digestive tract curling neatly below my navel, you were bursting out of yours, your brilliant blood running from your tares and washing down the streets into the gutters and back out into the big wide field in which you roamed. you prohibited my retreat into the sealed imaginary, my transcending into cultivated light. moral compass? you had none. you had no borders, no boundaries, and your maniacal force snapped my very perfect edges. i approached the limits of my symptomatic and treasured flesh. you were as real as this very dark, this very external stain and i couldn’t bare to wash you off like the rest of my earthly tethers.

what was my internal necessity? the bone in my throat. candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. my geometry, my reservoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.

* material appearing in italics is taken from selected writings of julia kristeva (1941-)

Friendship Triangle

Light / Luz : White noise. Clean walls, fresh paint, china. Domesticity. Friendship. Visible anatomy; Pressed napkins, hot irons. Sanitation. Tennis skirts. distillation. Private bathrooms. Flat Screens, sopranos, strings of pearls, cups of sugar. Anorexia. Architecture. Academia. Eugenics. Vodka sodas, small talk. Father. Voicemail. Light pollution. Ice.


Gray Area / Medio: collective memory. affection. pencil marks. carbohydrate. guilt. friendship triangles, café con leche. windshields, silence, email. parallel lines. lures. scotch tape. smoked glass. film. lean meat. dream-states. Adhesives, dust. The texture of the symptom, its snaking parts, like long tongues wetting my limbs. The dwelling space within our poetic hierarchies; you are contingent, punctual and fragile at your points of entry. Contaminating, becoming, dissolving. Gift and reserve. The baking rhythm, rising, icing, dripping, slicing open. The border surveyor, silver chief.

Dark / Oscuro: Cravings, throats. Nightmares. Racism. Soot, Neglect. Precoscious children. Depth. Secret. Proximity, heat, fire, sex. Thick hair, eye contact. Tar, 4-day hair. Stimulants, jealousy, attention. Mother. Deep night sky.

What was our internal necessity? The bone in my throat. Candy bone, glitter bone, gutter bone, gun bone, gore bone. Light as gift, dark as reserve. You and you, my triangle, my resevoir, my mote, my drinking straw, my lonely round.

Anxiety Banquet

The house is a bird’s very person; it is its form and it’s most immediate effort, I shall even say, it’s suffering. The result is only obtained by constant repeated pressure of the breast. There is not one of these blades of grass that, in order to make it curve and hold the curve, has not been pressed on countless times by the bird’s breast, its heart, surely with difficulty breathing, perhaps even, with palpitations. (Jules Michelet, L’oisseau, 4th Edition, 1858)

At the banquet, the mother never spilled a drop or made a stain, never let loose a lick. I looked on in pain as she groomed her steaming dishes in a mechanized waltz - gravy, candied berries, honeyed ham, creamed potatoes, she lifting, stirring and separating with her cooking wands; clean, fresh and cold like a young pearl protected from the sticky, hot, spicy stink of those foods pulsing beneath their white lids until dinner time.

The tendency of crystals, certain minerals and rocks is that they break in preferred directions so as to yield more or less smooth surfaces, called cleavage planes. These are interfaces, they are like cracks, they are the gem's defense against boundary confusion. They yield what appears to be solid, smooth units, flat units, contained units; but it is the cracks that reference my lost hopes*

I prayed I was a border crosser, that I had double visions, that I could please the banquet mother and the banquet father without deserting myself.

I looked at each of the faces at the banquet. The sister, the brother, the stepsiblings, the uncles and animals and Grandma with her vanishing fingers glued to her golden goblet of wine. The aunt, who said, "I'm taking something." Who said, firmly, "I'm much better" and "much happier," automatism circling her face like a snake.

This one had a sister, whose every pore gleamed with the extempore flame of her mechanism; her breathe reeked of it as she excreted it in mists of vaporous ribaldry she flung about the table like fire sparks. You could tell the lens she looked through into the world made it bright. “I’ve found it,” she began dramatically, “a light for the night.” You couldn’t blame her for accepting it, this notion that there was no panacea, only little rushes of calculated euphoria (and the people you could love while the fury of the night in your heart rots out its fire) despite the deficits and disappointments that always rushed in like a flood. That you should find comfort and rush in, claw at it – until it made you an animal, a swan that sinks crying.

“The brain tissue, it conducts electricity! And these burdensome psychological thresholds, how they burst!” she sung, spittle gleaming from the crevices of her narrow animal teeth.

I looked deeper into this garden of the banquet, where inhabited space transcended the geometrics of the dining room. I saw the ancestral milk running into rivers and around islands, the putrid vegetable dust of dead mothers who shoved their brains in ovens, or drowned themselves in food and drink. Each ghost bloomed like a flower in its bed. I saw the anxiety that hung around these ghosts, and how what they could not master in life wrapped them like a cloak after death.

The banquet food called to me, shrilly, calling for me to make it my refuge. With syrup and butter married upon my hands I might have fashioned myself a large cradle. Would I submit to its terror? Would I refuse to eat? My little heart stayed back, she starved. My skin played the part of the classic daughter, the daughter seduced by glittering packages and holiday romance, pony-tailed, milk-drinking, rosey-cheeked and chirpy, chiming in during the discussion of safe topics (The weather. Recipes. Technology. Money. Finances) warmly from my very first nest.

Suddenly my lungs and all the other bodily drums ignited, listening to her, this beast that flooded the table with her monster music, her pitch rising against the sinking frowns of the monkey chorus, “I know in what pocket a woman keeps her heart and soul, and in what jostle of the liver, kidneys and genitalia these pockets are pilfered. There is no pure sorrow. Why? It is bedfellow to the lungs, lights, bones, guts and gall!”

Slap. My little heart skipped away for the moment, stolen by revery, still hungrily looking, for nourishment.

My little heart ran from the banquet, from its ominous aroma, that thick stink that struck the air like a bellwether. She ran under careless moonbeams into the forest, where she could dance too much under the stars that rubbed away filial tethers.

How freely the imagination remakes space. My heart danced with the Wilis that night during the banquet while my body could not. If you don't know them, the Wilis are womenlike creatures that appear to mortal men in the night. They take pleasure in the seduction of these men, enticing them and vanishing, luring them into a dance that can only end in their death from exhaustion.

My heart (pulsing, palpitating) thrust herself into this beastly underworld. I wanted the felicitous liaison I made in the forest with the Wili's to invade the banquet where my skin and bones still remained. Could this dream skip from soul to soul?

This garden that grew up all around me during the banquet was fierce, and I felt like a swelling fruit pressing up against its sides. My body sectioned out into independent events - skin, mouth, limbs and of course, my internal organs, which won out in the end for being so hot, so angry, bubbling over from their pots and spilling out like lava on the crisp white table cloth, the cream carpet, burning the hands of the mother and sister and brother and the tongues of the animals as they licked up my hot spilling flesh.


- material in italics has been taken from Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (1937)