Residuaries: Morgan Lucas Schuldt's Especial Unvanishings

Morgan Lucas Schuldt's obituary can be read here, but his "residuary" (the name incidentally, of one of his poems in (as vanish, unespecially) (Flying Guillotine Press, 2012)) resides in the three chapbooks and assorted poems he found places for in the world.

Schuldt's (dis)ability poetics is one of lyrical fracture, brokenness as neologism, archaicism as innovation:

Bc the body--
lopsed, scrawned, convolved--

is ex-why.

The nouns of normative syntax and nominative language do not suffice, to reach toward the language of the body, "lopped, scrawned, convolved" as it is.  Spellchecker offers "scrawled" for "scrawned."

Suffering from cystic fibrosis, a gradual deterioration of the lungs, Schuldt had to invent a new way of breathing words.

Lung ache.  Lang-ache.

Or, in "Becoming Regardless,": "If I could forget/this breatheathing"

With the inevitability of his own death hanging over him, in his early thirties, everything is shot through with the intense need to get it right, right now:

Like the heard words in the sounds--

every place we are
...............................is one we'll aren't.

Elaboratably.

--("Memento Mori") 

And:

Days giving way like birth bone.

--("Becoming Regardless")

And

the pain

wd be with & w/ out form

........................usefulness longing

for how nothing in the word

(other than us)

.........................performs

--("Body as Go, Body as Believer") 

Such relentless invention.  Such reaching toward the ribs and breathing of language, our worst-best prosthesis, our open sarcophagus.

Would that Schuldt could have built longer.  And what would he have done, had he had longer--the question we ask of all struck down in youth--seems less important than to read what he did with the time he had.  So: read him.