I want to imagine
the quiet pause
among dreaming
bodies unworried
by fear, just before
the dizzy speed of
radioactive play
began uncoiling
itself.
Eye
Antique dreamscape
Category: earthling
Lead Time
Before leaving
Part of preparing to go anywhere else always involves collecting to yourself those things that you think you may need. It doesn’t matter whether the mind doing the collecting is the conscious one––the type to make a list––or signing from an underground, unseen but essential.
Making do
Between the living
Until rest
Until I can answer
Until I can do better
Until quiet
Until time
and presence erupts
against our absence.
Transience
After space
First was displacement across a hollowing, echoing earth. Then came the longing of the rest of us, still here. The ache to know a place. Meanwhile, we remain tethered to one or another edge but mostly floating, trying to listen to the remaining birds. Who seem sometimes to suggest a song to somewhere.
how to succeed
in a utopia
follow fortune.
hate the fallen.
leave the huddled masses
on the road in the wake
of drums announcing
perpetual triumph.
know that looking
is considered trespass
against the preachers
of positivity
for there is no
stopping here.
only progress
up and always
as hot air
Soundings
and wave
What is the opposite of the way we floated in that space, where it held us in that singing silence, drifting to and from? I don’t want to say it. Only that when we approached near enough, we gave names to one another. It was a way to hold and pass between us, all that reflection and depth. Later came a noise to shatter that silence, and we stopped passing names. I may forget my own, soon. Or the one that held me floating, more than mine. I make this feeble note, unsure if I can sound it anymore. It is the scrap of a decimated raft. I hold it, something between here and that endless down.
The Signifier
When suggesting.
What I mean
is that I mean to remember
where meaning is murdered.
What I mean
is for what
lives and where
it may.
Boom
Before recorded time
You don’t have a name for what you are in until you’re leaving it. Sometimes, to move, you have to try to give it words even when the blasts keep interrupting, even when the words you have fail to satisfy the genre of official record.
Trade Show
Spectacles of progress
Notice its efficiency,
the ease with which
this machine can
separate the living
from the life.
Why this?
Answers to FAQs.
Why this?
For these moments
I brace with an answer.
So dumb when it comes
to the ways of this place
that I carry a cheat sheet.
It says: taste, tear,
bear the weight because
you know yourself a floating
thing, prone to flying off,
unable to land. The terror
of losing touch with
gravity. Because that dark
beyond those clouds
is thick with the pull
of entropy, into some
chaos and I don’t know
what, away from here
the place of sweat
and laundry and alarms
and a lot of driving to
and from places in cars
with their warning lights
and trying to park
and getting overdraft
notices and the most recent
thing to break today is a blood
vessel in the eye and that little
hinge that’s supposed to keep
the door from opening too wide
and obviously this heart and
at least one of these is going
to stay broke and too far open
all the time.