Category: earthling

true confessions

at the killing hour

  1.  Hello. I am this being before you, embodied.
  2. I am made of flesh. I am being enfleshed.
  3. Which by extension makes me not quite up to muster &  by definition a slow being. 
  4. A fact that forces an admission: how flesh is a slow, as far as substances go. Yesterday, driving home in traffic, I listened to a story (in real time) about the development of data transfer methods via photon. It was old news by the time I heard it. And yet.
  5. My flesh, such as it is, will never travel at the speed of light. And yet, being human, I am one part body and the rest of me is story.
  6. In one of these, I dream of a constant beginning at first light.
  7. In another, I fly.
  8. In another, I am the dead, returned. Sometimes winged. With a choral entourage.
  9. I suspect you are, too. 
  10. So listen. To this question, please.  If I sing to you from the dark place where we hide, waiting, will you please shine me home?
  1.  [and beyond]  for once you surpass ten steps you are surely beyond the beyonds

and yet

I know you are a stranger here, too, so by the light of you I become friend. 

Come, friend. We have places to go. 

They are dark now, until we arrive. 

We may not travel at the speed of light, but this love is a shining thing. 

What if now is time to bring it out? 

I have no answers, only this slow form.

Take it now and let us go.

susurrar

of bodies in translation

It appears that the what of it all
such as it is, happens between
ordered chains of causalities
& wild storms of infinite chance
so if then i should glimpse & dare
some address, will it matter? where
are you going and where have you
been? & i wonder what other
questions hide behind the veil
of this one, a bawdy elegy for
some lost relic, now lucid,
now dense, entombed
where root whispers to
root then sings to leaf
amid reaching of singular
dendrites across impossible
gulfs, where i am made
of volatile stuff between
ice and liquid, you may

find me
in the melt between lake
and cloud where i must be
the flying off.

one note

in a gathering marginal crowd

Rhythms of earth tongues,
come out. I give these
primitive liberties forms
to evade surveillance
of that principle
bent on separation
of bodies from themselves
and one another
that enacts bars
of murderous purity
masquerading
as sensible grammars.
Nocturnal creatures know
me, sit in my lap, lap from
my hands & laugh at extents
of your fears. We only eat prey,
love, announce the joyful birds.
Separate us all you like. Each
solitude only offers another
rebirth. With each, we widen
the net of our bodies. We become
looming canopies connecting
at altitudes & depths, above
& beneath the walls you drive
yourself mad with the effort
of erecting in your endless quest
to extract Resource from source
while mass-printing gods to coddle
your greed, and their dragons laugh
Will you look at this face? No
you can’t bear it, finding
in its gaze the endless points
of no return, each now a star
in the night you claimed
to conquer & our skins fallen
from us, we move from
their weight & your ability to trace
yes what are you tracing & do you
know when the last wall is built its last
stone in place and the weight of its
prowess inverts and you find yourself
entombed in some solitary well, to call
us, who will hear you but the lowest,
who come and go
among these depths
and their
dead?

ars moriendi

if it goes like this what now

the week for learning
how it was death
been knocking
on my nerves
was the week for learning
how
now might be
an entry into this
high time
to set some things
down and go
into that long channel
with high archways
of blue-white ice
where a single bird silhouette
flaps waiting, high above
& also you
in that passage
where we can’t take what
with us when we
go

unspeakable

afters

when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped

& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only

took up song again, with all words
wronged

upright, back braced, throwing
notes

to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond

meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch

she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone

from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond

the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,

becoming something else, enough
light to make shade

like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch

each branch like a river she knew
when him once

before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost

song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird

to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry

from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore

to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.

out on a limb

in retreat

with weakness ever infinite,
surrender is always possible,
even likely.

better to the tree than the crowd,
better to the force of gravity than
the heights of a fool, professing––
anything.

out there, in the beyond, there
is a tree and she holds up the
sky

you can walk to her, extend a foot
to a branch and let her
hold you

suspended, then breathe and look.
how much better this offering
than another needless
sacrifice? you can

stay awhile. you may need to.
let the crowd and the fools
hold forth with the sole of
your foot facing sky

let your head remain grounded
beneath her shade. Extend
a hand, return.

carrier pigeon

re: undelivered message

What I came here for was a thing for the moment. Ancient and entirely present.

Ready? You called, with so much enthusiasm, I thought you understood.

You know? I called back, amazed. Now retrace the original sin.

I do know! you shouted, and Now is the time! I took your slogans for sincerity. That was a long time ago. Now you repeat yourself. Sure, there’s a wolf somewhere, but when?

You don’t know time. We joke that you are it, given the terms of your world. In which you are all but your saving and still the sun. No other imaginable constant, and so not ready when the real one comes.

I am not sure to what extent the joke is mutual, but laughter is a means of survival in transit. Destination? Return to sender, we suppose. I have nowhere else I was planning to go. But here––

Okay, if you want, I say. Be louder. Wear more feathers. I don’t know what you think you are doing with any of that but they say it works somewhere.

Many love it––you constantly remind me, and anyone listening, of this truth. Your sacred red herring.

Go ahead. Offer it up again and again. Confess without words, how you love how they love it, even as they hold the alternative like a knife to your throat.

I don’t want to lead you into a frightening place, you smile. And wink, for the camera, again. Recasting illness as forbidden fruit, infestation as the alluring dragon guarding your treasures, your gilded selves.

What does an old bird say to something like this? With a sigh I assure you, I am not afraid. But for you.

You can lead a horse to water but there’s nothing to do for the one who keeps sending the cart far ahead of himself and away from her banks, to collect.

Okay then, friend. Carry on. It is easy to misread a moment. There is enough here to distract you from presence, and in a moment, I go, to carry back with me an awareness that most of yourselves will never know.

ideas for beginning

somewhere, meaning

Start with want.

Begin with impatience, the stuck breath of what to say when everyone is always interrupting, holding forth.

Start with fever.

Begin with syntax as the opposite of cultivated rows of well-behaved lines, to swing the screeching monkey mind between vining ellipses.

Start with eruption of doggerel in perfect union with the fervent bloom of heart’s first blood, and with the last. Of everything. Start with everything at once, all at one time.

Begin as a reader. Begin with a piercing sense of fundamental unworthiness. Then say the word.

Start intending to get a closer look at the many-legged creature sliming under the rock you take to be your soul. Start naming the insects teeming in the soul, and the slime you mistook for a separate matter.

Begin with the end in mind––no, not your ends. The end. Begin with questions, like how many legs? And what is the taste of this monster’s spool?

Start with what may kill you and then get past it. Resist thinking this makes you stronger than those who start with what may kill you and then get nowhere. Notice how everywhere you get; you break open into more pieces. Break. Dance.

Begin building the opposite of a fortress. Start with rubble. With commitment and patience, one day you may evolve into an underwater wreck. Stick with it, and one day you will become the sand of an abandoned beach.

I mean.

Start with revision. Of the material as they have been presented to you, by all who meant you well, or ill. Start by revising the known story.

Begin against logic, against all reasonable arguments for some better thing. In hope and without any.

I mean.

You can begin with an attempt to explain, if you must. But that one, I think, is overrated. So little of this what will submit to explanation, anyway. Plenty of people get off on the idea of fitting saddles onto flying dragons, but some prefer dragons in their wildest states, breathing fire against any demands to explain themselves.

Start with putting a bucket to catch the drops from a leaking roof, or you can start on the roof–– or if you are really motivated, you can remove the roof. There are many ways to stop a leak, but none to stop the leaking of the world from the containers we try to make for it.

Begin with an admission. I am such a small container, and the world is leaking from me.

I mean.

Begin in darkness, deaf, and dumb as bedrock, mute as the whale as she appears to the climber who cannot hear her singing.