Bones rattle museum walls, knocking time from broken joint. Mind the masks.
living matter
post plunder
Month: October 2024
binding energies
future objects
When the prison or its shadow becomes constant and the fugitive no longer wants to scream, sing against its fortress in scandalous melody, of exorbitant creation––not of lasting order, but as embodiment of the cycle of renewal and destruction sacred to all life. Sing to the way form freed from origin may open the way to the ecstatic space of sublime sense, out of mind and loosed from all perspective, the psychic distance between eye and image finally collapsed, in favor of the wider lens, no longer a singular consciousness, but psyche herself; no longer worldview, but vision. Bring back the missing, the not-theres, invisible. To animate the assembly back to birth.
dematerialization
desired delusion
In the hour for actions reversed, the eye shifts into attention after the face is gone. Where is the matter when what lived is lined up for erasure by the image? Touched-up, retouched, rendered from raw into perfect abstraction, acres of rendered flesh are stored in server silos beyond the reach of any of any creature’s touch.
say the word
in the dark times, singing
Three weeks ago, I met a daughter, just out of rehab, tattoos on her face.
You don’t get tattoos on your face so young and so beautiful unless. You don’t get those without knowing what it means to be taken from all knowing and collapsed into container for taking the pain as it comes from the strangers who come from a place from which memory has long been erased and every effort made to replace its former volume with desperate force. It doesn’t take so much imagination to understand what happens to girls in desperate places.
She was gentle and frightened and I sat with her in solemn awe, I see you, daughter, and now––here. I could offer only space and calm (no, I didn’t have the wifi code, none of us did) and said what I could about the possibility of story, to take the stuff of before and bring it before the fire of pen on page, fingertips on keyboard, voice taking stage before the formerly silent self, to sing brokenness back into being. “I like this,” she said, “I need more of this.”
It was days between losing and marking the loss to a system of regulations in the name of keeping safe and I nodded my acceptance when they told me as I imagine she may have, eventually, after they took her away––even through boiling rage against another senseless day in the wake of so long breaking–––meaning to maintain devotion to the hope for an ordering hand, coming where waiting feels like a looping prayer, Say the Word.
May she find that word, or it find her.
lullaby: Time
By Tom Waits.
No words today. Heart wrung too raw with a week of accumulated griefs, yet ever committed to hope as a moral obligation. I have not held my guitar in years. Today I dusted it off to try to remember some things. Warmed up with this old favorite by the legendary Tom Waits. Forgive my faltering. I am no musician, only a seeker.
muse on fire
in the age of combustion
Nomos, look. Piles of human meat in the shadow of constant hunt. Camps across the landscape. Who is there? Strangers, while every other seeming friend is more estranged by the hour.
Killing is clean now. See its mechanical precision. How ignorance becomes power, bestowing freedom from the burden of care to anyone ready to get drunk on controlling the flow.
Truth becomes a willingness to collapse against the heat of the furnace from the Cyclops’ workshop where the official language is money, and it means to excise other tongues, as souvenirs.
Absence of connection now connective tissue. O body, hold me to remember against the age of endless exhibition––the face, how it felt before you saw it as looping mirrors screening its self-portrait funhouse for forgetting all form where the matter at hand is content and the hand need not apply.
What speaks is by number now but my beginning was the word and I mean to live inside that womb, becoming.
body
of earth
power of bedrock
expanse of sea into sky
you will not be owned
though some try
still
crying seize, seize!
another day
what waits in waste
notes on progress
What intent
will steal the word
in service of machine?
What essence, baptized by iron
fist, can never reach itself?
Only destruction, and its tools
once animated with vital force
by mechanized congregations
have ways of running out
of hand.
For consolation, only
conquest of accomplishment
in perpetual precarity, seeking
perpetual next.
Ore
What time is now?
The dream of power: to become time, to embody its abstractions and the way it will not be destroyed. If it is possible to become what is eaten, power eats time, to tune the instrument of its incessant hunger to construct, demolish, form; it needs concrete, mortar, beams, bodies; to crush stone, bones, flesh––and does so, until time itself is called into question and the countdown begins.
*
Notes while reading Achille Mbembe’s Brutalism.
plant talk
underheard
Inert, you said, in our direction.
Unfeeling, without a brain.
We were eating light, making green.
Involved as this was, we still made efforts to translate for you.
You plugged your ears, turned eyes to the cutting glow in your hands.
Working, you said, of what you were doing. We wondered, at what?
You did not seem to have a taste for light and the dark frightened you.
Here, we offered, waving. You turned away.