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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.

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.

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.

leaking cup

and cracks between worlds

There is a leak in these cups. For three mornings in a row now, my coffee is gone before I am anywhere near ready to begin anything. And the compass must have fallen into a crevice––or crevasse, somewhere in the storm of this mess. I like the dreaming better when I am not pulled from it so soon, and when I can see the distinctions between to and from. Writing that sentence sounds like an admission of having lost essential bearings, of not knowing whether this is coming or going, which is more than I meant to unpack so early. 

I rehearse the choreography of resolve: I will sort this out. Here, like this. This is a bed. This is a room. The alarm, Monday. The empty cup where the coffee should still be. In the kitchen, the knife beside the bread until the moment comes to cut, to feed. And I balk before reading the news again, not ready yet for the next installment of who is eating whom; it seems that we have yet to admit something to ourselves, about our tastes.

In the last dream, there were a number of us in need of carrying, away from some alarm. I was among these, but in the last scene a carrier, taking whomever I could fit in my arms. The carried were weakened, ill, and although larger than me in normal times, presented themselves small enough to fit under an arm.

Here we are, the I of my dream was saying to these, here we are and checking as I hurried, are you okay, saying as I hurried, here we are and we are almost. Saying, we are almost here. And now, time to go to some other where, more familiar in setting and somehow much less clear.