Category: Perception

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?

burn

a meeting with the emperor

please don’t put the new fortress there, said the old woman to the emperor. remember what happened to the last one?

he picked her up, spun her around, smiled. he sang a happy song about self-love.

it’s going to burn, she said. she lived in a tiny hut near the well. she was calm and very polite. she made no mention of his nakedness.

you are so wise! he said, laughing, and your eyes! wow, are those wells, too?

then he assured her not to worry. he had the best of intentions and these were the opposite of burning. all good! he sang, spinning off.

later, when the blaze ate the hillside and everyone on it, including the old woman’s hut, he cried, SEND SOMEONE! HELP!

o god, he whispered, after the shouting.

but by the point, even the helicopters had to retreat. the woman near the well was silent.

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.

touring the empire

at midnight

There were forests and wildlands at the outskirts of the empire––still, can you imagine?! All quaking earth and quail whistle, where roaring waters sounded ceaselessly. We were paid to visit them, as translators––not very much, as everyone believed that none of the forms of this land had anything informative to offer. What they had to say was so much more than the intelligence the emperors were after but there wasn’t a word for what it was, so we returned without much to say, accepting pennies for our silence. We said nothing, too, of the stifling emptiness they built of gilded halls of recycled data sets, sharpened to cut the earnest pilgrim at every edge. The naked emperors bled, too, but no one spoke of this––neither the blood nor their nakedness. The dogs followed at a distance, to lick it up. There was no room in the shelters in the shadows of the golden halls, so we took our numbers and got in line with the others while the shining halls stood empty, dripping blood with the wind and the dogs howling through them.

gone with

the tide

Then we came to the lamp, singing. What fun there was in those moments was not to be had, but had us. Then, stopping just short of being stretched to taffy with laughter, we parted. Time to go. The only way to hear was as an outcast. Inside, the ears get stopped by the noise of building fortress walls. Goodbye, each called, to find us again in waters, blooming.

sidling up

between membranes

When winter stills the air from vapored vowels of our mouths into crystal-edged mirrors between us, I want to imagine that what follows will be sharp enough to see through to the other sides of ancient wounds and cut the teeth of inner ears on choral voices bathing in the residue of final breaths, still unheard. And so I look on, ignorant and wanting while the departed clip still-growing fingernails, blowing steam rings over my head.