creased cosmos
If the only given I may assume asserts this universe as a story in pieces, with each unseen place a fiction to be assembled from salvaged shards of knowns and unknowns found and undiscovered bits, then my only conclusion may be to wonder at the mosaic brilliance of the map that swallows the all that any of us witnesses, in the valley of the trace of a single fold.
after Dionne Brand
in plain sight
Wanting only to be witnessed, children turn to handheld mirrors endlessly reflecting one another back, far away amid the storms of him nearby, mirroring only the magnitude of his own signs.
post plunder
Bones rattle museum walls, knocking time from broken joint. Mind the masks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
this solution an unknown substance, dissolving
No, meaning is not the cat’s pajamas. I think but cannot tell you how. Neither is it the bees’ knees. Do these dream in flower? I can only imagine. It isn’t exactly remembrance or having the same nightmare as the night before. This morning’s visitor wonders whether deer think in words without knowing it, so now I wonder whether I might read in flower, unaware as one who by the swallowing presence of an atmospheric mind, can write herd even when alone, and smell the wild prairie poem, recited in honeybee.
***
Inspired by Bernadette Meyer.
Appealing to vertigo
Begin again–– before the fall. Turning and returning––the mind spins like a child to feel the euphoria of dizziness. Too close to the edge, I try to warn, back away from there! But vertigo is its own draw. The weight of seeming sanity is enough to inspire a preference for the vantage afforded by dizziness. There is sight beyond seeing, but no words for what it is.
The dream
Reject the reality of consensus, those givens which work as chains. Of course they are offered freely, usually sweetened. If maintained, so is our life force, taken by what was made to reap from us our ability to imagine better. Imagine better.
