Starlight scatters wound flint paths of old songs to remember scales in rain.
vine
and branch
Category: Wonders
mist
mourn
after the melt,
what strange mold
creeps where blood
once ran, its sound
less pulse, more drum
vibrancy
life beyond ideas
What moves hand, root, tide, bud, breath––
is no abstraction, but the trembling in each
listening leaf.
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.
let
into voice
Incant a tongue inflamed at drought’s long deaths, to spit a song to spark the sky to weeping.
Cyanobacteria
Innovating breath
Although they, too, would later be lumped––by clumsy taxonomies and antimicrobial prejudice––into a category of creature commonly jeered as pestilence, these tiny pioneers had the chutzpah to dare to take into themselves what all others knew as poison and we now call breath, and life, and living. At the arrival of the great oxidation event, one might imagine the others on the planet lamenting the end. Meanwhile, these guys were like, and now. . . here’s green!
Augury
No roosting here
The birds will tell you. Watch. Take this one, for example. This strident singer, pausing mid-trill to make the expression that translates loosely to never mind. This upon finding herself in the company of another kind of bird than she expected. The place to which instinct had led her had changed. The other bird is frightened by these strange notes. They belong in an elsewhere that used to be here. Now it may be nowhere. She makes sounds that translate loosely to it’s okay. Once calmed, the frightened bird returns to singing the familiar notes of the region. The now silent stranger waits, nodding, then flies again, wings sighing. It had been so long between landings. The next will be longer.
Now she remembers. There is a way to stay in flight while sleeping. Hold the wings. Let the currents do the work, move only to pivot and slice between them when you must. Decide there is no other place but this flight. Forget wanting to land. Here is the song. She pulls it to her, full and close.
the never mind
calling to attend
Bells break. Reminders back to something, another order. Which?
I break. Wanting to remember what once mattered, and how.
Break now. You are not this dull waste, but more. Who?
Efflorescence
An offering
Call the mind a flower atop the stem of someone swaying, fragile, rooted. Call its opening an invitation to the ones in flight. Like, come and see. Take part of me when you leave.