Tag: Against the machine

sapere

whale music

to know
to be able to
to taste
to feel
only this how
i am because we are
& need know only this
& how machine will disagree
does not make it less true
but only more like the living
and less like the thing
whose badge of being
is of efficiency
& departure from
the dirt & blood
& flow of living
earth as she
remains
still
here
an offering
beyond product
or production
in echo
beyond
any other sound
however loud however
bleeding it leaves us in our ears
where we swim deep underwater & still here & here & here to hear us––
tho bleeding it leaves us in our ears however loud
however any other sound beyond in echo
still our offering here remaining
in dirt & bloodied waters
beneath you

what even is

this place at this time

maybe it’s a story about being a body in this world
in an age of destruction on the verge of
remembering her collective life
despite the current bluster
i cannot be alone
in having have felt it creeping all of mine
while regularly and inexplicably injured
by the force worked so aggressively to stifle
that still, small voice that has always been
all i ever wanted to hear until nodding
in response to this thing
David Wagoner wrote, which I paraphrase
regularly in my thoughts
as Here is the place where you are,
and you must treat it like
a powerful stranger.
so here we go again––


Hello, strange stranger, you are
all of us now, and i can’t keep from
dreaming some possible arrival
even here
even now

true confessions

at the killing hour

  1.  Hello. I am this being before you, embodied.
  2. I am made of flesh. I am being enfleshed.
  3. Which by extension makes me not quite up to muster &  by definition a slow being. 
  4. A fact that forces an admission: how flesh is a slow, as far as substances go. Yesterday, driving home in traffic, I listened to a story (in real time) about the development of data transfer methods via photon. It was old news by the time I heard it. And yet.
  5. My flesh, such as it is, will never travel at the speed of light. And yet, being human, I am one part body and the rest of me is story.
  6. In one of these, I dream of a constant beginning at first light.
  7. In another, I fly.
  8. In another, I am the dead, returned. Sometimes winged. With a choral entourage.
  9. I suspect you are, too. 
  10. So listen. To this question, please.  If I sing to you from the dark place where we hide, waiting, will you please shine me home?
  1.  [and beyond]  for once you surpass ten steps you are surely beyond the beyonds

and yet

I know you are a stranger here, too, so by the light of you I become friend. 

Come, friend. We have places to go. 

They are dark now, until we arrive. 

We may not travel at the speed of light, but this love is a shining thing. 

What if now is time to bring it out? 

I have no answers, only this slow form.

Take it now and let us go.

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.

What, Counting

in this space before what goes

In this time among these machines that want nothing, that take and absorb the images and sounds and other residues of our lives, their harvest, I want. But am so often dulled among their droning that I may not name it. 

What, then? Has that been also reaped? I am counting before it goes, wanting to say. Something but the taint of those scythes is in the words, too.

Let us count before we go, some other way. The machine will not know to measure waiting by the heartbeat, ear pressed to beloved chest, the rasp of final breaths or by the caw-caw-caw across the sky outside this window in the still of midafternoon, above and beyond the droning, beeping whirr of them, indifferent to the stretched stillness, pulled taut until the next caws back. 

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