Tag: language

unspeakable

afters

when bird i dreamed i walked
upright like woman to fall
beneath tree under branch
after their singing stopped

& upright like her i braced back
into song to call her lost to calling
them
back beneath shade beneath branch
to revive her and rising she only

took up song again, with all words
wronged

upright, back braced, throwing
notes

to land gone from sense or syntax
to cries beyond

meaning, obscured shades beneath
that branch

she lost the lines between her limbs
now they are gone

from sense or syntax, losing herself
to loss beyond

the beyonds, as her grandmother had,
beyond hope,

becoming something else, enough
light to make shade

like the dead, leaving––leaves beneath
each living branch

each branch like a river she knew
when him once

before her body into dirt was enough
to carry the lost

song from beyond that ancient branch
from bird

to whatever gave her syntax sense,
from loss, to carry

from the last she knew, the song
no one sings anymore

to rest in shade, believing you can
still make a soul from dead
leaves if you leave
it all.

chaos and waste

in the fields

Know the killers by their words. They use too many, and invert them. They speak a language of chaos to stir confusion. Once frothed to full foment, they descend from their towers to feed and grow fat on the blood of lambs. By morning, they have disappeared to clean themselves and then reappear above the carnage, lamenting. This mess, this mess, they say. For shame, they say, and lob another theory into the crowd, the usual balloons of enhanced security and maximum efficiency. These float on the raised hands of the assembled, who cheer.  The speakers smile, digesting last night’s feast. Tonight, repeat.

Meanwhile, a haggard band of constant shepherds gather under cover of remaining trees, to tremble before the lives remaining, and abide.

astral missives

between elsewhere

Where to, next? but the boatman will not tell.
Only leap, he says, between the boats
as we sail in the space between channels,
coursing code of signals woven in these waters,
currents of carpet filigreed with figures
of vegetal dream, scented with musk
of mane and canine teeth, tail and tender
breath of newborn skin; down of butterfly
catching red of griffin’s eye, shouting call back!
against flicker of torches painting membrane
of cave wall; trembling hand over womb,
magnetic storm lunges us into the slipstream
of tongues after Babel’s last breath and look
another shouts, look! We are arriving! now.

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. 

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.

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.

considering context

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.