Tag: time

a.m. notes

by river bed

Here it is again: you, falling
from another heaven at daybreak;
sob of thunder, waking, to play agin
against the dealer’s fixed chips.

You know you won’t get out of here
alive, but can’t keep yourself
from trying.

Meanwhile, outside leaves
pearl hot beads
of late-morning mist
alert and insistent––

long past the hour
when the last god slipped
from leaking basket
of a drowning heir to call
after one of the prophets
groaning another toothache
from too much gnashing of teeth
to make another now from the next
application of warm rum
to gums stayed through mornings
by sleep.

There is so much
more to do, and we with teeth
still in us, some keep on
keeping,
biding time.

Ore

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.

Cymatics

Aural imagery

I saw a sound. It rattled the bones of the last days of a time. That time of frayed signposts. Or times. The time was current. The time moved past futures. The time was possible, and all of us at stake. Now I watch for it everywhere, in hope of hearing. It is everywhere, but my eyes are not so good, having been too thoroughly trained by all that would erase her appearance.

Every Grain

Our sands

With bone worn backs we huddle
in the shadow of empire, nursing
unborn stars, to beg the question:
how many dawns remain? Against
vain attempts to tame the hungers
of that constant, mechanical mouth,
its gaping hole the void in the centers
where we once met beneath another
sun, in another time, before time was
eaten too, to be excreted in legions
of micro units, meted out in
increments
of perceived
worth.

Body in Time

One, two, one again.

Sure, I am interested in keeping time. Who isn’t? But there has to be more to it than clocks. I can lose a clock, or the clocks can go all wrong, and then what? I will not even keep my body, and yet. As long as I am of the keeping kind, it is where I hold the world. 

Sometimes I dream of knowing the world through other bodies. That I am a bird, for example, or whale, spider, tree. Of course, I do not know what it is to experience the world in these bodies. I can only imagine. If I ever did know, I suppose I had to give that awareness back, too.

Perhaps my first body is imagining. I cannot seem to keep myself. From asking, how did this happen? And when will? Or was, and then back again trying to collect some lingering residue of what, like the scent of a lover, is then gone. 

The bower bird, to draw a mate, collects. Some make arrangements of blue rocks, blue buttons, cerulean feathers, chipped glass. Here is a keeping kind, too. I seem only ever tethered to this place by what I try to hold, even as I am aware that the point, they say, is letting go. 

It is an easy thing to say––just let it go! But I think that we are so made for holding that the only way to know whatever insight might be held in this reminder is by drawing what will be released so close that it is married to your next breath, and on exhalation, finding that what flies is less air than essential limb, less tired past than the future hope you meant to breathe the next breath. And then what? No one goes around saying Just let yourself go!––with the same enthusiasm, and yet. 

I’ve lost it again, lost the thread and probably myself and all that follows is another opening, another chance to hold and one less limb to do it with, and this sense that the constant act for me may be keeping and I will not keep up.

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