pink noise

Pears cannot ripen alone. So we ripened together.” — Meridel Le Sueur

Lyndi Sales. What are your chances if the game is rigged?, paper & thread, 124 x 115 cm

I remember helping my father feed the boss’s cattle.
My sisters and I would watch him shovel hay
from the bed of the slow-moving pickup, driverless
and pointed in the general direction of home.

In winter, the cab’s heater blasting,
we were witness to the cattle’s eager breath
etch a chorus of hungry moos into the frozen air.
The chore was done when the hay was gone.
Wavy furred lines transformed the barren prairie landscape.

I remember the weight of your loudest threats
mapped onto your hands. You hit us to teach us a lesson,
to be quiet, because you couldn’t hit the boss.

As we got older, and bigger, you perfected words
into weapons, making your impact invisible.
Then came tender gaps of amputated time
when your anger spilled vengeance
against those you had declaimed to love so fiercely.

Forced to move into the deepest parts of nowhere,
packing tempers and testimony
this time would be better than the last.
Starting over was the goddamn point when
all you have for a legacy is your name.

That may have been one reason why
no one knew us where we were headed.

Our mutual legacy now an extension of reputation,
much like how only female cottonwood trees
shed their obnoxious cottony seeds
into the most distant, wind-driven places.

apophenia

“Sensuality. Our basis of being concrete about the world. It is lustful relationship to things that exist.” — Mark Rothko, from Mark Rothko From the Inside Out

Fruit postcard, Paul Huf, 1983

Not quite epiphany
more
   false positive
associations of pink
or orange to flesh
as displacement
or tender resignations
   an unqueering
a gamble.

Such inconvenience filters the odds
into other’s perceptions, luck, or madness.
When our fists equal the size of our hearts
there’s recognition in that sovereign drama.
Beginnings blindspot endings.
All rhetorical approximations
become redundant.
Transitions, as in not yet.

Our histories are programmed errors
    marked like rings inside trees
plastic as the immediate future.
Mystery strikes then bends
absorbing the unrecognizable
when opposites compliment
more than divide
  potentially godwinked
impossibly divine.

nature morte

When you eat the forbidden,
sooner or later your teeth
scrape against stone, bitter,
and you will spit it out.

last lines of PEACH GIRL by Lee Ann Roripaugh

photographer: noell oszvald

walking through high waisted
grass sprouted hills
our faces slack with hustle
we laughed like stuffed animal heads
over stories about how snow has energy
shedding syllables as we hurried along

this resistance against recursive nature
(we walk upright for a reason)
not remembering how much our bodies work for us
only sensing how much we fight against it
knowing drama and karma can feel differently
bent backwards until fragile as blue

we maintain stillness
despite insincere throats
affecting the slant of our inner lives
these threads connecting codes
native realizations that community
now definitely includes you

ok, don’t panic

“I pray in words. I pray in poems. I want to learn to pray through breathing, through dreams and sleeplessness, through love and renunciation.” — Anna Kamienska, from “In That Great River: A Notebook” (tr. Clare Cavanagh)

artist: Josh Courlas

There is anger, again.
It is a fear of waste.
Misfortune. Unfairness.
There is nothing left
to do but wake up,
make coffee, write.

Hummingbirds flirt.
Salt, a mineral.
Soft truths with edges.

It is also true we lived in temporary houses.
No one was home so we self-supervised.
Neglect and despair kept us full.
Competition thrived. Like ocean waves,
we conformed to the landscape
beneath a rough water’s surface.

I remember when the city air smelled like summer,
longing and loss. Trees were shaped
by ocean breezes, bald on the west side.
Country twang bled past Mission bar doors opened early.
That moment, its energy, left an imprint.

Liminal space
shifting recklessly
like the breath
just beneath this prayer.

revelations

“I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.”
—Agnes Martin, Writings

artist: Shu Takahashi

We had so much nothing,
it was taken for granted.
Believing nothing would always be there
absence became comfort.

Not unlike early morning prayers
spirals of grand scale idolizing
the ego erases into ecstasy
feral as our collective waking dreams.

This gap — promised conjecture —
as yet unproven and deep as the ocean
is sensory. A modern perception.
Time expresses both light and shadow.

Take this faithful repeated effort
to disrupt, relate, or to create.
Apocalypses, ancient reveals,
have nothing left to give us.

Release remaining regrets, a familiar form.
After all, we are in process
shaping the near future like it’s a bad thing.
Maybe there’s nothing but good in this.

rhyme scheme

“What is secret never has total objectivity.” — Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

screenshot from the documentary “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon” (1968)

Am I repeating lies? The Australian wildfires were started by humans and we live in a democracy or you can say no, which is a choice. I read an audacious headline and followed clicks and threads shiny as trolling lures. In the thick of seduction, I confess I may have shared images without acknowledging an artist because I wanted the frame of reference to reverb. I’ve posted songs that had no accompanying album, which means its context also wandered unattended. I have repeatedly liked things I never read, and never will. I’m exclusive, in a trapped kind of way. Eulogies for the cancelled are stored in clouds stacked miles deep. An echo wags the dog. Empty space occupies sound. We are pixelated into our own repetitive concepts of an othered likeness. Are you repeating lies? Please remind me tomorrow that non-knowing is stasis, sacred affect, and a series is a pattern is a sentence.

abdicating

“Walking on the land or digging in the fine soil I am intensely aware that time quivers slightly, changes occurring in imperceptible and minute ways, accumulating so subtly that they seem not to exist. Yet the tiny shifts in everything – cell replication, the rain of dust motes, lengthening hair, wind-pushed rocks – press inexorably on and on.” – Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud

Whooli Chen, Morning Song

I’ve learned enough to be dangerous. I’ve failed enough to feel successful.

Lessons learned, in the order they showed up:

  1. Expectations are different than boundaries.
  2. Shame is a form of self-abuse.
  3. Distinguish the difference between meaningful work and paid work.
  4. The stories I tell myself matter the most.
  5. Maintaining a conscious awareness of abundance is the work of being open to inspiration — being fascinated feels good. Acceptance is eternal work.
  6. Establishing new routines takes time.
  7. Trust in self is a sacred commitment.
  8. Patience is its own desire and trust in myself is sacred energy. Learning stimulates: both focus and curiosity are required.
  9. Creating poetics inquiries deepened my capacity for patient discovery.
  10. Breathe through the urge to have answers.
  11. Staying present and having curious inquiry is the process of accelerating joy.
  12. It matters how you show up.

2020 is one of those future-forward years, like 1999 and 2000. Every year has its own biography of echoes. The list above are some of my loudest.

overthinking

“Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent – live fully, live passionately, live disastrously [if necessary].”

— Violet Keppel, in a letter to Vita Sackville-West (1918)

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967

Monday’s sky rolled out baby blues and soft power pinks with creamy lilac contrails. Yesterday’s news was the same as today: promotional micro-divisions, myopic hyperbole, and regrets familiar as hard-coded hegemonic language.

Cloud banks wander wistfully south where it is summer.

For almost fifteen years, I’ve willingly come to this empty, open place. This returning is one of my most illicit love affairs. Responsible only to self and the swells of intuition, I may decide to write passively because that shadowed edge has the most depth or I show up with a cathartic vendetta that has begged for its own release. This virtual space a catalog of conversions, an alchemy of early-morning meditations transmuted into an ever evolving contemporary poetics. Here, time is measured as equal parts fumbling through curated distances and urgent absolution. This is a sacred practice that I’ve revised, distilled, and kept wild.

The redwoods are watching, thinking, and breathing just like me — and you.

Even now this landscape is assembling. Neither melancholic beast nor hyperconsciousness of a benevolent god’s perversions could keep me away from this erotic ritual of pleasure making. It is glorious how I have taken, and keep taking, what is useful to me. The violence of past sins have not failed me. It is precisely this ancient chorus that has finally connected curious inquiry to my formerly disembodied soul.

Let us start here, again, reimagined.

yielding

Barbara Kruger “Don’t Make Me Angry”, 1999

volume won the day

what was said
had to be abandoned

because more was coming

this universe was not built
to accommodate more than one sun

Betty Danon, I am, 1978

call me when
the Afghanistan war
is over

Black Lines 1, 1916, Georgia O’Keeffe

 

fog obscures the depth behind it

 

Richard Barnes, Murmur, 23 December 2006

from my side of this wall
I am only a body
& the sky is a milky blue

I quietly compose performative debts
unchecked — they form treacherous habits
when written they  s t r  e t c h  smooth

I’ve ritualized these (now) ceremonial feelings
& marinated in their bone-heavy broth
as panicked days continue to pace themselves

slow blink to xmas

Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very depth of the last days…

-Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky

Arnaldo Pomodoro, Untitled, 1984-85.

Celestially speaking, we all belong to a restrictive social class.
Cumulative in our longings, we render dependency as emergencies
[how romantic to feel each other’s interdependent commitments].
We take our love-starved coordinates and plot collective orbits.
Moving at the textured pace of gravity’s grace, time fragments.
Do not worry. This scattering happens every year. Remember?
What will you pick up and carry into tomorrow? The new year?

morning shadows

Do me a favor this morning. Draw the curtain and come
  back to bed.
Forget the coffee. We’ll pretend
we’re in a foreign country, and in love.

Raymond Carver, last stanza of “The Road”

Helen Lundeberg, Islands, 1986. Acrylic on canvas, 127 x 127 cm.

There’s an urgency when you wake up in darkness. Instinct tells you to trust that light is coming. The sky opened a hazy lilac. Morning shadows sharpen. I’ve misinterpreted the danger inherent in matter cannot be created nor destroyed. Navigating productions, stilted formations misunderstood as lyrical responses, becomes a performance. Often, soothing a distraction.

I learned early that soft touches were to be saved for moving someone to confession, then towards salvation. For all those end-of-days Sunday warnings, I am not prepared. This is a special kind of denial, an abject version of faith.

“We should have known” has signaled subtle shaming. Didn’t you hear all those rumors?

The moon is new. At the moment, there is no wind. My body remembers this fear. My sense of distance expands in the pink layered light.

I’ve kept this on the tip of my tongue, at the rim of my mouth, inside my lungs sweet like a curated secret. I tried to write around the noise but this is the silence that found me.

red flag warning

Who will touch me in the middle of this war. — Zaina Alsous, from “On Longing,” A Theory of Birds: Poems

Luis Camnitzer, vacuum formed polystyrene, 1968

in the darkness, I whisper
red sky at night
sailor’s delight

this ancient prayer breaks
its positive predictive power
when the sun rose red, again
highly sensitive weather machines
translate falling ash as snow and rain
smoke spreads heavy in the amber colored night
in the darkness, I whisper
red sky at night
sailor’s delight

lean into the punch

“They are not allowed to distract the attraction.” The Tao of Physics

I AM SIGNAL AND NOISE

 

your hands wrote notes on the arch of my back
a syntax of bruised blues
confusing the map with the territory
you left elegant traces of comparative expressions
a relatively exalted possession
to sublimate time unspoken as gilded pleasure
a glitch forsaken, tender undulation

seven years and a day

artist: Yuko Shimizu

Police found nothing but pairs of empty shoes inside abandoned cars stopped on the freeway that carved edge lines between city and suburb. Stereos were still playing upbeat songs or blaring ads for insurance, spicy chicken sandwiches, eradicating skin rashes, and a cloud that promised to secure memories. Coffee left warm in secure cup holders.

I have my own, obvious, working hypothesis for the dispossessed.

I can feel you wanting more. More analysis, more details, more quantifiable truth. I recognize that desire. If left unchecked, it is a serial and extractive response.

Instead of getting stuck in that kind of particular production, what spiritual inclinations were you born with? Will your future prove the past?

The ending is coming. How wild is your hope?

________

title is reference to seven years and a day is often the period of trial in fairy tales (Denise Levertov, The Poet in the World, page 13)

graceful friction

But where I come from withdrawal is easy to forgive. — William Stafford

Rupprecht Geiger, Zu Licht und Schatten (trans. To Light and Shadow), acrylic on plastic foil, 40 x 35 cm, 1972

She said she loved me.
She loved me.
Loved me
became an anthem,
a melodic hook.
Stacked like clouds
fists tucked
ready for a fight
bent over     or
how horizons form.
Don’t believe me?
Study the moon
and sun’s partnership.
A story of graceful friction.
Literally magnificent light
now wild from abandon.

end of the 3rd quarter | 2019

“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.“ —Saskatchewan farmer saying

Masao Komura, ‘OPTICAL EFFECT OF INEQUALITY’, computer graphic based on an algorithm using and displaying the greater-than sign, 1968

a quietness calls
stars still groggy
from shining all night
our tongues found light
in caves of darkness
bound by touch
we hold tight
such ritual informs
produces   distills
grand obscene thoughts
bent knees
rabid digits
intake   release
revelations replicate
unseen feedback a risk
strung across suffering
that has no reflection

enter

Out One, 1971, Jacques Rivette

“Variety, multiplicity, eroticism are difficult to control.” — Barbara Christian, The Race for Theory, 1988

the world has been ending
since humans monetized time
selling stories elegant as tree rings
interrupted only to loop

together, attention affects gravity
softly gathered in quiet
found in the folds of endurance
atoned — we focus on the migrating season

elegant in its infinite chase
an autumn sun rose ripe
peachy explosions
light bloomed dandelion bright

take my hand, let’s walk
to the edge of town
I promise our sky opens
if you listen to its longest shadows

formed at the edges of quicksand

The hills are thick with creamy fog these late-August mornings, then fade into brilliant blue. My dreams have been performed in airports and church vans. I rode a mechanical bull pleading to get to where I thought I wanted to go.

Takahiko Hayashi, Stories-spilled out of histories, mixed media on paper.

a different summer morning
you joked that Red Delicious
was put there by a witch

4 May 2014, Oakland, CA

I’m disciplined to distraction
the peek of a thigh
roses at the edge of on-ramps
yielding to pressure

danger & excitement can feel the same

Richard Moult – In the Heart of the Wood and What I Found There

“What is it that keeps up from drowning in moments that rise and cover the heart?”
Anne Carson, Plainwater

the plot was a repeat
   a rerun

did you see that emergency flare?
it was bright
    red

inevitable

our skies hold light
      white
then expand
  blue

debate shatters into silence

we meant to say ineffable

details spread diluted
revenge collects into thriving tragedy

what hope hunts has no reflection
survival now the most obvious commodity

danger and excitement can feel the same
our bodies keep trying to tell us this news

live as in
right
now —

we grope backwards

enquiry for a future that does not yet exist

All responsible witnessing engages a poetic experience of language. — Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question

Dusting off the Male Gaze, Yuku Shimizu

It was the way you phrased the question
like scripture or that tone reserved for family
a sharpness of being open ended, interpretive.

You wanted to know about future memories
cached in bucolic 2020 time capsules.
When would we be notified of the opening ceremonies?

How would the reveal of selective imaginations cast
replicas of value and what will remain
in desire’s form? Why do we save time this way?

You wanted to know just how, exactly, would revelry
produce nostalgia. I answered in kind.
Why do men’s hands have a gravity to them?

moving diagonally in a blur

Lill Tschudi (Swiss, 1911-2004), Venetian Lines I, 1950. Linocut, 26 x 28 cm. Number 16:50

god is absent these manic days
and still, we try to be our best selves
(even my plants have grown inches)

find your lazy gaze focused
there is forgiveness in being temporary
(pink light burns morning fog)

abstract detachment feels like coping
dreamy summer days tumble us smooth
(bone white clouds break open)

private investigator

When I added the dimension of time to the landscape of the world, I saw how freedom grew the beauties and horrors from the same live branch. — Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Blind swimmers (Effect of a touch), 1934, Max Ernst

Planets square, conjunct, and align according to ancient calculations. A replicable physics of perpetual routine and abstract distance. The wise have correlated collective visceral feelings to this constant celestial movement and, of course, gravity’s determinate pull. There is grace in this kind of emotional profiteering, an abundance that forces us to confront unknown questions inside a mapped-out-for-you future.

I’m days away from another year around the sun. Three hundred sixty-five unbroken days of editing mistakes and expanding my realm of intuition.

These accumulating memories are a landscape bound to cycle back around to vanishing points. Gathered as collages and smelling like warm marigolds, all those shades of consciousness tend to the task of a well-paced axiom eventually becoming their own runaway speculative fictions. Nostalgia clutches just as much as it cascades.

The sky is always moving. I intend to continue investigating the figurative dancing light from that motion. Etching inventions into my own shameless shadow.

still life

Rivane Neuenschwander. The Silence of the Sirens. 2013.

The sky is mute.
My palms soft.

The future broke.
Your hands found me wanting.

Shared recognition creates intimacy
when the public body is an impulse.

Wild as blessings, and just as sacred,
I come wide, spread open.

Living a literal life
is an obedient life.

My feed is deepfake informative
so I reduce truth to metaphor.

Wandering ribs is a radical referent.
We’ve been promised what does not exist.

Birds bob and sway
above the frothy noise.

x + y =

AN ARMY OF LOVERS SHALL NOT FAIL – title on cover of The Lesbian Tide, Apr. 1973

Road to the Ranch, 1964, Georgia O’Keeffe

this feeling of war is different from other war feelings I’ve had.
it is a conscious scan of knowing where the exits are located.
it is a wanting of quiet and stillness
inside all this (up)loaded aggression.
it is a particular kind of collaborated knowing.

bodies bend closer in fantasies without violence.
a genre of collected mundane details:
dishes in the sink
airport air thick with fancy perfume
the memory of water.

I study nothing, obviously.
I like that space
in between.
crowded spaces. public spaces.
being ignored in isolation.

strictly speaking, we think we know
what is happening
because we study history.
if we believe we are more manipulated today,
do we fulfill our own prophesies?

this may be the only place I feel alive

Paul Schutzer, birds on barbed wire strung atop the Berlin Wall, January 1962

 

This may be the exact amount of now that I can continuously absorb.

deposits of memories make a body
or a pulpit

Despondence, according to plan, is a fevered imagination.

should I revise, again
or stay as is

After all, even light has its own form of pollution.

 

due north

“I love you, I hate you” (digital drawing collage) Elissaveta Zerdeva

I walked in the direction the bus takes to get me home.
A non-direct route through neighborhoods where curtains hold space
for sleeping cats. Each intersection an opportunity to wait within
a landscape of past lovers reminding how time renews.
Objects in such a mirror are closer than they appear.
Curved to reflect light outward, my old selves diverged.

I am learning to trust and when to leave
a refrain from speculation
and a practice of conscientious objection.
Just past the corners of trees, a distance
due west, urban sounds echo infinite.
Curated to reflect disappearance, I find home.

long division

“Success is someone else’s failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty. No, I do not wish you success. I don’t even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, excerpt from her 1983 Mills College commencement address “A Left-Handed Commencement Address”

Shujiro Shimomura, Poster Design, 1929

Mental maps are flashbacks of intertwined stories not to be confused with flash-forward dreams like visible clouds in the night sky backlit by 24-7 traffic lights, or knowing you are looking directly at an invisible full moon. I am sorry if this specificity of darkness is dense and complicated. I have historically avoided anchors of place in my writing because it feels safer to drift unmoored. It is entirely possible I do not want you to find me.

My past has too many inconsistent waypoints to map accurately—my mother is an unreliable narrator and my father’s sense of direction was absorbed as gospel, narrow and aggressive. Gathered, these scattered memories take shape as a specific form of isolation. The truth is, wrapping myself in distance feels like home.

This dark and expansive landscape I pull from is as familiar as counting landmarks on long drives back home, de facto mile markers such as wind-sculpted trees, mirage plateaus, and the occasional 4-way stop sign scarred with casual bullet holes. My expertise in understanding subtle changes as a sense of direction was earned honestly.

As an identical twin, separation is a practice of abundance.  Do you recognize that gift in yourself?

Stars are born when clouds of gas called nebulae infinitely collapse. The center of this collapse, a result of carefully balanced external gravitational forces and internal rising temperatures, fuses into light brilliant enough to witness from Earth’s distance. In this nearly empty darkness, collapsing coordinates are not fixed either. All these simple steps broken into a discovery of self, in excellence and always in evolution.

under center

Loie Hollowell (American, b. 1983), Incoming Tide, 2016. oil, acrylic, sawdust, and high-density foam on linen on panel

the lecture ended at cooperation
endless constellations looping
associations and reified traces

he said it was better
before
nostalgia produces
utopia

all this mutual (re)production
that feel of shared experience
remorse, traffic jams, expectations

reckless as rhetoric
faith (as in not control)
pull and then release

apologia

Joni Mitchell, skating on Lake Mendota, Madison, WI, Joel Bernstein, 1976, gelatin silver print

I’ve realized I have seen more Passion Plays than I knew. I come back, here, again. Today is another dispossessed day. News forms around emotions. I stopped believing in Saviors a long time ago. The ending is predictable. From above and from below, inside and out, this internalized desire for external validation starts feeling like an intentional defense. In 1971, James Baldwin said something will rest something will remain. Retraction survives in all this chatter. Context protecting accusers are familiar to me. I learned that language at home and in school. Resale is always at a premium. Redo. Undo. Redo again. Coffee and tiger’s eye stone, water, land and sky meet angled. This, now, is the everything I’ve ever wanted.

weak futures / sell high

“A horror so deep only ritual can contain it.” — Sarah Kane, “Crave”

All that exuberant, collective hope of a new year dissipated
into silhouettes whose interiors frame a groomed rage.
Such glamour is visceral in the light of a knowledge apocalypse.

Our inherited rage learned.
Daily lessons worn so deep to appear smooth,
ordinary. Even today, algorithms reveal their shadows.

Yes, it really has always been like this:
raw, broken, cruel, and transferred.
How we participate is birthright.

Such process generates the futures we believe we can change.
In all this fractured isolation, soft bodies spread sparse.

music from the balcony

new wave vengeance frames this reflection. we are now, again.
2018: masses react and subjectively perform aggression.
yes, I do think differently. epistemic relevance matters.

THE MUSIC FROM THE BALCONIES NEARBY WAS OVERLAID BY THE NOISE OF SPORADIC ACTS OF VIOLENCE, Edward Ruscha, oil paint on canvas, 1984.

What a savage year. Calendar time and actual time disassociated. Let go or be dragged. I got dragged and then I let go. In this protracted state, I mended critical boundaries and broke open new patterns. I made the days useful to me. I wrote about cowboys while breathing in fire. I listened and was seduced. I transmuted silence, my way. Drowning in manufactured violence and drama, we held each other longer and tighter. I saw urgency extract exquisite ideas and leave behind ghosts still in motion. Recognizing that glitch, I give myself infinite permission to fail, to risk, to revive. I still believe revolutions are frenetic desires and armor myself contextually. Curiosity is my ideal pace. I follow cats and poets. I came into this world greedy. I need reminders when my body grips fear: be awake for soft pink sunrises and orange suns floating into fading darkness. It is my responsibility to source these personal validations and ritualize inspiration. Reflex grace. Find balance in distractions and create sacred ceremonies with your hands on my hips.

rejoice

“Know that you are prior to the first day you witnessed.” —Nisargadatta Maharaj

WE LIKE IT WILD (artist unknown)

Audre Lorde was light years ahead when she said our visions begin with our desires. These fragments glitter. I integrate language queerly. This seriousness is earned as the contemporary moves at the speed of drones.

Some still apply ancient alien theories to the present.

I want off this boring ride.

cache culture is a collection of intimacy and a consecration of infinite justifications. My Sunday best. I source symbolic actions because they structure the silences I see between each chosen word. I am in active witness.

Finding the shape of darkness, I rejoice. That means light is at the edges.

wish list

maybe I do want you to feel intimidated by me

Rochester, New York, Nathan Lyons, 1978, gelatin silver print

I want a revolution as reckless as cowboys with broken backs.
Throwing restraint to the western winds, a favorable direction,
& towards that edge where darkness is shaped into possibility,
I wait familiar      in shy quiet      impatient.

I want a revolution as prolific as chants for collective safety.
Born from burn scars so large you can see it from a distant
universe, a reminder we will never be in control so long as
money motivates our hustle for pretentious liberation.

I want a revolution as tender as loving in present tense.
An immediacy that respects our inherited kinetic energies.
Until then, I’ll gather productive & discover curious tensions
sensual as thunder replying to lightening’s transfiguring danger.

In protest and in wealth, I want a revolution that gives as much as it takes.

difficult knowledge

Below Zero (Fahrenheit), Lake Erie, Pennsylvania, Josef Hoflehner, 2015

as perennial pipelines heat prairie homes
I dream of drifting oceans & waves of snow

effluence      affluence

I have been told so many times & so many ways
this  world   is  ending

omen        amen

I’ve taken to stealing lines on borrowed time

censor       center

somewhere in this self-immolation is discipline
the denomination of need

fractals

I. Writing; an act of stroking paper.

4 October 2018, Oakland, CA

II. The aggressiveness of buying and selling resistance, as seen on TV, makes me wanna disassociate.

self-portrait in Wave by Pirkle Jones, 1952, gelatin silver print [Oakland Museum of California]

III. Competitions of sadness are trauma tiers.

PUBLIC NOTICE, 14 September 2018, Oakland, CA

IV. It’s ok that I don’t fit in she says.

27 April 2018, San Francisco, CA

V. If I write a word today, just one, that must be enough.

the cumulative impact of reaction

“As if a tenderness awoke, a tenderness that did not tire, something healing.”
— Sylvia Plath, from The Collected Poems; “Three Women,” (1962)

I was born into an isolated, literal Evangelical culture. A place where time was on always on trial and faith was righteous as pride. Our promised future had already been written. We were urgent. The rapture was past due.

All of us who knew even a fraction of the story internalized why Jesus hadn’t returned. Acts of a vengeful god are common and welcomed in this scenario. It was also true when you knew the ending tipped in your favor, knowledge became seductive. A blessing disguised.

To have learned about the world this way feels like a subtle theft. Trauma works that way too. False recognitions bound to real sounds, smells, touch, twists of phrases, and, if lucky, fading re-creations. A true con.

Decades later, I am still carving an existence that is receptive to invitation. There are no answers inside all these non-moments of relentless judgement. That clarity is its own rushed reality. Adapting gracefully to change is an ancient sermon. This is a map to all this undoing.

horizon note

Huseyin Sami, Cut Painting (Light Yellow), 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 183 x 152 cm.

I’ve never had the same address for long. My current streak is seven years. I’ve far exceeded all prior knowledge of living in one place. I am as far west as I’ve ever been, which means my reverence for home has changed. Somewhere between this nostalgia and the truth is the hard edge of acceptance.

In all this stillness, I forgot how to let go.

So I start over.
Again.

As a habit, writing is its own method of reckoning. An ecstatic attention to spirit. A positive deviance. Specifically, I want to create a feeling of communion. I want this feeling in spite of its dominant religious significations.

The concept and practice of being “reborn” was an early fascination. I’d watch my father make his way to the front of the church and confess his weaknesses. Our sins were made public. We wanted to believe, as much as he did, that each confession was his last. His liberation bound so tightly to our survival.

I choose to keep these collective epiphanies to remember how far from home I am.
_________

*horizon note = the beat or pulse underlying the whole of the poem (Denise Levertov)

periphery of justice

“Most of the time, I think we’re embodied because we are supposed to be. I don’t think the goal is to leave our bodies behind, despite what many major religions tell us.” — Dana Levin

Santiago Moix, Rippling #34, silkscreen monotype, 2012

Economists believe
things that are abundant
have less value,
example: love.
Their cheap cadence
mutates and twists
around its swelling chorus.
Shut tight. Loud as bodies.
Imagine if we answered
all these blushed curious inquiries
to rewrite backwards retrogrades
spoken softly enough
to understand its sacred feedback.

__________

title is William Stafford’s reference to “that feeling you have when you go along accepting what occurs to you and finding your way out somewhere to the rim where you are ready to abandon that sequence and come back and start all over again” (Writing the Australian Crawl)

august is a glitch

my jaw has been clenched shut for three days
in a trance, I wait

Nathaniel Evans, 2015, A Message [oil on canvas]
sounds of skateboards grinding concrete float
common as the sun rising above distant freeways
this is a scene framed by palm tree ascensions

bus stops concentrate waiting strangers
wanting lives that respond versus react
a wish more violent than fading starlight

fear-riddled dreams are an intuitive compass
the future is bigger than we can ever pretend
metaphors swell as waves of silent witnesses scroll

in transit, temporary, I thrash

a 21st century dream

I am at war with the obvious. —William Eggleston

artist: Todd Norsten

I get nervous when people start talking about wanting to own things:
land, houses, ideas.
This present moment feels like freedom,
a highly volatile state.
In my dream, I walked US-Highway 12.
I passed community banks flush with bartered dreams
and gas stations promising consistently low prices when paying with cash.
The ghosts all drove cars and didn’t bother me.
Lucid, I believed I was back in Berlin. I was brave.
I woke to trees taller than houses.

conscientious imposter

‘I see’ ‘with my voice’ — Alice Notley, from The Decent of Alette

Note by Anne Truitt, April 1965

our learning is from the news
a nurtured condition

⁄ it is eclipse season
shadows are light  ⁄

our call is to imagine, to conceive
defend against performance-enhancing speculations

visionary blight
= fragmentations

our hands worn from self-caress
please see management

it takes a lot of energy to kill a god
Δ long division

prominence

“writing…is a process of relying on immediate pervasive feelings, not an escape from them…”   — William Stafford, Writing the Australian Crawl. pg. 88

I’M HERE FOR LUCK. Louis Wain (1926)

I haven’t found a way to say I love you that isn’t complicated, so I practice loving you every day. Sounds of terrorized children broke through all those hours of visual noise. Hope is a map. A place to begin.

The distance of decades doesn’t always make things quieter. Calendars are more form than function. I learned early and repeatedly that love must be earned, and value is measured by others. An intimacy of detachment.

Addicted to seeking approval is one way of saying yes unconditionally. Instead, imagine a private collection of silent hymns. These days, I take care to mend memories as a way to create acceptance. A public chorus swelled.

Broken into speculative practices, writing things down reinforces pleasure and importance in tandem. Together, through famine and fortune, what stands out is love.  An oxygen where sacrifice is not born from competition.

delayed gratification

“There’s always a lot to do before you get to go to heaven.”
— Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower

Lee Kun-Yong : Logic of place, 1975

when the sun sets pink, orange, and red
broken moving clouds spread
like velvet like compulsion
action stretches idle       smooth

reading read is different from hearing read spoken
or why I adore hiding words in my throat

formerly private as guilt
what came first
  sky
   or water

altered
like states of being with
   or without you

regenerative loops: believing in a tomorrow

repeat after me

cai guo-qiang; sky ladder, 2015

a prompt     significance of scale
all days pull forward, if you are lucky
connecting fascination to scarcity

generic worries     an organic undoing
we burn fuel to buy: eggs, cheese, & bread
overwhelmed, we fear waste

what does it mean to be loved more when you are gone
absent    swallowing
light years from your guilt, shame replicating comfort

a feeling       like deserve
repeat after me: there is so much to hope for
& even more to remember to want

speculative practice

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

T.S. Eliot, from ‘Preludes (IV)’, The Waste Land and Other Poems

Motonaga Sadamasa (Japanese, 1922-2011), Untitled, 1965. Oil and synthetic resin paint on canvas laid down on panel, 91.6 × 116.7 cm.

concerts of effort
sounds better inside a fragment
forgive that this starts out so slow
posting at me to me with me
I’m casual to realize
to follow your  our vision
is to be organized into spacial moments — threads
a witness of curation
the: father son and holy spirit

faith is within your standing
some think it is earned
as for me I was taught to be innocent
later learning curiosity had its own beneficiaries
a lesson on just how few original ideas are assigned majestic
fueling dark appreciations for wild abstractions
until it is as uncommon as creating reminders to breathe
I know this all sounds strange
you can call it: new wave vengeance

Sunday, 4pm

photographer: Robin Cerutti

I think about the distance of fog
& find another way home
lost (as in damaged)
with all the sharp edges of a dog whistle
you left us nothing but absence — its own hope of escape

your mystery dominated empty spaces
so we reduced ourselves to survive
along pressure points (dislocated)
& under religion’s exploitation of bad luck
answers started rooting their own origins

in spite of darkness translating shape
light claimed its own space
showing influence (weighted)
we learned to feel
reverie

ephemerality devoured

“Writing to you is like kissing you. It is something physical.”
— Simone de Beauvoir, from a letter to Nelson Algren c. November 1949

Elena del Rivero, Letter from Home #9, 2015. Watercolor on accounting paper & thread, 9.25 x 12 in

As an aesthetic, I like a hushed chorus,
but only when trust is visceral and
bent around a promise—or a threat.

Arranged curious, this casual normalizing devours.
As we follow a line or a thread until safely curated—

tangled into the finest shouting fragments,
subbed as loaded derivatives, and mocked influences
we have learned to manage public feelings to epic scale.

In privacy’s absence, such division is essential.
These inhabited suggestions become their own revenge.