desire – Cache Culture

are your reactions to anger justifiable?

There’s a splinter in your eye and it reads, “React”
R.E.M., Harborcoat

What should fill this space of manufactured urgency? Terms of obligation or something else like how self-remorse is an addiction shaped around denial. Maybe this space deserves a kind of specific clarity of action, ownership as embodiment—as if caught stealing. Will you confess or double down and absorb risk as pleasure? Experts say it’s best practice to take an inventory of what has been dragging you down and replace those words with what makes you feel less afraid. But this only works if you capture the very smallest of details, the trigger-thin anxieties: unborn seeds, missed directions, a roundabout that has no immediate exits, the kind of momentum when the speaker is reliable. Gather up this inventory of superstitious riches. You’ll know when you can clutch a plot of pearls without escalating conflict.

what is the occasion

Magnolia flowers push through their felt cocoons.
I play the anticipation game, which fuels my attachment fears.
In my defense, the seduction is honest and hard-earned.
In the time it took to reach this conclusion,
Mt. Hood glowed peach. When does it become wrong?
When it becomes too much?
Restraint feels good too. Different.

Anticipation becomes the preverbal call and response.
The in-between. I can hold hope here, gently and with full intention.
I am looking for something real—an effort unchallenged. Less questions.
More of a slender inquiry like a river narrowing, entrenched.
Spelling out exit wounds as two bodies enjambed.

Taking is a kind of giving,
sometimes. This is a lesson
etched inside of me. It is hard-wired,
a learned behavior. I’m spying on the self
and its tendencies towards destruction.
Choices made at full speed—from spiritual delusion,
rapture and ecstasy.

Science says twilight is that time just before.
That too exists.

when the line breaks

We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.

—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”

personal screen capture from film, DERRIDA

What calls me this morning is dark matter.

It proves its own existence by showing up.

Interred is in the news, again.

Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.

***

In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:

- - There were no people here before us.
  - We made this place useful.
  - Our destiny is unbought.
  - You belong here.

****

This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.

Apologies are evidence: absent presence.

*****

The sky is percussive.

Rain falls in delight.

******

There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.

Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?

The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.

*******

Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.

Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.

Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.

at the moment of surrender is happiness

Always, all my life, that thing about time passing. All my whole life long.
—Marguerite Duras

I told myself—
things have been worse and
you’ve been poor before or
this is temporary…
then, a familiar urgency
of sharpened clarity:
absence owns desire.

Neglect wrote this edict.

This half-life was born within
circumstances with no horizon.
A hopelessness earned honestly.

You might read this later
and ask who is to blame or
what failure becomes the real lesson and
demand your worth shouldn’t be so dependent.

This attempt at politeness transmutes your, not my, shame.

As polyphonous form—
I source the weather
as oracle’s explication
and trust the heavens
beneath me to mouth
my needs so eager
to release another witness.

This claustrophobia. A weighed salvation.

I heard a galaxy sing
midway through this journey.
Nothing but implicit openings
conflating the darkness
with beauty.

I know you want
the fantasy of rescue:
at the moment of surrender is happiness.

panic in the pocket

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“To imagine that turmoil is in the past and somehow we are now in a more stable time seems to be a psychological need.” —John McPhee, Assembling California

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In Audre Lorde’s 1984 Creative Writing Workshop in Berlin, she had two requirements:

Read at least 10 poems a week. Keep a log of the poems—name of poem and poet—and write a sentence that will help you recall how you feel from the poem.
Keep a pen/pencil and paper with you at all times to write things down (“it will not stay in your head”).

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In claiming this emotional space every week, anchors of memory and experience structure a highly unstable body of work. I arrive inhabiting this swath of living, or as Lauren Berlant said in her essay Cruel Optimism, “deflating the symbolic into the somatic”.

After all, islands are the tops of mountains. Perception as slant, signaling both perspective and insight. That sweet trigger of embodied habit. Writing from an ascetic life.

What earned reward lays in wait? Is it focus as illumination? Maybe the reward is endurance inside an anxious limbic system. Simply, a need gets satisfied. A temperance of honesty that there is no final outcome to this effort. That this predictive text, and its energy, may be read as art. That this is worthless.

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“If I resisted, I was lost. If I gave in, I was saved.” —Didier Eribon, Returning to Reims

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)

sub rosa

“And is is strange how experiences blend and enhance each other.”
— William Stafford

It is not that what I know today is necessarily different from what I knew yesterday, or that I have replaced prior knowledge with a brand new extended spectrum of understanding. It is more subtle than a transaction, more gracefully defined as complexity. This feels like transformation. A shift.

Love fits into this equation as a multiplier. The critical variables that come next are a matter of routine, a particular and conscious genre. A ritual.

There is always more. A compilation.