dream – Cache Culture

strictly personal

The Consciousness Raisers

they meet on Fridays when
the women home from the factories & the offices
& on Sunday afternoons

At night they lie in bed
& hold hands
counting the stars

—John James from the collection Kinderlieder (1992)

I.
I saw a dream catcher hung inside a USPS truck.

II.
There is a shadow side of salvation, of rescue, of deliverance
from a foreclosed future. I want you to imagine the energy needed
to be in a constant state of arrival.

III.
I dream. The Pacific Ocean waves are frozen solid; locked, raw and stilled. No sound.

IV.
The news circles like a drain. The production of meaning taking
the path of least resistance. I write about the weather to keep track of time.

V.
I dreamt the Washington Monument was draped in Christmas lights in July.

VI.
I take in the beg and prompt of morning.
Familiar neighborhood sounds rise in courage
and with stamina. My waking memory, still a hinge,
holding onto yesterday.

They walk like cowboys, recently dismounted. He eats slowly out of a Trader Joe’s bag, the one that has the laughing donkey on it. We wander to find new ways of understanding old ideas. Innocent babies continue to be born into privilege. Ordinary trauma is a slow build—swinging from want to need, and back to want to be taken. The multitudes of being consumed becomes a careful process of discernment like knowing the addictive taste of dispossession. Although sometimes, with frequency, the loop closes on you. Don’t worry. There is space here, stored as evergreen desires, located between patterns of waves formed from swallowing knowledge by association. It’s been recommended we might feel at the edges for faint annotations of alchemic personality. In the same way, men have learned to cross their legs at their ankles and global fantasies of catastrophe make us proficient in technology. Ritual is perfected suspense. It has already taken place. Events such as these are mere dreams; a tiger, white and mangy, tries to eat my hands from taking up too much space. A way to show how time is wasteless.

wasted on apparitions

The pattern is there is no pattern. Only thrills split from the inside of nightly dreams. Fireworks imploded. In the background of Jaws, the captured sound of the ocean insistent. Tumbleweeds untitled. Lives carefully leashed. Forgiveness now sold at cost. It’s cheaper than a full-bodied excavation or postponing uninsured vacations. Those flag waving contests, sacred competitions, enunciate the ascendant feelings. Clear and bright. Rising suspicions, surges of delusion, all of it natural as dredged wetlands or pipelines exploding to spectacular affect. The variants are just following the rules of long division. A simple prayer; please. Insert more coins to keep living. The transactions of ordinary time. Freedom to fill an empty page. Phantom whisper networks now interstellar contextual markers. Parabolic welcome wagons. There is no pattern, only recognition.

elegy for the collective

Han Jin (South Korean, b. 1979), *Inner Side of the Wind #1*, 2017. Oil on linen, 130.3 x 130.3 cm

Large-scale logistics require brutality to properly function. It’s a consistent low-grade hum, not quite elevated to cadence, buried between the lines of the system’s dramatic rhetoric. Have not. Listen to the outgoing empire’s heroes—the obedient civil servants, the priests, and the keepers of fluctuating interest rates—as they transition their esoteric power. In this tenuous state, it feels risky to outright deny dehumanization is holding together our mutual cultural identities. Shut your mouth, withdraw. Are your dreams an onslaught of forbidden touch too? Historically, politics of a republic abandon specific kinds of astonishment. Buried seeds of exaltation. This year’s plans were just that, plans. Revision requires experience, which can only be earned through the passage of kairological time. Our collective scripts of possibility are now hardwired into the evaporating streams of multiple realities. We are conducted citizens. The death of illusions can be a gift with the right slant. I think philosophers of imagination make the best poets. Please love me as much as a skeptic’s devotion. Help me feel for the traces of memory around our capacity to forget. That’s grace. The last time it snowed in Los Angeles? 2007. If you want, you can call that feeling of recognition emotional regulation. Are you a canary? Am I? Were they?

aesthetic aberrations

Opposites are abstract concepts belonging to the realm of thought, and as such they are relative. By the very act of focusing our attention on any one concept we create its opposite. … Since all opposites are interdependent, their conflict can never result in the total victory of one side, but will always be a manifestation of the interplay between the two sides. — The Tao of Physics

her dreams were filled with spooked horses and rabid wolves
allegories of courage or danger or obsession
shallow interpretations, her repressed energies a spark
threads of eternal poems with narrow slanted voices
waking, she stuck pins in her eyes to filter in more light

a very, very loud extended silence

I find peace inside California’s dramatic winter weather changes. They remind me I was never in control. During the eclipse, I dreamt girls were fist fighting under street lights. I woke up centered and kept all that scattered energy lodged between the spaces of my teeth.

Shock. Then awe. This is what they warned us about. Civic intimacies have been breeched. Residents clutch their pearl-handled pistols. Our movies show us acting surprised while collective sighs are lodged inaudible.

Bound by the length of light, time arouses. I take these sacred fascinations and wrap myself soft and deep as the high tides. I search for conscience affect in its rawest and wildest form. This is a new year of stimulated objections. We have been warned.

_________________________________________________________________________________

title reference to: ‘The grave of the Russian composer Alfred Schnittke in Novodevichye Cemetery in Moscow is surmounted by a stone on which is engraved a rest beneath a fermata with a triple forte noted at the bottom: A very, very loud extended silence.’ —John Biguenet, Silence (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), p.49.

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

Category: dream