Now that most of the neighborhood trees have leaves,
there is extra music, percussive, inside the offshore winds.
LOVE IS $, Oakland (October 2021)
Grieve the affects of a closed throat. No sound, only devouring.
Bright—brilliance in its injury. An echo. Observe the moment,
vestigial and temporary as spring’s abridged shadows.
NEVER WORK, Berlin (October 2017)
In the end, it’s only abstraction and phenomenon.
I hope you have choices too. The ability to revise.
That you demand the real, and push beyond memory.
This movement is discretion at its finest.
Refusal, grace and her technicalities, extends perception.
That angle, visceral, is what creates this poetic materiality.
An open prairie, a reservoir, raw mediums of nomadic attention.
This urge is to live my life swollen with blank spaces.
“…those who fight against prophesy only draw it more tightly around their throats.” —Madeline Miller, Circe
LOST, October 2019 (Oakland, CA)
First, I heard the whispers—then screams. A public audience
formed opinions. Within that poetics, an image burns beyond
what used to be memory. Like a curve seen from a highway.
Not quite perverse but ordinary as a Sunday. After the crowd left,
I heard the graves sing. I thought about sugar, fire, and energy
taking the shape of a ransom. Formulas of demand and release.
Nervous echoes continue to fill the gaps. To receive, I take.
“March, all that deceptive light but no fruits yet.” —Talvikki Ansel,
from “16 Stanzas in February,” Field (no. 98, Spring 2018).
d Robert Doisneau. Pedestrians Looking at Painting of a Nude in Paris Antique Shop Window, 1948.
In the kitchen, the light disarms domesticity. If you know, it is the same indistinguishable process as Mt. Tam’s cleaving iterations in the golden hour light. Always with breakneck speed. A world without material things, maybe more anti-internet, and certainly like the undead. This buried architecture of alleged domination, and its long-term parter submission, are binary witness to a blueprint of only translated secrets. The light resting inside corners, its own container of space and structure—mathematics, hypocrisy, or anxiety of memory—ensures that all our futures wait rushed and uncommitted. Swallow the miracle of ritual. Startling in its immediacy.
I was straddled, briefly, inside a space hollow with intent.
My clarity took the shape of a human-shaped hole.
Repetition became remembrance. Bright angles broke the plane.
I remember the camellias were dropping as headlines portend
false security. In this dreamed reality, sorrow penetrated remorse.
Something moved sideways as if in confession. At this edge,
just beyond, nothing. Blank imagination untangled into simple objects.
I heard ballon, small car, bus. I saw light dancing as if a whetstone.
Starlight hissed sharp. My hands held my face like a bell jar.
Wherever I was, my gravity kissed itself goodbye. I was an entire creation.
Light and shadow and universe.
Film still from A Taste of Honey, Tony Richardson, 1961
You may well be the narrator, the narrative, and the narrated.
—Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence
Generally, analytic predictions are only worth their final outcome. To help explain the magnitude of our current predicament, experts frame our collective memories in context of 100-year old floods, fires, wind events, drought, and storms. It’s an affective perspective born from habits that deny discovery, and it becomes boring—this cycle of forgetting. It’s obvious they never bothered to ask the swollen streams and eroding mountains what they know. Patches of grey swirl in a wanting-to-be blue bruised sky. This familiarity, both as place and mood, is its own form of disquiet energy. Memories of transverse understanding are leisurely folded inside melancholic miles of distance and above tangled root systems bolting vigorous. I prepare these filaments of imagination for when the apocalypse finally arrives out-of-breath and panicked. I extend no shame in its direction. It knows how late it is. I close my eyes and taste the sacred in all its contingencies. temporary, temporary, temporary
Maybe all of this has a simple explanation. I don’t remember
how I got home. I was feral due to generational circumstances.
I started this life from a deficit. I am a self-described opt-out.
What might be lies and what might be inaccessible misunderstandings?
The tail of history wags in all our faces, stubborn as possession.
It is an earned intimacy. The subject is abandoned, an allusion of comfort,
if that’s an orientation. It is a pattern recognition.
I want to try and describe an image of a hole but it’s more extravagant
than that. Hole is more of a preferential reference and also a moment recognizable only because this thread is a fractal.
Statutory evidence gathered like exhale and escape.
“It is a time for tons of verbiage, activity, consumption.” —Mark Rothko
The end of the year is coming, again.
Will you claim you are satisfied,
so far? How will you commit
to these remaining days? In this interlude,
what to cherish, what to improvise,
what to root, and what to let go?
I am still learning to pretend
the difference between memories
of a past gone and memories of a past unknown.
A loop on its return becomes a harbinger
of sentient evidence, now personal phenomenology.
It’s best to surrender to messianic joy
at this horizon point in a vanishing year.
Update your maps of what remains of your calls
to provisional responses. Name your beloveds.
There’s still time for passionate cadence and
appreciation of light’s lengthened silhouettes.
That space, that pause, is an insider’s point of view.
These longings pull from long-shadow days and nights.
Return, again, repeat. That kind of essential
permanence, palpable. Cross reference your embodied index,
then become a territory beyond meaning.
Enable new, interpretive beginnings. I flicker—an epic
verse. Your alterity is my resonance. Ride with me.
I don’t want to complain. It’s the morning light, bright and orange,
that is angry. Do not read this as a confession but more guided by the belief: a month of Sundays. It may be true; I have a furious wish to rearrange time. This is not a mare’s nest but more deceptively a half-full moon.
Breaking has an edge when the loudest crowd is guided by psychopomps
muted mouthing and demented.
I’m learning town names and their geography by following wildfires.
Not quite pastime, like writing, but more gradual like buried cities
now exposed. Reminders that the slanting light shares this memory.
A bitter taste lingers—
stringent, punchy
mouth feel—tongue maps.
Rebound special—
I dreamt, again, of moving.
A task of packing things
you forgot still exist.
We lay in bed, innocent
until forced to engage
with the world under a sky
quiet, grey milky light.
NICE KID, June 2014, Portland, OR
In America, I regret to be informed
war and rising gas prices
are equally traumatic. There’s panic
at that trigger-shaped pump.
Some reread biblical stories—
extracted citations of plagues, sin,
and salt. Fear finds us hungry.
Evacuation trails of refugees are littered
with what is no longer essential. Left behind;
rapture. Calculations shape bitter mouths,
reactions and policy becomes oracle.
In America, I regret to be informed
speculative fantasy and prosperity, a state,
are the gospel. Instead, I demand nothing exists.
Some claim emerging trends tell the story,
not knowing all data expires. The disconnect
of what has been with what is becoming unravels—
desperate inflations to make sugar from light.
If we do not forget, what is there to remember? —Mary Ruefle from “On Secrets”
found reality on a construction site sign, July 2011, San Francisco, CA
Suspension is a type of prayer
in the same way hard luck is still luck
or how clicking clocks make meaning.
Ending another year with reconstituted rituals:
unwrap an orange, warm the house with lights,
leave no trace and lament the echoes.
Interiors become accomplices
in a cascading culture of closures.
Reminding me the moon makes no light
of its own, and I don’t know
is the most honest answer I have to give.
This response to an unknown call,
how deeply personal an endeavor.
The past beats inside me like a second heart. —John Banville, The Sea
A Marilyn Monroe Simulacrum, December 2011, Sioux Falls, South Dakota
From football to cult rallies on glacial plains,
America excels at strategies of deterrence.
There is generational learning behind knowing
the difference between submission and giving.
Release is forbidden.
Americans’ reflective accolades penetrate the best
as fervent belief converts to trembling devotion.
The point being none of this is supposed to make sense.
As true as death, reality always fades.
“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
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”).
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.
For the first time in any recent memory
the sedimentary accumulation of details shift.
Cloaked like nerves and tucked inside,
we weren’t on any kind of edge at all!
Sometime, much later, Mars reflected bright
suspended above the light-polluted city limits.
Clouds clocked MPH. A smooth sense of validation.
The poets disagreed on the finer points
but we all agreed faint light still finds shadows.
Some called it art. For now, it was simply enough.
Tea leaves will have to broadcast what’s next.
The questions endless: courage or nostalgia?
Our timelines no longer mediative glory holes.
We, the animals, will follow the sun rising.
Cache Culture 