“Thinking is more erotic than calculating.”
—Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals
I’m dreaming of digital music evaporating inside fancy buildings,
of piss-stained city sidewalks, of stars born inside black holes.
I’m dreaming of facts not found in science, of poetry observed,
of what goes unsaid when the wrong people have power over me.
I’m dreaming of words and phrases forming infinite questions,
of line breaks matching my psyche, of wilding time to stay feral.
You insisted on an open casket. Hard proof, evidence of generous witness.
I remember it was rhubarb season, early spring, and your absence
deepened the long shadows laying gently across your receiving body.
Lilies (yellow, your favorite color) and fresh cut dandelions,
still dripping defensive sticky milk, held the light of your horizon.
Your life’s silhouette now full circle. Our mutual failures
vanished into pedantic memories and obscured the reverent silence.
I force myself to swallow the always-disappearing now.
There is pleasure in this remembrance, a type of muscle memory,
while I actively grope for a future. Even this specific meaning-making,
if shockingly ordinary, is superstitious in its suffering.
I’ve learned to gather these blurred edges, glints of everyday living,
as gravity compliments a recursive temptation towards animality.
“And maybe in a year, I will learn to love the fear.” — Adult Mom, “Survival”
Blank noise. Breathe quickly, but quietly.
The biggest trees are abandoning their place.
Machines have not yet mastered human hands.
The gaze performs. Daffodils brag upon bloom.
The Greek god of sleep is death’s brother.
Nothing is ever really buried.
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
a warm winter sun
and somatic echoes
pull dreams from my bones
and the stars
become repetition compulsion—
call and response.
A gust of wind,
voices carry.
Thresholds of absence
absorb transfiguration—
artificial as divination.
Ease my thighs.
Pay attention.
Track the pattern.
It’s what is encouraged
when time does not stop.
“Ask yourself: Why am I seeing and feeling this? How am I growing? What am I learning? Remember: every coincidence is potentially meaningful. How high your awareness level is determines how much meaning you get from your world.” —Ansel Adams
Yesterday, not an ounce of sunshine so I read old love letters.
I hoard my integrity and stash joy wherever I can find it.
There is muscle memory and active imagination.
There is something called living in between these extremes.
I kept the love letters. I liked that they still held their refrains
from a recent past. I remember to cast its spell.
There is ceremony and letting go.
There is something I call living in between those extremes.
“I won’t see this year again, not again so innocent; and longing wrapped round my throat like a scarf.” —Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Recent times is a reference, well-worn and specific enough to create a shared understanding. I read an article that used the phrase “deaths pulled from the future” after reading another article that claimed the word “robot” wasn’t publicly used until the early 1920s. The framing for both pieces was replaceability. What comes next becomes a question of narration. Can I claim to know the moon without having been there?
I listened to a recording of an exploding volcano thousands of miles away. It initially sounded like gunfire, then I heard a blast from a force unimaginable, a process of release and eventual settling that is so unknowable it has been ascribed to the gods. This is a story to find a way, a hook to hold onto while the world spins.
I wanted what the future would bring. When and how was what I was most interested in. I thought about how the best poets break the conventions of language. How passive writing is aggressive and how darkness holds its own light. As trees absorb sound, bodies shelter. I write deliberately. I’m acutely aware of how time can get one-dimensional when influenced by the dollar.
It was only February.
I imagined a time where hope has no currency because there is no fear to weight its over-inflated value. Neglect should have been the word of the year; acting as both a verb (a failure to care for properly) and a noun (a state of being uncared for—deprivation). In between cracks of clouds, blue. I dredged, flayed, and autopsied the past into quantum bytes. I tried to stay inside my bones.
The palm trees hissed and swayed. A Home Depot burned so hot we saw the fire’s heat signature from space. I found quiet inside a frequency where the sacred is buried. Wars drag on, more brutal and unnecessary than last yesterday’s justifications.
What can be palmed is what I want. A random ray of sunlight; the trill of unseen song birds; a break, nearly inaudible, in the freeway traffic. I gather the most extraordinary mundane moments—the astonishing present—as proof of my witness.
August arrived and asked an ancient question: will any god save us?
What reclamation can be shown from the exchange of a year lived? Inside this daydream marathon, I toast to multivalent miracles. Nobody survives by accident.
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.
Sunday: a day of cathedral ascension
and perpetual penetration. Not yet: a ghost.
On the eve becomes threatening.
All the suspense of being on your knees,
heaven spread.
There are easier ways to say these things, but some things shouldn’t be said easily. —Octavia Butler, Imago (1989)
The first season’s snow dusted the highest Sierra peaks.
Much later, I heard the falling morning light beg for attention.
In this origin story, and its evolving landscape,
the changing trees become the loudest voices.
I learned early that submission requires indulgence.
They called it grace, which was also a sympathy.
I remember there was laying on of hands.
At the edge of town, someone advertised a rummage sale.
Within this temporary interval of speculation,
fate feels systematic. I carry absence like an autopsy,
an examination as method towards truth.
I know how to hold time as a promise.
“And now I see that I am sorrowful about only a few things, but over and over.” —Mary Oliver
In June, I dreamt of New York City: the subway, tucked and nested shops,
sand dunes, snow drifts on the beach.
In July, at 6:47pm, so much light still.
In August, I prayed the cadence of life would find me awake and wanting.
Suddenly, it is October. It feels like beautiful trouble, like tasteful nudes,
both a precipice and an orientation towards receptivity.
For the first time in a long time I’m not worried.
I know how to wait for the giving to begin.
You have to find your own way of stilling time. —Mary Ruefle
Alchemic wishes and wants, memories
and miracles disintegrate—
muted into mythology of lives lived.
A texture felt both like a shadow
and a daydream or the loss of time found.
It’s ok. A sense of panic is inevitable
when half of this year is behind us.
Please promise me you’ll decorate
for Christmas in July, and in between
all the holiday seasons after I’m gone.
Even machines take time to integrate
their learnings. Make the pause sacred
inside this constant state of readiness.
Summer funerals, holiday funerals, GoFundMe™ funerals
become parades of divinity serving a false purpose:
time progresses. Thrust takes the shape of a noun
and a verb; slow entry
repetition is seduction is violence is compliance.
Mutilated men archive intimacy inside avarice
and finger the crumbs left behind.
“Death is hidden in clocks… in my youth I chose as my motto
the ancient Latin maxim festina lente: make haste slowly.”
— Italo Calvino
In between the gaps
where sunlight reaches—
shades of green extend.
Shawls of fog dampen
the moving silence.
I surrendered to Time
as the backsides of train towns
and tranquil boredom took me
closer to you and then back
home. Somewhere past the darkness
where distressed light of forests spill
into borders of thriving attraction,
I dreamt bravely. I named it joy.
“When it’s your turn to live through a war, you’ll see, you don’t have time to feel anything.” —Colette Marin Catherine
It’s all random chaotic vigilance these days.
Day number: “unknown”. Secret selves will be revealed
in the times to come. They know desperation
influences choices. Which illusions may end up real?
II.
This “new normal” hangs like a loose shirt,
an odor, a swallow. We are promised a brighter future.
III.
Philosophers and preachers’ predictions,
unproven claims, betray their nostalgia.
Doubts to the contrary raise suspicions,
an emotion of imagination and subjectivity.
IIII.
Uncertain and curious how permanent this now
will be is one way to recognize the game.
Loss, grief, time are the same measurement,
which requires comparison in some form.
IIIII.
The rich, and their need for luxuries, buy ready made.
Some beauty is unimaginable, a pang. Sharp vanishing
click bait. Possession was an emanation: source.
A list, after all, is an incantation.
—Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”
I almost paid attention every day this just past year. There might not be an instant memory to pull from but I remember:
23 February, Tuesday, 2021 — we reached that unimaginable 500,000 deaths yesterday
By April, languishing was declared 2021’s dominant emotion. The experts were specific—we are languishing, a residual and continuously active tense.
But we are extraordinary now, more so than the before-times. Those of us who survived have an understanding, a swallow of temporary obedience, having squeezed through another dimension. In the same way Cliff Swallows, federally protected migratory songbirds, continue to build their nests on overvalued condos built on top of their well-known migration paths, we can claim we too are still living.
What’s next will be found in the ordinary, beyond the cleaved repetition.
Traveling at the speed of days per hour.
Is it okay to celebrate survival?
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
Arranging for false openings—second endings.
What marrow should we salvage?
Oblivion becomes subjugation
when aesthetics have agendas.
Only at the very beginning
did the freeway quiet.
Now, faint signals of endearment are muted
as claw marks or socialized hope.
(All this death. It’s inevitable.)
At this point in time, there might be enough
to carry the rest of us curiously forward
full from holding unanswerable questions
in all this cropped light.
That moment when the word incarnates, finds its skin: yes.
— Lia Purpura, from the essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie”
I’m gnawing off my own survival
and feeling full at the end of another year.
That any private emotion can still be felt
feels victorious. Sure, sensationalism
feels good, but only for so long.
Invisible patterns, an intentional result,
form this temporality, which may be also be
averse pacification. It’s not even midwinter
and yet we want—phantom abundance.
The way marginalia signals scarcity.
That kind of resourceful:
our aggregate bodies immersed in attention.
Pasteurized sameness. But wait—
there’s still anticipation—
a specific kind of waiting.
What clouds teach us.
Saturn, it says, devours his children.
Yes, it’s true, I know it.
An ordinary man, though, a man like me
eats and is full.
Only God is never satisfied.
Ai, “The Good Shepherd: Atlanta, 1981”, from Sin, 1986
How we all get busy in not believing
in ourselves despite mixing in mantras
that repeat with each breath—
I am enough
and you in absence,
no more next year.
A week’s worth of grind makes edges
so soft they can’t be felt, just yet—
like observing shadows’ length and depth
and distant clouds thick as mountain ranges.
Day skies still hold starlight.
That kind of worth fighting for.
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.
Praise in the sense that it is an embracing of emerging experience. —William Stafford
A cloudless sky, mostly blue,
held remnants of peach
at its opening edges.
This longing permeates, resisting
a horizon—a working class assumption
of completeness.
Our culture is from men who recorded tides
before gravity from the moon was proved
by future men.
And we must keep living
in that absence.
one hundred hours spent
+ one hundred hours taken
= affectual transactions
a certain level of suffering
is required to earn a dollar
I put enough here to fill that hole
“No matter what disintegrating influences I was experiencing, the writing was the act of wholeness.” —Anaïs Nin, In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays
A local politician sells
subtext. Mixing patterns
of outbreaks, denial, aggressive
neglect, profit, waste. Time
monetized into relativity of spectacle.
Subterranean realities. July descends into August.
Clouds sail by dry as bones. Crowns above spread
shade. Our vernacular noisy wagons, isolated
oak savannas, quarantined in translation.
Wanting to do what we see; evidence.
Let’s take these metastasized days
and ride them into darkness. Be silhouettes,
featureless. Are you aware of all the consequences
when accepting the advertised risks?
Time is visual—
the sun an arc,
we are the curve.
On the cusp of a new year
time has been absorbed;
last year not yet finished.
Unless otherwise stated,
no one is coming to save me.
Time now swarmed with qualifiers,
its own forgotten circumstance.
Lead me gently back to place.
My tense present perfect—
not yet.
Pleasure is productive; it produces itself. —Arielle Zibrak
Clouds stretch fluff
over million-dollar hills.
That clock stopped years ago.
The plants grow taller.
Evacuations have started,
master prompts. This land of fault lines
under a sky so blue, suspended in hope.
Responsive is the desire, a memory.
“I shrug whatever is gone and welcome the changing truth.”
—William Stafford, 25 September 1975
* crosswalks are supposed to keep you safe *
Consider this to be a true story. Send a self-addressed stamped envelope to learn more.
* a moment, a chance, they are everywhere *
The orange tree has been gone for at least a year now?
It was one of those bright and sunny days.
* perpetrators hidden in plain sight *
Home is a loop, shadowed at its edges.
Go out and gather. Return /
insubordinate.
“I find it easy to admire in trees what depresses me in people.”
— Marge Piercy, last two lines of “The Doughty Oaks” from The Moon Is Always Female
Spring finds us haunted. A seasonal feeling after witnessing winter’s passing, but it is acute this year. Blue skies expanding. Nests of birds explode in sound. Time is the fulcrum. I love you fills the past, present, future. Now weightless, light cracks through early morning clouds.
I thought about the scam of resurrection. Some never fully accept death
as loss, permanence unchanged. They believe death can be cheated.
The obvious irony is you’ll suffer from wanting what is not possible.
Time is the fulcrum. Flexing, palming, sucking off temporal attention.
Through the eyes of a non-believer, the sharpened edge of dilution,
I miss you.
… read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life,
re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book,
and dismiss whatever insults your own soul…
— Walt Whitman
This just-past year was a hard and impatient year to live through. All the ways that living had been previously measured—flesh on flesh, breathing in blue sky, talking with your eyes in crowded noisy rooms, curating analog conversations—were inverted. In my sheltered place, I watched as the pace and geographic scale of global suffering became buried in disembodied aggregates. Paradox ruptured.
“Everyone remains aware of the arbitrariness, the artificial character of time and history.”
—Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End
pleasure | obsession | distraction | instinct
This list contains references from a calendar year that borrowed time to push its own way through. It began as it ended, incomplete.
It has been enough to record the honest and the irreverent interruptions. There are whole days, months, ideas, and precious witnesses missing. An almost unbearable time-lag of consciousness is now felt experience. To survive what? An optics of promise, a future?
distance + force = gravity
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.—William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
What I continually draw from this poem’s well is not hope but alert perspective and prophetic predictability. I anchor on should — indicating both obligation and possibility — as the holding ground. “A Ritual to Read to Each Other” is a solicitation, or a prayer, to listen to your clearest signals — yes or no, or maybe — and bravely claim them.
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?
“There is a sense in which we are all each other’s consequences.”
—Wallace Stevens, All the Little Live Things
Every day has been a chance
to live within the margins
that remain and maintain
the rigor of keeping it together.
Some normalized themselves
to a saturation point when
conspiracies’ realities are
unconfirmed real threats.
The calendar says winter is coming.
Where is this god that so many claim?
The one that protects and loves us or
that other one that enjoys mercy.
Queer as feelings, speculation has left
us wild. Go ahead—we might as well
make our own temporal decisions.
Loud, quiet, loud. Fringed dynamics.
The greed of men. A sagging breast.
Haphazardly adjacent as ecstasy.
Our animal consciousness seek
what we recognize, warm refuge.
count the number of Tuesday’s remaining
this year, if lucky a new year is coming
calibrate your most latent expectations
distinguish stimulation from propaganda
if you need drama, watch the leaves turn
feel the unconscious dare of hope
swallow the sacredness of ordinary days
examine the materiality of fidelity; listen
elucidate future present tense
seek pleasure to root out despair
replenish your somatic prayers
consider how your routine is a rhythm
write down its verse, chorus, verse
review when you forget you are the bridge
“Instead of becoming preoccupied by the extraordinary things the deluded individual believes, we should turn our attention instead to the ordinary things they no longer believe, the absence of which have allowed the bizarre to flourish.” — Huw Green, “Deluded, with reason”
I was born on the east side of the Missouri River. U.S. Route 12 segregated town into north and south. If you drove west, time moved backward one hour from Central to Mountain. A sign on the bridge let you know you were crossing the threshold when you reached the middle of the river. Everyone west, within a certain driving distance of town, set their clocks to Central. Awareness of time in this way, coupled with growing up immersed in seductive Evangelical promises of attaining an afterlife, shaped absolutely how I perceive time and place.
Living in a community that so willfully defied authority (whoever put that arbitrary line of what time was supposed to be) while persistently yielding to a prophesy that believed you were doomed unless saved, was ordinary—normal—to me. Technically, every day was urgent and distorted.
What was delusion and what was habitual enough to thrive in that unique cultural echo?
Learning so young to measure time as both borrowed and flexible expanded my ability to conceptualize reality, an immense landscape of what I knew and what I saw. It also helped to construct a very specific concept of suspension of disbelief. I recognize and am familiar with waiting as an anchor of suffering and its twin—earned anticipation of endurance.
As the contemporary drags hot and dangerous, I wonder if these times, right now, are worse than other times of war, protest, fire. To pull an image from the last line in William Stafford’s A Ritual to Read to Each Other …the darkness around us is deep.
What revelations lay at this undulating edge?
I don’t know. For now, I’ll keep translating evocations into poems and finding pleasure in trying to answer unanswerable questions. Where I come from, we call that feeling for miracles.
“Without touch, God is a monologue.” — Andre Dubus from Broken Vessels: Essays
edge of collapse
absence entrance,
a trance
I’m craving land
spread wide
open.
orange primary sun
a macabre atmosphere
the news scrolls
trolls concern for structures
malefic energy
to make decisions
humans are hardwired
to scan for threats
there’s a moment
after the emergency
I feel stupid
like I overreacted
I survived
but didn’t stay calm
making everything sacred
takes so much
in my dreams,
I asked for time
confirmation is a need
during Steinbeck summers
lifting up prayers
by day and profitable hour
just one way to count time
while Siberia and Los Angeles burn
a poet said truth is a promise
is conspiracy
is part of the weather
is a chain of events
an affect of algorithms
our unconscious
this wanting desire to influence
counterfeit double consciousness
divergent as sonic traces
bending poetics of disaster
to experience thinking out loud
together on a mesoscale
we live
in a nervous system
shy regards now a bond
static as panic
we live
where time invites neglect
monied generations
under hot blue skies
we live
in all-cap sentiments
rhetorical as pushing buttons
fragments of sunken places
How quickly can one dispense with the old bargains between defense and desire, adapting to a regime whose rules provide no felt comfort?
— Lauren Berlant, “Cruel Optimism”
Inside this temporal state,
habitualization is the climax.
To date, public misery
is not officially worthy
of monuments or accurate measurements.
Finely stratified, your and my collective
future—active emptiness—is its own
embodied aleatory performance.
But what are we supposed to be
doing with this time?
Such insinuating can feel negative,
counterproductive as misdirected desires.
Overstimulated, I beg for revision
rather than tempt resolution.
These present hours unknowing.
This is a special way of being afraid — first line of third stanza in “Aubade” by Philip Levine
do you feel fear ineffably?
personal, not public — self as an other
the social distance in between
hoax and binaries and stimulus
do you feel subtleties?
curated indoor skies — measuring light
efface negation
imperfect present
do you feel like you are repeating yourself?
ritual or repetition — your reputation
There was a sun once
It lit the whole damn sky
It kept everything
Everything alive
Jawbreaker — Shield Your Eyes
what gods are inside you?
have you asked them for help?
will they respond in time?
The different names for the soul, among nearly all peoples, are just so many breath variations, and onomatopoeic expressions of breathing.” — Charles Nodier (1828)
my idle hands are:
structures of experience
polymorphic intentions
dimensions of interstitial time
devils playthings
listening
“The number of people here [New York City] who think they are alone, sing alone, and eat and talk alone in the streets in mind-boggling. And yet they don’t add up. Quite the reverse. The subtract from each other and their resemblance to one another is uncertain.
… It is the saddest sight in the world. Sadder than destitution, sadder than the beggar is the man who eats alone in public.” — Jean Baudrillard, America (trans. Chris Turner, 1991)
Nearly a year ago, I carried America by Jean Baudrillard around the Bay Area and all the way down to the most American of places, Los Angeles.
I wanted to capture Baudrillard’s idea that eating alone was the saddest sight in the world.
And of course nothing and everything can change in a year.
Contemporary America is at an epic and fevered hyperpitch with an advancing crisis of reality. What is refracted is what will be. Our ascetic online lives more fake than ever. Asepsis is an arousing and obsessive state in this quarantine simulacrum. Hygiene a cult. The habitual repetition of survival, an amplified fascination of being alive, its own seduction.
But one day soon—in the scheme of weeks or as quick as when you notice your neighborhood trees blaring their blooms—restaurants will open for sit-down meals and I will prove Baudrillard wrong.
Listen—this is a faint station
left alive in the vast universe.
I was left here to tell you a message
designed for your instruction or comfort,
but now that my world is gone I crave
expression pure as all the space
around me: I want to tell what is. …
— William Stafford, TUNED IN LATE ONE NIGHT, first stanza
We were told to get extra, but not hoard.
All professional sports, including NASCAR,
and all mass entertainment cancelled.
Church and work shifts to virtual platforms.
Even the Pro Football Hall of Fame
shuts down for “at least two weeks.”
Tourists won’t hear the bronze busts
speak in stiff-lipped whispers.
Witness begins to require recalibration.
An Italian doctor corrected the British talk show host –
bomb metaphors are inadequate for this pandemic.
A bomb implies “one moment in time and space.”
The doctor begged viewers to grasp spacetime physics
as Florida’s spring break beaches swell.
I scrolled and
scrolled
and
scrolled
for good news
(time passed)
Freeway traffic flows in east/west lanes
like ants on a crumb score.
I’m waking up later each day,
blending home and work
into a double-stitched seam.
It is the first day of spring.
I beg you to prepare for the future you want.
Yet nothing has really happened
yet.
Place has even more significance
than we can consciously hold
now cracking open at its weakest points –
where we are isolated and approximate distance.
News moves relative to a wide margin of incompetence
and displays itself as curved lines.
I bless the bus drivers keeping their ghost routes.
New leaves spread wider each passing day.
I am hyperaware of my phantom wants:
a balcony and family. A dopamine loop fueled
by anticipation. The future now a fermata.
I.
What am I listening for?
The rhythm of an endless human-centered conversation.
Why?
To feel the space between our next collective breath.
II.
The sky split in half with the trail of an early flight.
Orange morning light, a long exhale, and the sound
of pencil on paper filling a page. I appreciate
clouds temporary status and apply that truth
to my own temporary life.
III.
I want to find a way to open
from the inside,
safely and slowly,
with pleasure and wonder.
IV.
Put your weapons down.
The sky is the same as yesterday: blue and uninterrupted.
“I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.”
—Agnes Martin, Writings
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.
“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
I’ve learned enough to be dangerous. I’ve failed enough to feel successful.
Lessons learned, in the order they showed 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.
“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)
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.
Always to shine,
to shine everywhere,
to the very depth of the last days…
-Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky
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?
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)
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
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.
dreams of meat
fractured rendering
time wasted
a scarce luxury
this kind of clarity
born from salvation
a knowing how petty
being a victim can be
in classic tactile evasion
you beg for cruelty before comfort
caught in a familiar discordant loop
arrested in rustic sanctuary
passive as a twinned body
swallowing your present tense
to breast the wave
then shred your fears of impotence
these kinds of clearings
a place where light abandons control
are at the edges of regeneration
the poetics of follow through
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.
In three years and just shy of three months I intentionally curated one hundred hours of aesthetic meditation. For six thousand minutes, I listened and watched the ocean perform. The consistency of each unique breaking wave reminding me that this, too, is living. That doing the same thing over and over for no purpose other than feeling pleasure is the goddamn point. Time worth its exchange in salty kisses. I’ve written how empty landscapes are familiar, safe. Home. Blank page, empty horizon. Now, neither scare me.
I respect the crash and appreciate the ability to pull back into myself. It is energy in motion. To swell. To release. To be seen. To be heard. To be so elegantly agitated. To retreat. To join. To rise. To start again. Already good enough.
Home is here—and out there. I wish to never lose my quiet roar.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
title is Dorothy Allison’s Two or Three Things I Know for Sure (1995)
Cache Culture 