flotsam

“For the alert body, the useless interval becomes a plenum.”
— Francis Richard, Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics 

10 June 2016, San Francisco HOW DOES MY POVERTY RELATE TO YOUR PROSPERITY?

I obsessively check the feeds and the timelines like a salt lick. Distracted bait draws the largest crowds. People are bored. The death toll rises. Profiteers are euphoric for high demand drawn from historic lows. I look up the word “disinter” [verb: dig up (something that has been buried, especially a corpse)], then notice the grass in the park is ankle deep. Clouds break blue. Home becomes hysteria—a boundary state—shape shifting into the space in between, wrecked. In these unique times, it is best to rehearse worries to scale. Memory and risk are their own parabolic textures. Voided feelings now so very retro.

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

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

blue noise

artist: unknown

Maybe if I loved her enough, my mother would heal. – Chana Wilson, Riding Fury Home

My mom officially disappeared from our family when I was thirteen. To be fair, she did not know she’d be leaving her four daughters that day either. When she left the house, she had packed nothing but her purse. Dispossessed, my memories are inscribed into a tight buzzing chest, rushed breathing, and anxious as self-doubt. These memories are my limbic system, the circuits of my mood board. I learned decades later my father took her purse as the only door out of the mental institution shut in her face.

The memories I have exist because I was there but that is as far as my truth can extend, the rest are now privatized myths. To be honest, my mom had been disappearing long before that fateful day. The silence in between seeing her was seasonless and evokes the dreamy concept of eternity for me.

It is true some winters the prairie grass reached taller than the snow drifts. To be obnoxious, you can read snow drifts as a noun or a verb. In that way, my teenage years were a righteous alchemy of oblivion and riot. I remember watching my mom’s need to earn her perfection and how she absorbed all his taking. I deducted a respect for witness and learned early that quiet violence swells. Infinite in its exhaustion, my realities are at best uncertain, which means I have the capacity to refine and revise.

I learned the art and practice of possibility from my mom. To be obvious, I owe my mom my life even if she wasn’t there for most of it. I had to let go of any contempt for her absence years ago because, like me, she also holds dreams of an expansive horizon inside her.

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.

paradox of desire

October 2018, Brooklyn

I almost never buy in bulk, although I appreciate the expression of commitment. My lack of bulk desire is rooted in one of those childhoods funneled through scarcity politics, of all kinds: spirit, body, voice, resources, access, stimulation. My earliest taste of cultural politics were synthetic extractions grounded in epic narratives of fatherly protection.
A practice endured through sacrifice.

There was a seduction to all that nurturing, an attention and encouragement to focus on one’s most intimate self—the soul.
If followed correctly, there would be saving.

In all that repetitive redemption, there was a sense of safety—
false as it was. I ache for those early feelings of learning about abundance. When the simple was profound, like the sound of snow falling.

These days are starting to feel retrograde, astrologically speaking
an illusion. My dreams are looping, again. I’m taking all these memories, the bulk of them, and feeling nothing but an offering to grieve for what was taken, withheld, starved. An invitation of acceptance, a different kind of suffering.

 

anticipatory grief is poiesis

Danny Lyon, From 89 Beekman Street Looking South in Fulton Street, c. 1967, from The Destruction of Lower Manhattan

“Are we witnesses or actors?” – Carolyn Kizer from “Twelve O’Clock”

From a tender age, we learn to anticipate expansive boundaries. This is how we survived.

Our inheritances can be found folded into cornered spaces where silence occupies itself. A similar appreciation to realizing how much our eyes have adjusted to darkness. We trade today’s exhaustion for speculative futures. Assassinations happen daily.

Diversions become elegant beginnings when you realize resistance has immortal roots. That’s why performing for an absent savior is a dishonest practice and violence is a loop of fractured sounds. Do you hear that echo abdicating its own existence?

The sun feels yellow today. Birds still relay their news through song. Incantations woven over and through the roar of their own destruction. A natural and honest alchemy. Such revision signals there is enough, a gathering of effort.

When they ask how you survived this century, what will your answer be?

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.

reconciliation

“everyone is a conscientious objector to something” — William Stafford (from Every War Has Two Losers)

artist unknown

The sun was warm. Flowers pop and stretch.
I sang softly into the deepest darkness.
I was not afraid.

Even here, I struggle what to say.
Bending under the weight of unwritten letters,
I want to succeed
differently.

Morning news push violent denials.
I wake softly into fading darkness.
I am not afraid.

field notes

We used to think that if we knew one, we knew two, because one and one are two. We are finding that we must learn a great deal more about “and.” — Sir Arthur Eddington

“you found the clit,” april 2018, san francisco

I. virtual systems

we have learned to covet reflective virtual objects
on occasion, we can still recall vibrations of analog sounds
in a digital world fueled by fossils & compounded fabrications
I wrap my arms around you as car alarms blare songs of protection

II. echo as residue

our preferences fill shapes generated by algorithms gone wild
authenticated searches find radical stability
a looped sacred ceremony

III. curation

corn, cowboys, & cattle
broken buttons
violent light

[classed units of measurement
or why it matters I want the horizon to never end]

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.

body as an arguement

sex scandals are time stamps
tenacious denials in constant motion
caught in the heart of our throats

we collect these daily reactions edited towards fortune
while retribution becomes a chimera as forthcoming
as justice or glacial landscaping or forgiveness

feelings are now citations of replicated intuition
ancient categories of visceral intimacy siding with self
sacrosanct representation     (a politic)

swelling to release multiple truths
charming double entendres entwined
bound to furious calculations of power and risk

the way white anger colludes with fear
a curious seduction of inductive logic
recast as an approximate commitment to devotion

embraced invasions
meat, text, and soul

transfixed politics

Our bones are built of spirals. – Joy Harjo

Nicole Eisenman, Untitled, 2012

I.

our wildest prophetic imagination
has led us here: a shattering of sex
uncomfortable
deep
looking

II.

calm & concentrated
I saw two waves lock
like elk horns
then embrace

III.

truth of feelings
as charm offensives
as wet feathers

IV.

divine signs
pushing forward

V.
smoothness is both a measure and a lack of roughness

mercurial politics

I have no body; the “I” writing this has no body: not in the old way. Zones. Pressures. Here a structured tension there an underlying ache. Vital signs. Phases of disquiet not clearly demarcated from areas of peace. — Laura Mullen, “Spectograms (projected autobiography),” Complicated Grief

Nov 2017, Berlin

Revolutions are frenetic desires. Seams stretch tight.
   familiar stimulation: swelled power and impulse

Violence precedes peace when knowledge becomes ransom.
   negative space: culture is public negotiation

Men speak in abstraction. Their distancing performative.
   economies of scale: underwhelming demands for mass hysteria

Intuition anchored.   Solicit.