Limbs

Here, where words are waning
They move with shadows
Beneath the limn of the moon.

A distance -
The tide's dull thrum

The brightness falling,
Rising again
With the heat of the day.

Here, where they laugh
Keep fires
Slip hands beneath the mane of the earth

Lips whip words through the night
On sparks,
Stray embers

Tongues lick against the grain
Verge on description
Go silent again.

Their limits run up
Against the curve of the lip of the sea

Verge on destruction

Return to the tentative

And collected

Under the limn of the moon

The negative sun

What you lost me
Eclipses what I might someday find

A permanent nightfall
A perpetual lack

Shake to dust

...And Release

With noon arrives:
A high sun
The event horizon
Of a life.

It's been strangling you anyhow,
Since birth,
From breath to breath

Each exhalation a reminder
Each inhalation a tension
Which could never go on.

Laughter in the loudest places
Midnight hours of who knows what
Washing out real purpose
In the extraneous
And uncertain.

But this is all periphery.

Do not go at night;
Even an immanent end cannot justify
That sort of sadness.

Go in the daytime,
Go under a high sun.

Make one last move
For balance
For peace

Perhaps it will not set -
You can never be sure.

Semaphore

The old
Stick needles in
Telephone books,

Cry out

"It has been hobbled."

And still they speak,
The living.

Semaphore,
Metaphor,

Telepathy,
Maybe.

Lingering laughter
In the apparatus.

Between the synapse of hands -

A Grammar.

A Reprise

time takes its detail
and life its fullness,

leaving just this theme in memory.

we hum along with
what is left -
a subtraction leaving only
spine and odd flourishes,

what is essential
and the strangest other things.

markers of passage,
of decay;

memories of music
reduced
are still memories
of music.

what remains,
after all,
is a song.

a transmigratory bird

I set your birds free

In the pale nothing of the moon.

hollowness in the bones is a principle.

a transmigratory bird

a new life

but you have been born before so don’t be afraid.

Endgame

I. Act Without Words

Listen:

They are singing against the calm.

Time now

To restore silence

To speak only these last words

In the arc of truth:

Quiet, quiet

Quiet while you are ahead.

Endgame

III. Not I

Listen: 

The sum of all voices

Fills your mouth.

It is your voice.

It is the song of your kind.

See: 

Incapable beasts of noise

Unsilent spirits afloat on the sea

of Time.

with apologies to S. Beckett

Unremembered

There is a memory like the ghosts of leaves

It floats through the silence

Between teeth and trees.

It is almost absent,

Overlooked,

One of the things

Time took.

I have left it back there,

In the snow.

Amongst the ragged trees.

       

 #e

Tertiary Colors

East: a promise,
A fable he favors above all else.

The playground groans,
Fire beneath

If you listen,
Which you do,
It is evident, audible:

Counting, small words and simple
Somewhere in the hollow ground.

The silence has gotten what it came for.

An Inter(n)ment

Hay,

And a head,

Lie above the cold earth.

Picking pumpkins,

Cutting vines.

To forget the body:

Burial,

Husks,

Material need.

Casualties.

Return to Sender

The primacy of self in your philosophy is doing that dark work it inevitably does, skewing the world in your eyes away from the way those ripples hit the other fish, and your empathy and your patience are going, at least where I'm concerned. The primacy of your story means overwriting my own narrative of emotion, means seeing my pain in terms of what I ask of you, not what you have asked of me, nor by what we both agreed to by being here in this room, by not retreating into those mythic woods of solitude where whatever one is is right and finished. Here, we are not autonomous. Here we have made ourselves vulnerable and to undermine that is to lie while holding a life in your hands.

This life is precious, yes, so let it be treated with care. How can any pain be trivial in a life that ends? Here's the last shred of my angst and anger, my resentment and resistance, there will be nothing now but love or silence. This can be a document, a charter, a letter of resignation, or an invitation to some kind of future not so heavy with loss.

Or maybe it will get lost in the mail like so many such petitions.

Another thing you make is this light in me

Sometimes
They mean

"Put this bit here"

Sometimes

"Let it fall thus, or thuslike"
But you mean

"What matrix of concepts
Would occur
To a child
In the night"

And that is
The mind
Of making
Which lights me on fire

Keeps my head
In singing static

In moving meanings

Which sets all things -

The body, also -

Alight

The Deep

A recurrence:

This and that handed-down couch
this and that failing screen

The beauty of the deep
a vast world we will never see.

A symmetry:

This and that
beginning and end.

Five years,
fifteen years:
a drop in the endless waters
an aberration of
biology, chance,
what passes by,
is appetizing.

What can be swallowed.


Here is the angler,
motionless,
waiting,
returning to nothing,

a stranger
lost at sea.

It has never been seen.

You Are Here

All things speak,
for god's sake.

All things have
some stunted half-measure
of agency.

All things prey,
brutalize,
fail to be frail.

All things speak,
god rest their souls.

Teachers, Their Hands Held High

“Every moment in a thousand different ways, in all your faculties and all their reckonings, you amount to this one thing - a scale, being tipped, or failing to be tipped.

You are your uncertainty. You are your distance from god.”

“I don't believe in god.”

“You are your distance from belief.”

Perspective

"So she said,

'When you feel...interred like this by the emotional force of his involvement in your life, just shift your scale a little bit. Of course individuality, uniqueness, can't really be an illusion - I know you care about him for reasons, I'm not suggesting otherwise. But this is only one truth, truth on one scale.

When you find being zoomed in is killing you, for fuck's sake, zoom out. Remember that, from a certain vantage, he's the most minor thing - a roach, a flea, a spore. One unit among billions whose quirks are inconsequential. He's just meat. Don't let meat ruin your day.”’

“Did she give you any indication how you’re supposed to accomplish this?”

“No, and I’m glad I didn't figure it out; that’s a dangerous tool to have in a moment of weakness. It's bad advice, you know. It's dangerous because it's not entirely unfounded. It seems to me all the hows of this operation are where we begin to turn toward the void. Because the universe is fond of irony, of course it begins with a wish to turn away from pain, only to find that pain, unlike other kinds of meaning, is not scalar or relative.

It's fractal; it always fits.”

Rest Less

Oh the details only change, an endless night that lasts from some blue peace to some great eternity and fever in between and misery between and prodding in between and loneliness and dreams and now the night proves it's as long as it seems it's young forever young it always seems so young it always seems so long it always seems

Crashing Planes

So these are the worlds, as they are, these ultimate states: the distant expanse, the mystery of the universe, and this town where what counts lies behind the literal, moves through moments like a lonely ghost but never really leaves. It knows my name - it may even be me, temporality aside. The shadow of the city and the specter of distant life, some mind beyond the red depths of space; they both know my name, and it is nothing special. The superimposition of worlds, of strata, is the truth of all things. There is no reduction, but there is primacy, greater weight from where we stand. To collapse many worlds into one: this is the imperative of sentience, maybe of all things. To collapse the possible into the actual and lose nothing, or very little: this is the whole of it. That, and to be haunted by the fact, by this world and all others, by what can be combined and by what is lost to the merely conceivable, despite all trying.

How I know you should fuck off forever

That first time you were at the apartment, I was what, 16? You showed me that irreverent humor which got you so many charm points. Too vulgar to say, not because I'm modest by rights but because of some perhaps-archaic respect for the dead. I was still broken by that loss, and you told me I could do better. I missed it, in that first real moment of relation: your capacity to bypass pain, love, connection for a view of human beings as commodities. A decade later, you would compel swooning art-drunk strangers and those who should have known better to swallow the obvious by playing maharaja at that fucked-up communal birthday party we convinced ourselves was an effort toward egalitarianism, but which really was just a cynical move toward the power dynamic you'd always been working on, like a feat of public engineering, wrapped up in red tape, eventuality and utter myopia. Like you were anything but guileless.

You're no savior, no prophet, no dream. You're an objectivizing shit who couldn't care less when someone worthy of the kind of oddness-worship you always cultivated loses everything in the woods, decades and miles away from your barest recollection. Fuck you and your scales of beauty, your metrics of entitlement, your libertarian sense of freedom which forgets others. I watched you wrestle your other to the floor. Did you think I was too drunk to notice? Did you mistake one vice for another, categorically different one? For all my self-destruction, I never destroyed someone else, not willfully, not without regret. Every misstep I've had the misfortune to recognize has grown like a barnacle on the lonely vessel of my life. Where are you, driftwood that you are? Why did the chaos of the universe float you my way? It's chaos, I can't look for reason. But when I wonder if I am cursed - when, during the darkest corners of the endless night, I give in to superstition - I do wonder about you most of all. That doubt is a sure thing, a certainty, a dream I cannot shake.

Upshot

And there's the rub: the end of empathy is the washing out of the self into the whole, the death of the individual. And the other option? The retention of the self, alone and for nothing.

Extension

"You know how some people extend themselves too much, like, into their perceptions of the world, of others? Well I extend you. My empathic mechanism... Maybe empathy, it's a kind of modeling, right? Maybe for most people it's like a model airplane. It gives you a sense of the thing, but it doesn't get off the ground. Mine gets off the ground. It flies. It's not the thing itself, but it's closer than it should be. Too close, maybe, for comfort."

Reach Out

Wanted: The unreconstructed M. Having the trait known as wanderlust and a map which can constrict so as to fit the farthest shore at the edge of a bed. The destigmatized meat of human ascendency. That frenetic activity which might be redirected toward receptivity. Teachers as students, souls in skins who know it. Operant conditions. Must be willing to be haunted, possibly possessed.

Anhedonia

Slowly the world recedes from me. Desire, commitments, interests - one moment I am scrambling to stuff as many as possible into the inadequate days. Now, the days are long. Even the sun sets later - a smirk, a grain of salt in my wound. But it isn't a wound, or at the least does not involve pain. Emptiness grows in emptiness, expands inward toward a smaller and more complete nothingness.

Sometimes

I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.

All Roads Lead to Mishnory

What is more arrogant than honesty? 

-Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Left Hand of Darkness"

Ambient: 3

Are there spaces which are not lonely spaces? In the long night it is suddenly difficult to extend my empathy to any position which is not utterly solitary. Does the world, as such, truly exist? Not plants and rocks and oceans; if I have doubt of them, this is not the place for it. But the world, as we mean it, of people; is it even slightly more than an illusion?

I dream that I wake in a town which appears to be abandoned. Entering the street, I find all sorts of postings. Old, yellowed, rain-soaked papers are stapled and stuffed everywhere, but every bit of handwriting is different. Furthermore, every author seems as illusory as the last. Still, in my desperation, I take the words to heart, I learn to speak them to myself as I move through the ghosted world. Never do I see a soul; always am I assured we have just been proven, each to the other.

Are there spaces which can contain two beings? I dream there are, dream that I remember being, my being and another being, in some tangled moment as if the walls of the world did not prevent all such unions. But from where did I glean these memories? Are they real, and if so, are they mine? Did they grow, like moss, from the mere suggestion of some phantom flier pasted to a telephone pole? Are they recent, ancient, immemorial? How long have I been wandering?

Some hands built the world, it seems. But have I seen hands ever? Or am I merely projecting, as the saying goes?

Image from the Serial Experiments: Lain game for Playstation

Secrets of the Summer Sun

You did other things you hid from your family, behind that veil of your body, a two-sided mirror, one side a projector, and you were vanished away.

They were harmless as a hat.

Suggestions

“I don't know what to do about my face”

“I think you should wear it out”

There Is A Light That Goes Out

I had a dream we saw Sparks together

I had a dream you didn't die

I had a dream you laughed

Intolerable cruelty

I had a dream we just laughed instead

Narrative

It's only fair, I suppose; I'm always extolling the value of stories. Now you're the storyteller, and I'm a pair of ears and idle hands wandering to whatever warm darkness is around.

Reader response is a more difficult theory when you have to look it in the eye.
"That's my name," they say, "That's my story."

And no amount of kindness can bring you not to correct them: "No, it's not."

So much for the subjective.

Scent, the Persistence of Choice

Scent is the biggest liar of all the senses. Does danger smell repugnant? Does a bad person smell bad? Not that bad people aren't sometimes attractive, and vice versa, but eventually it's still visible. In the eyes. In the twist of the lips.

The smell of someone's hair, their skin, their breath. the grass outside the house; none of these tell you you're in the wrong place, a terrible place, a place so bad you won't even know how fully it has wrecked you for years. In fact, they seem to conspire to tell you otherwise. "Stay," they say, intoxicating. And you do.

I wonder if her hair would have smelled familiar, all those long years later. Her skin. Would it have changed due to age, due to products they didn't make back then or which at any length she didn't use? Would the overwhelming scent of trees and flowers and grass which surely swelled around her on that day allow her own, personal scent to come through? Would the blood caked to what was left of her skull drown out those subtleties in harsh iron musk? Does it smell like smoke, or seared flesh, when someone blows their head off? I don't know, I've never been around it.

I didn't even realize it bothered me - how crazy that sounds now. Later I thought I'd just been in denial, just failed to process it, so I set about processing it. But I failed even then. I am not over it. I am haunted. I experience things I thought strictly for the movies. I quiver, shake, my crying is punctuated by wide-eyed gasping at the horror beneath it. It is intimate, real. This is how it happens, how the void crawls into our skulls. It leers at us from unanswered questions, from pangs born in well-worded fiction or real, personal loss. But still it keeps its distance. Still it is somehow remote - and we know it. Even if we don't know it at the time. Because later, when it has found its one place of entry, that single weak spot on which it turns torrent, rushes in to fill us with its darkness, then we certainly know.

The horror of her death is a counterpoint to the horror of my life. Modesty, as well as obvious, foundational distinctions, guarantee I see them as truly different. And yet both are horrors. And that's the point. Even the most distant, different things are eventually the same.

But only half the horror, half the haunting, is because she is gone, inexplicably and tragically. The other half is much more insidious. The truth of it is like a slow whisper from hell. It echoes in the wind, reverberates in the creaks of floorboards, insinuating itself subtlety, slowly. It is the presentation of an option, and the proof that it delivers.

I am haunted by her death and I am haunted by my life and they are so different - and yet not. So the whisper kicks up. The darkness fills my skull, floods it full until I begin to look for a way, any way, to vent it. The whisper rises on the wind, makes its dark promises, and I start to listen. It's beginning to be so I can't hear anything else.