Solid Quarter

Visit Trembling Pillow Press for poetry books, broadsides, chapbooks, and Solid Quarter Magazine.

Visit New Orleans Poetry Fest for the annual 4 day poetry festival directed by Bill Lavender and Megan Burns.

Megan Burns' Poeticsofbone&city project on Tumblr



Sunday, December 20, 2020

Ghost Fog

  


 

you become abandon itself

bold in the taking

dance upon unsafe floors knowing death

could arrive; it could be brutal 

this world schemes it all into being

 

you can choose to love anyone here 

if you want to feel nothing, go to language

see we deconstructed of our armor 

 

when your heart asks, what does it ask

of you, a fencing of smallest space

the way things are predicable inside despair

 

it’s wanting to matter that opens the path

to you won’t, it’s inside desire

we find lack and name sufferings

 

you can stack the board, master movements

sit inside your wounding, act like choice

wasn’t the root of all doing

 

awaken from the dream by plunging 

into life irrationally, dying to greet you

the tune of survive hums for us

 

you are a man building a boat

on a rooftop that will never sail

i am the director of the movie

putting you in the frame

so you will live forever

Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Thresh: Hole



 Thresh: Hole


stand in the sound of angels

threshing like the palm fronds we painted

& held over our dead poured into the river

wherever grief channels its narrow

coursing, there we go & are, always

at the crossroads aware

 

come to me, find me untroubled

necklaces of skulls, i call each by name

must we always want to see more stars


in a doorway once, we stopped

& i took a picture of the wooden seraph guarding

i thought anything was possible between us then

we swim in never imagined nows, the landscape

of survive is can you breathe, can you breathe, can

you


we are dangerous in a way we rarely dreamed

now to one another, like i would sit far enough

away to feel you near me is a type of affection

to kiss is a poison, touching derangement

disordered of melody, the sound of us in the past

echoes so loud i lose sight of where we’re going


12.16.2020

Saturday, October 31, 2020

Love Does Not Exist


if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist
if you don't love me, it's because love does not exist

we are never quantum fixt to another.

we are only ever quantum fixt to the ideas that trap us here.
and believing love is here is the net that has caught so deep we can't see how fast asleep we are.

Friday, October 30, 2020

Echo of Lost


 time is a feature of our minds

at each moment, we are at the edge of a paradise

called now, nothing can be in two places

the mind projects motion in what is a series of still caughts

what we think of as love, continuous

is error in observation: given enough time

maximum entropy will occur 

it was no matter that you could never be straight

with me, could never tell me the truth of what you felt

could never say to me any sweetness in this hard, hard life

for what i imagine is everything, is more that what you could

offer, is more than what could ever exist

and inside the dreaming of the dream, it falters

to eclipse us, order is a rare phenomena falling around us

there was no before or after in this scene

it is ever lasting, i was closed my eyes against loss

i was shut down to when you left me standing 

here alone 

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Serpah less Listen

"I am your loved one, lost from eternity" 

-D. di Prima

 

ever aloud saying imagine would you

opening wider hearing it they

city they lived tried so i 

sings she ride will you

ever answer, cannot type that love

abandon share will you sorrow 

algae the surface settle we need

little very beauty rely very here 

know it, do of we course breaking 

directly look won't & need

control blows chain of is it

miracles am i talk 

wanting of long it comes birthing 

hard worth desire story 

ripped & not it continue to life

longing another us unfurled

make stuns emerge 

one who thing i so 

a that into us 

girl, recall i was

a woman you make 

 

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

Fire the Poem



who can fire the poet, she says
but i'm quitting all the time
i wanted to retrace a cause, spool into time
this measure of what i determined a quantum fixt sound
to be soul to soul bound of karmic disasters or what 
is measured as in relation, i found myself wrong
about more than i was ever right

i'm exhausted by left hand margins 
& a departure from
how cute the use of line breaks
while people die of easily preventable 
things like hunger and poverty
how much longer in the charade of scarcity 
of resources and wealth is our requited participation 
 
we aren't taking care of one another, she said
the day we took MDMA and voted
i have a right to be a happy citizen 
given that our time here is infinite
why all the anxiety about right & wrong moves
we misremembered parting and departing 
a different set of codes
 
the night sky partially a drowning of dead light
but drawn as we are to a shining, we pretend
how many ghosts are inside us now
i mean inside this universe and well, of course
this climate of mean observations

 

Tuesday, October 27, 2020

Severed of Timing

 





severed of hope is there's more of you
severed of delusion, & i am [un]-ground-
i'd rather make art between us than other shapes of control

madness called down so fine, the line trembles
to be quantum fixt is a code of reunions, i architect
into the code with a precision of science to sound
and what you hashtag makes it real, for here we live 
inside a doming, a light broken as horizons
broken of bird song

god is a woman asleep in the bathtub, dreaming 
do we have to know what we are creating

what's the poem about. there's no
poem here. look at the outline 
of make and tell me, you can't hear 
how reality is snapping 

we became beasted, two sets of eyes 
for every seeing, two sets of mind
so one stays afloat

one of us shores

equipped of light and browsing 
pages of directions
what's an echo in an isolated chamber
but retreaded as indentations 
deep enough to hold memory 

if all love is the same 
than all death must be the same

could you be simply here

you can become so untethere
we chimed in, a charm of not 
as if not loving me could ever be 
as dangerous as if you did

and then what we don't know we don't know yet
half as deadly as what we think we know 
that is actually unknowable

i am certainly dead & what shall be
made of it, if we no longer fear time 

what makes it matter

Monday, October 26, 2020

Finger to Tongue

it sounds ridiculous to be afraid to love someone
but that's where childhood gets us
we learn the knots of trespass so well
i could tie them in my sleep
eyes closed. i haven't remembered 

my dreams in months. mouth of devastation 

it was death that saved us. not war or money.
we tried to run from that fact. every person
in a photograph looks like a corpse to me.

time stopped. & we are the dead trying
to convince me we exist. i abhor the taste
of when the world ends. will you climb
with me into the bathtub, cover me in rose
petals and film it for eternity.

in the sound reality

i must ask you to relinquish expectation
there is only this: eternal wiring 

of souls scraped in the licked grin

i see history as a dream barely escaped
history as envelopes discarded
history as the corner now absent of us
lingering, history as deluded stories, so numerous

who is not a haunted body in history's dream

Sunday, October 25, 2020

Dropped of Desire



i'm going to take notes as we go under
as it capsizes
i'm going to small
in the terrible light of design
i'm centered on amaze
central to backing

there is a body in the building
is it recoverable
can you identify the design
of contamination, do you know how many
bodies were in the room prior to the diagnosis
of death: i am as statue. i am as prisoner.

i am attempt of constructed misjudgments
this song abrasive, undone of timing
i would sing for those forgotten

i was never going to be what you wanted
and that was hard for me to hold
i wanted to make it to the other shore
blessed of survive in how we held each otherdown

but here we are: adrift
i have to let you go 

i have to watch everything
i love
be taken by time

 

Saturday, October 24, 2020

Seen through Darkly


 i would eviscerate any knowing of what i am 


shall we archive the way we failed at being human 


i tired. 

to keep pieces.

cohere. 

to make a thing.

what is a mind. 

crumbling. 

fail as a photograph. 

to capture.

what is seen. 


i watch the walls. 

splatter.

if i could out this loop. 

i would. 

you can't hold me.

to sane. 


i will erase. 


memory. 


abandon. 


is the only word i know. 


for love.

Friday, October 23, 2020

Passive in Revolution



grief sharpens us
turns us into the ghosts we are
slap happy in the world 
you can't survive living

i have adjusted my expectations around you
i have retrieved the significant bytes from previous dialogues
i have attributed values to the 1s and 0s used in each string
i have typed these symbols in the text box [$#!?]
i have anonymously answered three questions about myself 
that only eternity can hold 
i have become incoherent passive in the revolution 
as predicted by television 
i have telescoped my thoughts to the smallest diameter
i am winking at you across the borders of declension 

have you had enough water today 

right shift + control: delete your notions of absurd
it's taxing to be a poet
in baseball season. and without. 
amidst a pandemic. or without. 
we write about the moon. 
but it's not like i really want 
to end up alone there.


Thursday, October 22, 2020

Bite Down Hard



i imagine we ship off
imagine we stow away 
i imagine the barges come and go on the river

we stalk around undetected
we slippery rats among the rocks
our tails a dead giveaway 
that we are alive still
searching borders broken 
i imagine i held my finger 
 
to your mouth 
& you bite down hard enough
to draw blood
i am a feeding to you 
 
i never wanted to be rescued
but devoured. like any proper
woman i would you let me know
you love me 
by removing my eyes, my tongue, ears
cut off my hands and leave me
senseless

i will know then i am one
of the adored
one of the precious
one of the salivated for by the masses

put one part of me on social media and with 
enough likes, i become a real girl
a real girl, they said, oh yes

everyone knows if you want to be worth anything
you have to have followers and likes 
enough to fill your days
that's what life is really worth dying for 
 
what else could make us the inverse
of god 

Wednesday, October 21, 2020

Solid as Wave


you've been nothing but bounded your whole lie, i mean life
to speak of it
i have fully embraced giving up 

boundaries risk nothing and are inevitable
everyone will bet on them
high praise slap on the back 
for wielding yours. but what an imaginary

what a way of concealing 
to think being human makes you 
so spectacular and not just spectacle
i'm not trying to craft poems here

i want a record of break, of fail, i want to insert 
into time the memory of how when you try 
to repeat, you are making a bargain with less
you can't go home again

but you also can't do any of this twice

do you understand what i am coding
you can't see clearly 
because our way of perceiving is being 
co-opted by what we consider acceptable 
ways to be in this level of program

and what we have allowed allows for no clear
management of the dream's taking 
so we barter and trespass and i want you 

to recall love is not a thing you can give 
or take, you have nothing and you get nothing 
dead or alive, we top the cascades of erase

you've been nothing but bounded your whole life.

the way we love one another is so particular
no word yet exists

what we call failure in this life is a lie, what we 
call success is a lie, what we call progress is a lie, what
we call history is a lie, what we are doing is actually 
nothing



Tuesday, October 20, 2020

Ashes from Ashes

 
 
we'll get to it, what
this. 
this is a what.
this is a type of
 
a burning. 
a what. i mean. 
it's calling. 
calling what. 
not what. a who. 
you mean. 
 
don't all talk at once. 
it's a calling. 
we'll get to it. 
we are getting closer. 
to what. 
to the beginning. 
 
now what. 
 
let me tell you a story. 
 
 
do you remember the caves we lived in for so many lifetimes. in the before. in the skins and furs of when we spoke the languages of all the living. do you recall the way we read the smoke. the way echoes danced inside us, our heartbeats as wild and free as the sky itself threatening to swallow. i am writing to you from inside the caging of a matrix that was designed to destroy all memory of what we are. how we traded freedom for an empty promise of safe. and there is no safe. there is now less and less safe for all. 
 
once upon a time, we slept in the crook of fear as sweet as any babe because we walked with death, our ancestors held as close as a whisper. do you hear them. do you know it was always just us in the cave. it only holds room enough for one. but from the flames we made shadows of self enough to dance ourselves into a frenzy. we began to believe in the closing down into disparate parts. and also we thought we were the burning. 
 
sleep now, we are almost there. 
 
we have called into the deepest dark, and the only resolution now is extinction. and then return. for there is nowhere to go beyond. the universe is exact and ever expanding, annihilation and ruin.

 

Monday, October 19, 2020

Don't Be Afraid


this is the us of our country. the us of our diligent courses. the us of financial disparity. the us of consuming resources. the us of hoarding. the us of instant gratification. the us of short attention spans. the us of enslavement under different names. the us of concentration camps, of prisons, of anything but freedom, home of the brave.

please be brave.

capture as blocks of time. i was in the moment listening. i was in the net, internetted to notions of lovely, shaped by direct messages & alerts and not by touch, the sound of your voice is a memory but i have scrolls of words that will nail you into place. 

 

this is a story of failure, the ways we collapse collectively. 

found our discomfort is what we call every day. 

 do you feel historical today, i mean, hysterical. i mean no one can work. no one 

can function. i mean how do you not marvel every day at the psychological 

warfare we're being asked to exist under

 emotions are the entertainment of distraction

it's when you feel nothing anymore that we can begin 

to deprogram you 

how long is this internment? 

 or what is the length of your belief in time. 

 

 

 

Sunday, October 18, 2020

Return to Begin




i had to bring you back. 
to the first photograph, 
so you can see. as i see. 

the world dusty
stained with fingerprints 
the way everything human 
to me is trespass

collections of sound, the detritus of energy
all of which is to say: i cannot clear it away 

enough. this coupling, this charged center
the heart's core of incomplete

i would carry this wound in each iris
i would lens light to a trapping
tell me what i can't do is keep trying

like i will not surrender 
us

i will not be made to give over
in some easy gestures, told that miracles
are minor accidents, or try to swallow some 
time spent in between make and imagine

when we held the keys to every crystal chamber
the mind colluded to create in us

i would you whisper to me before we leave 
this place. at least once to delight me. 
use the words we chose in silence, tell me 
we did find something together here. 


 

Saturday, October 17, 2020

No Surface Shatters



 
no. i'm not ok. you can't get this far
and be ok. they won't tell you that.
i can't figure this part out, i told him. 
you can swerve so far off course, he said
than you can still come back.
i'm stuck in a loop, i confessed. i keep trying.
he can't hear me because we are on separate time 
lines now, once we traveled together. 
 
that's all you get in this life
if you are a traveler. 
 
if you are lucky, for some short trips
you won't have to travel alone
 
but now it has been many long nights
and days and nights and days and life times
 
here in this location. 
 
i don't think we could have known. i don't think 
there's any way we could have known. 
 
but i've been wrong about so much.
 
we are ever at war. of course, we say
that is why we are here. that is why we came
we are ever at war
 
we are ever traveling here. 
 
 
look, i will one of these days
feel as though i'm getting it right
write exact
 
that blue. that sky. that sound of the river.
layers of concrete. holding us like magic.
 
all of it magic. holding us up. 
 
 
 

Friday, October 16, 2020

Travel this Devastation



they say we want to see the way others do but it's a lie we keep telling. we don't want to hold a[n] [other's] sorrow. don't want to know what the dead eyes collect. oh even now, this is a wrong headed way of saying a lot of nothing. of evidence to suspend care. the world is loops and swirls, the edge dusted to experience: come round so often, i forget the calling of it. here we again, here we forever. can you say with any certainty what the mind is supposed to be doing. what does it look like in a breaking. to be on both sides. to be so saddled with arranging, i can not comply with the hours of every dayness. i was slipping to the farthest reach. i was somewhere between and half remembered. why not even words could carry. i was so lazy now i will say just about anything to make you disappear.

universes that spindle, i was dead
a long time before i came here
i architect these walls to keep 
you would a life    hand you down
i stay masked under, you get her in a well
you sit a good, long spell
i'm going to speak to you over the headset only 
you'll have to forget everything you are to listen 

it's natural to wince/ it's brave to keep looking 

all the best parts of living round a little dying 
perfect in this turning 
who keeps time   now
who is keeping time 


my love for you turned gentle, i didn't want to be undone by it either, just stay awhile & i'll keep the sound low, the lights down low, the way my heart longs for you to hold, low. yes, even my wanting i can turn down the volume so low now it won't disturb nothing. 
 
 there were a lot of hours spent cataloguing excuse
what will we explain. 
once upon a time there was a reason 
for writing
 
 
 
 


Thursday, October 15, 2020

Break the Universe

We will need to break the patterns of the universe if we can, she says. And you know, god being a dead woman, won't mind.

we love to see it break.

she says, they love to see them break. and we are her and we are them. and we love. we lovewelovewelovewelovewelovewelovewelovetoseeitbreak 

 

in a handful of everything

what do you hold

i went out my whole life betting on a type 

of love

i've never known 

mine the fallow banks

deep fissures where i stored i

set down for safe keeping 

forgot how to be what type of person 

there's no difference between a word

and a want, the edge of your face skinned 

& an alphabet cloaking sound 

the dark matter of the poem 


In its flight from death, the craving from permanence clings to the very things sure to be lost in death. 

-H. Arendt  

 




Wednesday, October 14, 2020

Center the Monstrous

 

What gets raped out of the body? What does the body forget in neglect? What is disappeared under the weight of every day annihilation?  What is lost in translation when we are never told the truth. Can beauty ever be enough. Can the belief in love ever be enough. What fills up the smallest cup we call our heart space. This is a photograph of a drowning, the space of this one drop can be filled with enough neutrinos to kill a person. It is in the smallest measures that we are risking every day. The algorithm of consuming to extinction is hard wired into you at birth. Is there a difference between touching your tongue to the burning flame and me telling you: The world is on fire. 







what we see is the poem orbiting/ the poet radiates/ a type of internal combustion/ seek it in a different 'light'/ infrared, global and music/ what is an invisible word/ between spectrum / if some of us had survived/ now all of this would be different/ like misplacing all of the umbrellas/ so you have to feel the weight/ of water on your skin/ the way you know you are alive/ or don't

the representation of a wish is the representation of its realization

 

what is spell bound in language

 

what an effigy for desire in the word. to say petal.to say bloom. to say flowered. we trade in the etymology of a softness and a vulnerable that hand to hand asks of us to fantasy how hard it is to exist here. magic was never about manifesting dreams as much as shaping the programs that hold you under this illusion that we could be handed the smallest pieces of the puzzle and still solve for whole.

 

 i have been warning anyone who will listen, to come upon collectively this never remembered space in the time line must surely believe we have never made it this far before.

 

but perhaps you recall the sound of my voice.

 

even now, you could sound out my name on your tongue and that might be the length of existence.




Tuesday, October 13, 2020

Extraction for Measures

 

these words arrive to you via reflected light. via the course from mind of design to mind of intention to the yellow brick mazing of never go home again. do you know what happens to a city that leaves the dead in a building for almost a year. now we do. now we know the answer to so many terrors. the way what we hold sacred can be stripped from us, the way we became history even as we sank beneath it. 

 

 

 
 

this photograph x-rays the photon’s expectation, it adheres along the edge. What is emitted from the core is a beyond the speed of light determination. Does the operating system of the universe run analog or digital we might ponder to pass the minutes. i can tell you that under survival such cushions are not needed to line the couch. you can turn the whole furniture over to float when the water comes. don’t ask me about fire. all i’ve know in this life is more and more intricate ways to drown.

 

Monday, October 12, 2020

Hard-wired to Birthing

 

 

lenses diameter light, cervix to the optimal opening of a let there be…. and what waters we trouble. shade or shadow, the haunting of areas long left of their one wild sorry. i was distressed by how unclear the damage was, kept asking you to help me see, but you put the console between us. you kept arm’s length and away, a shushing of my face in the wind. there’s no amount of fast between us that will ever scare me. it’s what you hide in plain sight that is a terror i would try to contain. like if you keep showing up, it means one day you won’t. it’s blurry what we are and what binds us. 

 

 


 

 

hydrogen and oxygen will bond to create water and what are we bonding to and to create what. we think it must be a maximum state of procreation, emotional intensity, sexual gratification or rage itself, but in practice, we are bonded to each person we meet along the way, to varying degrees we are bonded and forever entangled with each other.

 

i think if we could ride the timelines out long enough… we could see the whole diameter of how we circle round one another, how we influence and learn, temper and trap against. it can’t be accidental, the way time never took us very far from one another. and through watching this city drown and die in so many measures, some how we managed to make it far enough into the future to spend one last day wasting time.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Realization throws Bright

we are god and we don’t want to be. we want anyone else to have this task. it’s invulnerable. this always being a little light of mine to shine. this always being here but pretending like it’s anew. we want anyone else to take this steering. take the wheel. take the momentary lapse of judgment. take the last slice. take the initiative. take the risk and let failure lap you like a wave. take handfuls of similes and metaphors and drip them along the curves of me, licking it clean.

 

desire is what confuses us of free will. to know we have wants and the autonomy to access choice makes it seem as if we are moving through time with some awareness enough to shape reality. and not that reality is shaping us reciprocally, that there is no separation. it doesn’t matter what we want: half is molded by the attachment of what we long to have and the rest by aversion to what we wish to avoid; the maze from above is easier to solve. try to abandon resistance and see what floats.

 

belief is for living not dying. it can boat you shore to shore but once we exit this staging, whatever dreams we built here fade to dust. we are as moon beams, the hint of romance and then dissolution. everything we see is architected within the darkness of our skulls, caged in illusions, entire realities are constructed on this notion of collective dreaming. an eye is as adaptable as any other organ. it rests in the explosion of data enumerated to infinity. nonsense is the way we use language to make sense of minutes, hours and eternities.


 

Saturday, October 10, 2020

Sipping the Line

 

Trapped against logic: the weather of human is what remains. Tones of grief we balanced in the walking, this photograph is part memory. The way childhood coalesces so even damage gets shaved down to a fine grit. You can take it up inside you in any manner of ways, hold tight the drawn over time feelings of regret and nostalgia. But to what end. To what end is the point of history except to rewrite, the point of remembering except to get it wrong. Love isn’t really an experience you can measure in time though they’ll lie to sell you dates and anniversaries. They don’t want you to realize love is happening every moment. It’s the way light enters all that we see. Even beyond eyes, light pierces all and if you think love is any different, maybe you need to listen.

 

 


 

 

being human is very important. being human is the consciousness with which the universe sees itself. if being human is very important, why does the universe not take more notice. if being human is important, why don’t we take it more seriously. do we take it too seriously. are we the universe in neglect. are we the universe in earnest.

 

i learned how to drink scotch in san ramon, costa rica when i was nineteen years old in a small bar where i met an elderly white man who was an expat now living outside the town for some twenty years, estranged from his family. we talked about rudyard kipling. he recited a poem from memory and we talked about life and time. he invited me to his house in the rain forest and we rode horses. when he mounted his horse, it threw him. he probably seemed older because i was so young. when you are a nineteen year old girl, men usually only want to hurt you i had learned. or i had not learned yet enough because i went with him anyway to the middle of nowhere but i have always survived by scent and he smelled harmless. once we were wolf cubs. once we were lizards. once we were hibernating in the dusty motes of space. what i am saying is every story is a myth. all of this true and always happening and so none of it is true and never happening. what i am saying is many things have happened to me as many things have happened to you. and at the end of the day, outside of entertainment, none of it matters. nothing ever stops happening.

 

if one hallucinates, one is said to be suffering from a mental anomaly.

 

but what we really mean is: If you perceive reality far from the collective, you are a type of dangerous to the flimsy threads of perception holding up the castle

 

you threaten to pull it all down around us.

 

what would you do first to collapse reality with intention.

Friday, October 09, 2020

Net the Imagined


absent photograph of your mouth

a poem written to myself

not giving up now

takes radical imagination

none of us can bear it

we keep moving, lost stars

what if what i always wanted to be

was a dead woman singing dead woman

songs sweetly into your dead mouth

till echo us all

 

 


Energy is eternal delight.

-Blake


this is a photograph of the threading of dimensions, the way one portal spindles into a next, the stories tell us all beauty is asleep and when we kiss we never kill one another as we do now in the new world order called paradise, called land of the freely lit up caged devices & underwater spamming that knows all your secret names.  you will get a great body of work, they will tell you, by excavating your traumas but what if i’m no longer interested in personal ads or buying more nightmares to store for nuclear winters.

 

in the 90s they assured us we would never recover, never get this far, trained to ghost hope & not fathom dense images we couldn’t slick trade on tomorrows. the fantasy of science was untethered and now every religion has a walking dead arc –you have to pick a team for survival but there’s nothing to survive, we’re so many dreams deep, there no longer exists a kick hard enough to reach—better yet, let’s invent new inventories made of lyrics forgotten. let’s line them up next to pictures taken on our phones & call it life.

Thursday, October 08, 2020

Diagram Your Thinking

Primordial vibration is the core root of assembled sound. Sound without motion is a dispersal. We have to gather these syllabics. We have to tend to the utterances, the sighs, the gestures in caught nets of transference. To speak is to want reciprocity. Understand and attend this part of the story. We are full of demands that go on without ceasing. Some of us pretend we need none of it; that is the base of really trying to hold on to everything around us too tightly. This is a photograph of burnt treble, the echo of spiraling letters, the way prayer was what forced us to kneel and bow.



 

 

Separations between objects are often called space because language and convention make us draw boundaries.

-R. Lanza

 

it’s hard to know how one person will lead to another, to a porch in fall in new orleans in a pandemic with coffee and conversation, and here is the way life fallows in hours spent called introduction and where we lead off in certain seasons of perfectly unaware of all of the facets of failure we hide within us. We talk always somewhere between honesty and the fiction of memory: To say i am unaware of how you could ever really see me, so let me hold up for you some versions i find most palatable. i never know what others really want from me except to be reflected back, and when called will i able be love enough. can i convince any stranger that in this unsafe place we inhabit called america that i am close enough to pet wildly, i am soft enough inside this armor that you could lay your head here and this biting is accordance, it’s the way i will taste to see if you are safe as well.

let me diagram this occasion: 

 in the left hand field, i will need you to draw a triangle and name three beings with whom you have strife. 

in the right hand field, i will need you to draw a circle filled with expectation. 

in the core of you, i will need you to determine if any feelings you've ever experienced are actually "real" and not simply projections of the sensate world.

burn everything you have been taught before this moment.

nothing will serve you once we are delivered from time. 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, October 07, 2020

Defend the Erotic

Picture the rock face of the moon, craven and without her, no pull. Heat from the sun would obliterate our oasis. The way she swerves round is the basis for employment. We exist by accidents so precise they cannot be measured yet. In the tear down of our histories, let us obliterate meaning outside of amaze. You think this can all not be rearranged, but a bloom is subject to annihilation and change.

 


 

 

 

[the only change was in our minds]

 

we want things to last even as we know they cannot.

assumption of a self is not necessary for life.

 

it may be necessary for the systems we’ve been convinced we must uphold, but life does not require a sense of self. 

 

 

i say we can have persistent beauty. i have a necklace of skulls that whisper to me the names we try to forget. absolved of ash, this tremble. i worry about the slippery ways we lose our own places in time. like we were traveling together but then one wrong word, and all rockets into space. a meteor whose shadow resembles the shape of you but elongated, and with more legs. that’s just absurd. we say as we read the news. and then to the dreaming we go for answers.

 

 

[look for what's there, not what you want to be there] 

 

Tuesday, October 06, 2020

Light called Traveler

 

A photograph is bound by light as we are bound by desire. Dancing on the head of a pin, angels in turn, what I hand you is the caught gram of suspended time. Moving forward and back, the fall of eternity is the harmonic of exhalation. And we so feathered as to be sold of all our heavy lifting. I would you seep beneath expectation: Let me woo you further.

 


 

 

Incandescence is the emission of electromagnetic radiation (including visible light) from a hot body as a result of its high temperature. The term derives from the Latin verb incandescere, to glow white. Incandescence is a special case of thermal radiation.

 

Sunlight is the incandescence of the "white hot" surface of the sun.

 

even my dreaming is a quiet action of wanting more…

 

i need you to love me in a way that doesn’t exist yet. 

carved down to images & codes.

 

the mutation of the eye to see light is useless 

without the nervous system to relay information

 

as is the song without a body to sing it

 

as is the weight of love without our determination to bear sorrow

 

to say of this layer it candesces, a window of soul pours out 

 

as is the thrum of sound in hollows

 

as is the ripple of movement across surfaces

 

to say of this layer it folds, time takes all if you believe it holds