All photographers are liars. They want to convince you the young beauty is not a corpse, the sunset not a dying star, the bloom not already wilted, and yet the poem could be called a lie except sound undoes us, its vibration cannot be held to untruth the way a framing can be said to manipulate time, to capture, to hold still. A photograph is what we wish memory could be. No shutter fast enough to catch the nothing of light: A city can disappear, a country, a whole universe in a whisper. All we catch here is for release. Do you understand what we fish for with the hook of compassion.
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Process Notes:
minute variations in any system when amplified lead to chaos-
I'm sorry but I can't let you go now.
If you've come this far, I am coding a new program. It's already happening.
I'm sorry but there is a way that seeing is belief, a way that the word transforms grief, the way I have put my body between you and the world, the way I have used this as reflection, as reciprocity.
There was never a poem.
There was only the spell of design to code a ritual to survive.
Just stick with me anyhow...
I don't know why it is true, but it is true.
I can shift the lines. Proximity is not in space and time, proximity to me is chaos and chaos is a choosing, so if you have chosen to arrive here. Well, there is not the choosing of you as much as the choosing I have done to get us here. And here we arrive, a wonder and a tasking.
I don't know the ending yet, but I know we have shaped time and distance across a city.
I have already seen it die and I have seen it come alive again. This is happening as we speak. This death is inside us, happening even now.
The question was never what will you do with your one wild and precious life, the question is always:
What will you do with your one wild and precious dying.
Photograph:
The Mississippi River and the other shore
"technostrategic language"
is language that attempts to reduce horror to digestible bits, often used in war
instead of "millions of dead" the words "collateral damage"
instead of humans, "targets"
instead of the lives now suffering, we have been reduced to "economic incentive"
to" stimulus relief," to "suffering economy"
even as we know: there is no economy that is suffering
[We're alone in the cave.
Hold on to that. It's just us and the shadows on the wall.]
i see you invincible
i see you invulnerable
i am the poet and you can never turn my gaze
i will spell disaster
and worded, watch me unclock inside
the dark energy that holds us all
threaded and over lifetimes, if you come
i am calling i abandon any connection to one
as we travel in plurality
unhook me un - hook - me
unhook your tongue
Plague Journal:
8.3.20
if we cannot tolerate another's suffering, we suffer
do you recall how you ever begin loving anything?
the way water hugs the land, a touching
"For Kali is said to be mad..."
-D. Kingsly
no one is coming. sanity is what i am containing. no one is coming. 15 years of containment and no more.
Resource:
Hurricane Katrina poem - Walidah Imarisha
https://youtu.be/DJgpkalWSKE
