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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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]
idea(d) i dead or ideation, dis- of the time or –dis of the constructed versions, yes, i let so many hands run over me because the sound they fed me was for a moment i’ll take your breath away. but don’t let wander confuse. this is a picture of the night i loved you unconditionally, the way planet means wanderer, the way we orbit the body, all of this time we were near one another but it took decades of mistakes to make us fit together now, this is a photograph of how time takes everything away
i imagine i wish them well, all the megans who are living and whose lives are scooped from mine, the universe bubbles in dimensions and if you call upon all of your selves do you wonder if there is a version close enough to perfect to make me feel happy.
who dares to wonder if it is the living itself that is the sickness.
addiction is such a special way of loving back. that disappoint that you all go on without me. is it that the heart wants what it wants or do we just like placing blame.
shouldering shadows.
a plunking down. eviscerated noise.
i was in a panic that we were owed the spaces to make art or love. not sure what mattered more or if there was a separation.
i once had a fondness for thinking.
the ways of the world now are a slow drift.
[sacred pause]
the things that happen in our heads are the only things we know with any precision
