Yet the Frame Held

When the pitch falls, who sings for you 

To have a new feeling in the hopelessness of now

& no outside of nature, memory is how we keep time 

Flowing, the constant and i would wait for you 

Power is the dream of consciousness mattering 

You take your bones out and form them into a cave

A wander in the shadow of play till we make slaughter

A normal every day entertainment and when the experiment 

Goes black, what is the echo of could you pull me back, cornered

i see the walls of structure, ghosted remnants where we curled our signs

i existed once upon a story in the well of caught light, in the mornings

Of sorrow where you are not, in the burst dam of i broke through 

The smallness of my own wanting, and i came here to be with you

Again and again, till the quiet overtakes us. If we write what is already 

Understood, we stay rooted to this terror, i would ask impossibility

and call it love. i am asking you to architect your escape from progress 

for we shall sing of things not yet come and of things of the past

we shall let the water of language wash it away. 

Raw Towns

 

For Bill Lavender

In the heart of deep hearts, no voodoo dolls

The shape of days, the hours we met and disappear, time

So fast it takes your breath away, how you can build a city 

But still be a stranger in it, the way a story of a man floating in flood

Waters in a plastic pool will image carve into the crenellations 

We call recollected history, in one lifetime you will have conversations

Barely recalled and words that turn swiftly the whole course & we 

Gather here, patchwork defense mirroring, look i have unthreaded 

The straight and narrow paths of arrival and departure: I would bet

Infinity in symbolic play, the truth of how any art meets and stabilizes 

The future namings, you were the only person who dared say it

That maybe it was worth it to abandon the safe measures of prescriptions 

That kept me numbed to wanting to die, imagined the length of travel 

Insanity must venture & if love is not our place than why do we come here

If love is not how we see one another, why are we paying attention 

I shed every safety net designed to cage in a whisper of what 

Could your mind be missing, to be set apart from self possession 

Campbell says, is the point of participation in a festival, the ritual 

Of disassociation masks so fine, and even in the knowing that 

We wear it, we revel in the apparition of this mythic state 

This state of how we crumble from fearsome field to invulnerable 

Abandoned structures, the shape of belief trembled along the loose 

Sounds unspoken for in any quantum reality, once there is

there is no undoing, the error of our lives was never 

Sleep’s frail hold or survival in the margins, it was 

Never seeing clearly how deeply the coding we designed seeped

The barycenter pulls the eye to a centered light but the burning 

Of that bright, unequivocal eye is as gentle as the sound of breathing 

Not to go gently, but that we do not go is the line’s off course entry 

Stand Closer

 

i bet this place is a bone silent whistling 

under stars, the vowels of time, a constant 

we made it this far but not very far from where we started

from up there, the horizon is a tone less 

like i sd, we’re going the wrong way driving away from it

every poem is a trying to steal, i let you wheel 

turned up, i ask what i can of you

if i show you this childhood, what does it seem 

neighborhood drowned but my memory sharps against 

i was hungry so long in this life 

held inside, does love become a burden 

blunt mouthed to stop speech, the corners of this living

fold down, i do and do not see you clearly 

when you say i know more people who’ve died 

who wins that standing, there were more photographs 

than hours and more ways to never say what we mean 

if we could just stay driving and never arrive, if we could 

umbrella softest bits, struck match tip, it was this need inside 

me to choose burning over ever just making it home 

Kiosks of No Returns

 

Kiosk of No Returns

 

surive just about everything & you’ll end up at the mall

near the end of the movie,

 

​when my grandmother died, i spoke at her funeral about how she was a painter and she said, you don’t paint the tree, you paint the space around the tree. she never said that. i am the poet & in grief, we near everything called living, we round it, do not go to places dangerous when there is a safe space to wander

 

you sent me this photograph while i was taking a bath

i lay there every night in this pandemic

 

terrified. 

 

terrified of what comes next & who is gonna die. & am i

my children, my parents,  you

how can you ask me to love in this place & we don’t

 

​​​​we go to spaces of abandon 

to still the terror: Look, here’s a picture of a dying mall in

                                America,

 

                              h  o m e    ofthe     f  r  e e         

            i want to tell someone of this fear  but who has 

 

any more room to hold it      whose lap can you sit on 

& say, what i want 

what i want

what i want 

 

is to be sure again, of why we built any of this. why we needed any of this. remind me why we crawled up out of the swamps for this excess of speed and glutton and was it to perfect suffering. have we reached that shore yet. have we designed it so perfectly we can’t ever go back or forward, but stay here taped off, an arrow marker to the place where you belong, and we’ve got the best prices in town. 

 

you’ve got to fill the frame with our obelisks and titans to consumerism. ephemera of pleasures that filled us once. now we are empty display cases. now we are hand sanitizer to remind us how we broke off, our fossil beauty in beige and tan tiles for miles of smiles…. how did we know desire. what was left to discover here. we pushed beyond temporary till disposal was the birth of this nation, i sing of thee.

Photograph by Todd White

@hollarrr

www.hollarrr.com

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

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

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.

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 

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 

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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.

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.

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 

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

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.

 

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. 

 

 

 

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.