A Glimpse Of Shameless Expression

joy, the movement of the body full of light, bouncing, rippling, limbs loosened, unfettered by appearance. she stood on a street corner dancing, wobbling about to a rhythm only she could hear, cars streaming through the intersection glancing, passerbys milling past the curb to the flashing call of the next sidewalk shore.
is it that people have seen everything? world-weary, dulled by the daily accosting blur of difference? or is it that people have seen nothing since that moment in their lives when someone beat the wonder out of them? childhood distilled to a residue of hidden malice. indifference.
there is only one language that cannot be misinterpreted: the unwithheld delight of the soul: the springy swinging of a dog’s bottom when you return home; the croon of a baby at the gift of attention, fingers waggling in bliss; the resounding, enveloping waves of beauty that emanate from a singer striking the depths of a note in a song; the radiant eyes of a stranger who knows herself in you.
sitting by the window in the bus, stopped at the light, i watched her standing there bopping about. i smiled to myself and felt happiness spread into me. i felt the potential in people, the delight fermented, waiting to be uncorked by a loving touch. there is so much more to every moment. if we could just stand like that in the midst of the crowd, and let our feelings flow through us, instead of running away to the next safe haven, instead of pretending not to understand. what is it in our lives that is more important than how we feel?

Tattoo

she stood seemingly perfectly arranged, admixture of coyness, bemused tolerance, majestic sideways downturned eyes, suggesting the line of her spine turning up into her ass, awareness of herself twisting towards the viewer. i stare at her for hours as i get my tattoo. yakuza wife. flesh property of some shadowy presence, the trophy of a name shrouded in smoke.
i could look at her forever, her hands folded into each other as if cradling a vase, her legs beginning to spread. as i watch her, body covered in needled colors, i become aware of her embedded calm, of her sharp poise. her body is loose and taut at the same time, her right breast jutting upwards, her nipple a soft punctuation in the outline against the darkness.
the body glove of her tattoo somehow makes her nakedness detached, protected from the desiring capture of the camera. her body has already been visibly claimed. money, power, ink penetrating the skin. i wonder what she is like in her unguarded moments, in her unconscious dreams where she is unmarked, innocent, and unprepared. but maybe we have no such space within ourselves, and everything we are is touched by someone, fingers branded in our veins, eyes pricked into our souls. there is nothing, perhaps, that can be hidden.
only claimed, renamed, and tattooed.

On and Off

i fall into the frames of space that swims eternally repeating before me, an old woman hacking into her arm, the bus driver singing a song in spanish, my fingers folding into each other. positive thoughts, i think. i can do this. think positive. i stare at buildings passing as if they hold some essential mystery, demanding my intentness. thoughts, think. i seem to be breaking into pieces. the airy hiss as the lighted box shudders to a
stop, like a gargantuan sleek beast cutting a swift fart. a kid shoulders his way to the concrete, enveloped in earphones. thoughts do not seem to matter at this current juncture of time. voices swarm through my arteries like an overbearing shock of electricity. move, move move, i tell the red light telepathically. i glare ferociously at a woman standing on the corner with a handbag. she has very tight calves, sweeping down out of her skirt into the sharp points of her heels. alert, i crane my head to capture this detail in my mind. it seems that this might save me. but a bottomless pit of frenzy opens in my face as the bus stays still, and i stroke my right ear to hold on. and then. it heaves, the doors swing closed, and the self-contained world continues its hurtling way to the next stop. a maid pulls the string and the sign lights up. she stands, wobbling against the metal posts, her breasts weighted to her belly. the kind of woman who is ignored by eyes searching for stars when she walks the streets to her job cleaning a rich family’s floors, hispanic, stocky, painted lips, hair tied back. yet looking at her standing in the air-conditioned bobble of the city’s mass transit system, i find her beautiful, her eyes prepared firmly for her exit. i feel a quiet breath of calm sweep into my mind and i look around me with the discovery of inner light, avoiding eyes, the abstract humanity of our containment, rustling paper bag, varicosely gripped cane, soft tufts of neck hair, intermittent coughing, the announcement of street names. a waiting room for the appointed daily grind of employment. i pull the string and stand swaying in the boxed movement. i step off into the day centered, part of a puzzle, fit into the jutting shapes of an uncompleted picture. patience.

Dumb Show

take the string and put the ends together and walk across the scone ends of your life. a wrinkle in time, a pause in the day for tea, an unspoken forgotten dimension of your world climbing out of your head like a continuously rising house extension, enabling you to see the view that everything immediately around you tends to obstruct. and out of this nameless height of vision a child, the lost impression of your formative past, drops twisted bed sheets to yourself. and you climb, and you climb, hoping to reach that trap door in the sky, but you grow tired soon and let yourself fall, hard, against the concrete establishment of your waking days, your coffee sodden money time, the prison of your escaping self. falling into the ringing silence of underwater subversion, the siren spectacles of tv. like houdini, you dislocate your limbs, and come out at the weekends dripping, turning wine into water, brimming with the illusion of freedom, inscribing the empty form of death with words, with the spiraling fall of tree leaves, apparel of light cut off at the stem, the shrouding cut of the tongue. fragments of yourself, crumbs, crumbling onto the tablecloth, the bleakness of your future spread out naked, white, and gleaming before you like a desperate lover crying take me, take me now, but when you reach out your tentacles like a starving anonymous anemone you find that there is nothing, nothing but the concentric circles of the masquerade, the pantomime of your past dancing silently before you like a ghost, detached, cold, beyond touch. don’t tesseract this moment, don’t try to connect me to your dying. let me fall, softly dreaming of the light, the slow liquid pulse of the parasite. . .

be beep b

once there was light it was seen that this was the way that it should be. in the pulse of our fading fears was known the path of many things. a subtle buoyancy of tempo pulling at fingering hesitancy, drawing out calling beauty til the pieces get sticky raw with stuff of life. here, says the glorious slug, herein lies the bait. can’t be always balanced, making ends meet. the ship slips down and sometimes takes on a bit of water on the way back up, if it be stormy, arrr. time is not a drum machine. notice the way the beautiful bottom of a girl washes side to side in a sway determined by what is around her. pretend not to notice, or stare blatantly from behind shades, it is the same. it is not for you or me, this earth. all of us, filling and emptying, slipping into nuanced sheens of interactive neurons. the only dragon’s hoard to be found nowadays sits within the calm depth of focused breath, streaming from belly-center. a halo of energy moves beyond while within the space of the mind there is nothing, there is simply skin.
steady, fluid, sexy.

Fern Goddess Waves In Breeze

just generally vague, wispish sorts of dialogue, presenting the strange vivacity of the alien lifestyle. throw in a little jack daniels and the syrupy residual attack of the words leaves you gaping open to the sound of what you do not know. extraterrestrial whispering down to the ears, push the hair around, ring crafted slopes, enwrapped within yourself sits the jewel vibration, stone which causes the waves to move in its after-path. the music reaches into you, let’s dance together, get away from standing against the wall and burst sweaty into open, crowded space, where things brush into each other, move together, move apart, together, and generally interact.

I
Jack realized that there was no need to feel ashamed. just himself acting instinctively. he is where he is, moving into something he is not.

II
Jill fell down the hill like water to catch him, and they trickled side by side until they rushed into each other and fell fell fell into themselves before they ever departed again for the sky droplets coalescing. ocean mother child, we are family.

III
Aint no point to pretend to feel nothing. something’s goin on. pay attention and stop thinking about how you look on satellite tv camera pictures. we are meant to be here, if we are here. i have arrived. you have landed. open the doors and les greet formally and then probe and press and get to the truth of the reality by putting on the masks of each other. glove habits of every day slipping over our naked souls, quiet darkness of our solitude holding each other into the eternity of this moment. shared life, rosebud opening into smell, unfolding glowing colour, life that clouds the scenery in the sun with its beauty.

IV
Nothing nothing nothing. I feel so good, so good so good. I am scared. I don’t know what is going on. I don’t know who I am, I don’t know where I am going. The rush of empty space and the stars wavering eternally changing.
Nothing is set.

V
And you. the bleeding of the moon calling to sleep remembrance. the pain of renewal. pyre burning birth like a pair of lungs moving contrapuntal to the embrace of balance, swaying to wind.

VI
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.
Lets be ourselves together, with nothing.

This About Faced

john moves the movement of the verily meaning into this sound horning into liquid breathing moving into silence. you see, one could say exactly what one meant to say but that would be dead now wouldn’t it? john findles the floppenheimer catch to the 22 second. he curdles the flame into incense spiralling ringling brothers. and john aka minuteman to his cousins takes the whiff of attempting into the bosom of misunderstanding. midnight yell. pigs flashing their fucking lights. one can flip them off but what does it do? the violence builds into shut out buildings shadowing over lives struggling to die noisily. and johhny-o-boyo, our lad, deciduates into the undertow, pecking languages that are only understood in the marketplace, selling. how could one possibly express, this amazing shit and blazing florescence that is your every day? john takes a shit. john takes numerous shits, at allotted times in the morning. a day moves into a night and then a woken up by shrilling alarm to dress cordially for another
round standing of drinks. quaffen deeply. it could be assignated meaning–but then again, that might be dangerous. move on, move on brave christian warrior. live to face another day to run again. john intaken of the nargila. john shisha’ed to headspinningness of southern comfort. Ricky Tea. somewhere in Louisiana. lost to the the remembrance of fuckedupness.
johnny delites in the sunny play of knowing the meaning is meaningless. still the struggle, word bile billowing up to be buried. be good. or not to be. success. failure. connected attempted but disconnected unable to compute accurately the rate of the font of teriyaki. i remember the bells, says john, the bells of the pre-school ringing presbyterian over the courtyard where i remember standing briefly on cones tied through with string. walking like a stork to the sandbox. i remember walking on macaroni in a cardboard glittered spaceship because the teacher made me and i liked her. but she made me sit in the triangle once and for that i felt bitter. i once called her later, upgraded to elementary school, and heard the voice of her (what was it, spouse, daughter? i can’t member) and hung up. john pontificating. john pontius selecting which to draw back out into to the light by the people yelling. i remember the shames made to be felt in those systems, the glory to be felt in winning the certificate of student of the month. circles of the fitting in moving inward. i seeming to be a part of even while observing, misunderstanding, miscalculating, shy. there all along, and so not wholly questioned. but now john. john. trying to say too much. what is it that could really be known from those long days of despair and triumph and running running running? will we forget? will we learn? will we ever learn?

Song of Spring

to be lost in a voice. the movement becomes you. her words spoken smoothen lullaby in the night when i scream lonely. textures of reassurance, rocking, lulling back to rest in the void. now i lay me down to sleep. the pictures come in the night vivid, taking me in, encapsulating me. the pores of her skin. the closing of my mouth around her nipples. i fold inward. into the floating laxity of the waves. into the darkness we travel.
how alone i am here, letting go of everything, letting the gravity of the ruts speed me forward engine, fuel fuel fuel, so much noise that i hear nothing, and the faces of the world jumping into my eyes as the warmth fades, firelight wavering in the wind, smoke intaken and billowing into moving pictures that turn meaningless, empty, echoing in the silence, jackolanterns carved to charm, give me my candy, lost in a narration that cannot be heard, tongues that have passed away, directionless, pointing nowhere.
struggling to uplift. to wet the beak of. to whet. reawaken the blood to its purpose, programmed. functioning beautifully, spreading wings, preening, singing pretty songs with no distinction between notes. patterns adapt to chaos, pixellating. the stars make so much sense. the buildings in the night. windows electrified. it doesn’t matter what you believe, there is always life on the other side. let yourself die and you will see.
this voice screaming in the night, disrupting, subverting, awakening. life. rock it into yourself. coo it quiet. sing yourself comfort. believe.
this is what it is to move together alone. music voices, webbing each other, network. but where is the backdrop? the narration, the tune, the history? there is nothing. pay attention. each singular drop sphered and crystalline is the news. the form through which juice moves in between. pores, pouring. into the mouth. and tomorrow. where not have been, but where are going. processing. doesn’t it always amaze you? didn’t quite expect so much, so fast, it was just atari then, look at the sprawling industrial children now. don’t stop looking. no one expects you to see. not past the game, not through it. becoming clear. the light moving through. just forms. just words, conveyor belts, cars. understanding for what is. for what is being done. tools in your hands, creator. use the world to construct yourself. graffiti your nickname on the train.
destroyer. this voice may go unrecognized by consciousness, conscientiousness. it may be whited out, slurred, and muffled. but it is there.
is was there. and streaming through the night window it may cross your windshield, screaming into your sleep to be held, understood, and led like a child to its death in the cauldron of your heart. and so you may cradle it, you may feed it, you may kindle it into flame. you may beat it senseless, hail it in the storm of your own noise. you may put the pillow over your own head and wait for forgetting.
but a voice once heard must be dealt with.
she told me not now. i held her in my arms until we were ready to let go again. and now, i am here, voicing myself into the night. i can feel the coming of the light. i will move towards this ready
to be accepted.

Guitaro the salamander alchemist

jackpot the sound bursts into the charge flowing from the fingers brushed, pressed down the strings, vibrating textures echoing, resound hollow into the porches of ears accepting, filtering. the body knows so much more than the mind. the mind, after all, is the body. so what do you think? you are what you eat. there is something we’ve been forgetting, lost in history. remembered sensations, emotions, churning butter snap image data into universal meaning, incorporating everything. but remember the sun? turning into a reflection in its hiding, memory laden moon, pulling up the waves. here it comes again. and what is what i see the same, here, quiet violence against my skin? shed. shedding. embracing. streaming forward in order to remain ready for never. everyday preparation for eternity. soldiers of an army that is not. the next instance steady, balanced, pot on head. that moment not yet happened beaming through, forebrained into the pavement. solid. objectified into living form. empty mask glancing two ways at once. light dark. the god rising infinite out of the middle. pupil eye. taking in. the body responding. the understanding that flows back, out, spurting, finger strumming. the waves of death billowing external. heard whispering, repeating, swirling, moving around itself, detaching off, melting into the air refracting. taken into your ear, your eye, your mouth. moving in between everything and nothing. i will repeat this always and it will never be the same. growing, parallax. i think today is different? it is we who are different. and so how can i think of being read, watched, broken, tasted? when it is i who am watching. i who am blinded? i who am devouring. i who is you? i who am i? further to fly. go to the middle, where you are two, one, attached. and let go. water spilling blood scream dividing into pairs of eyes looking away into future and back into past and not being able to speak this transformation this newness this void. feeling. terror. ecstasy. pain. the body knows. the body knowing.
we are happening. no bother buying the box seats. on the floor our feet pulsing with blood filled with air we share. and take. and destroy.
and renew.
gold making ain’t science, wilson.
it’s nature.

Release

i once thought of love as something eternal, as something you keep inside of you that never goes away. i once thought that i would always feel this way. it’s funny how time washes away your most cherished assumptions. it’s funny how you learn to forget, how you need to forget. layers, different sides revealed in the sliding change. what was beautiful fades into nothing. it almost seems ridiculous now, like a child playing games. like all dreams, the myth of love must die in the face of social reality. i sit at my table, drinking coffee, watching full grown men and women around me playing games with each other like children, asking each other to believe, to just believe. if you looked into my heart, you’d see the wind rustling through an empty room, the sun shining warm on the walls. whatever inhabits my heart grows there on its own. i give it space, and time. i’m not going to lock anybody up in there. sometimes people come and stay for a while, looking for shelter. then they leave again, looking for something more permanent. i let them go, singing and sighing, away into the world. i know what it feels like to wake up suddenly in a dark room out of a dream, to claw cold walls blindly, beating violently, the feeling of another’s blood on my hands. i know what it feels like to be locked up, monstrous. what is love? i sit at my table and sip my coffee. i watch the men and women around me playing games with each other, looking for someone to catch, looking to be caught. love is letting go. love is letting it all go.

Preterit Theory

Isis gave me a lap dance last nite. I nuzzled against her tattooed dolphins. And I realized, you know, that sometimes you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. To just say, hey, ok, I’m going to perform for you, I’m going to play this role in this game so that we can both get some enjoyment out of it. Let’s throw ourselves forward into the night and meet as masks on the other side. And you intellectual types who try to pretend like they something other than everything, it’s hard for you to let go of your identity, to let go of all this accumulated information about yourself, hours of mirror-time surveillance, replaying selected moments of your history and pasting them together so that you fit into this certain pattern of behavior, progress marked systematically by birthdays. But it’s all in the skin you know. When you are naked with another person, skin pressing together, are you yourself? You are something more, something less, something human. Something creature, breathing. This is your history, pores of skin sweating a deep musk, creating something new. Why do you feel the need to destroy this immersiveness with distance? Why do you watch yourself? You keep trying to keep everything inside, storing it all up like treasure for heaven, thinking that when the time comes you’ll be prepared. The time has already passed. You can’t wait to be saved. You’ve got to sell yourself in order to survive. Might as well enjoy it. Because you’ve got to sell yourself in order to feel. Noone’s gonna come to you and open you up. Noone’s gonna come to you and give you their heart. You’ve got to make deals to get past the pretense, you’ve got to agree to certain rules of the game. And the rules, honey, are this: we are what we don’t give each other. Hell, I’m selling out the system. I’m not gonna have anything left after this clearance. I’m not holding anything back. And who will be able to say, “This is what you are”? Because I’m yours. Because I’m everyone. Because I’m out there. And I’m enjoying myself.

A Nighttimed Story

shela opened herself to the night moon vibration, that pulling hum that yearns at the sea, beats at the land, trembles the edges like an amorphous thing. a thing. an alien is what she felt like. something reaching out across deep and silent depths and touching her face, sliding wetly over it, through it, her skin, her body unsure as to whether this was ecstasy or pain. her boundaries being continuously penetrated. shela decided, seeing only death in walls, in antagonism, secrets, gossip preventing the alternate reality of a parallel universe, that she would open herself to the night.
that she would let the sea travel through her like a conductor, the energy flowing through her and shining somewhere far away, timeless. she would be in the middle, shifting, always shifting, first one thing then another, disappearing and suddenly popping up surprisingly out of invisibility like a zit in the night. she would be passively disruptive. she would make the line dance like a lucid burst of static, like the shining randomness of a rain drop dance on the window, streaking down, making the night into a warm heaviness, a weighted unintelligible word singing subconsciously through your bones as you hide sheltered in light.
shela became a tentacle of unseen force, waving supple leaves in the whimsy of the wind. bending rippling cells of passing light, her breath never caught.
you won’t find shela in your history books, although she is the mother of all coming moments. from her sacrifice of self to love something she could never be she comes to be everything, caught up in the infinite movements of the universe. she is divine, because she is exactly a point in space, solidly an object of time, yet she could not be placed on any scale and measured. she is something that comes and goes, but stays with you forever.
so when she knocks on my door at night, come to call me out of the bed of my dreams, i throw away all my past, and i take her into my lungs. and when she is gone suddenly, i settle back into myself and remake the sheets. she is not mine. she is something i am grateful to touch. i know that i live in a different world. i know that when she comes everything changes. i know that nothing is certain. i know that i need to live.

This Is What We Need

take the light back. journey into the past and remember our heroes. the tree, the flower slewn, the silver falling, the dark running. myths of the empire, dreams of a birth, of a formulate rising out of chaos like venus in the half-shell. she is not all that beautiful–but the idea, you see, the ideal. what she is supposed to be, in her innocence. not coy, not a salesman suckering in another sucker, not an empty mask created for the express purpose of stirring desire, no. where would we be if we started looking at reality instead of our conceptions of what it should be? we would be lost. remember who we are. remember our place in history. we are different. we are special.
it’s about keeping everything in perspective. satellites. moon. orbital reality, distanced communication. venus rising out of the sea for you to look at.
it’s amazing how much we know, how much we can share with each other, how little need there is for us to say anything. when i trace my fingers across the steppes of your shoulders i imagine the electricity charging, flashing across cells of the networked synapsed swirl of information. what effect am i causing in you? how are you going to respond? i feel as though i already know. i feel as though i’m touching myself, reaching across into infinite space, coming out the other side of the mirror, awestruck, mimicking.
does this feel good? i know it feels good. it feels good. there is no need to say anything.
and when we hurt each other, we can already see ourselves moving away, and we push each other forward. it’s time to move. suddenly our mouths fill with words, with sounds we cannot explain. explosions occur. skins fill with heat, with blood. take the light back. remember our beginning. we are here for a purpose. we are different, we are special.

yes, you begin to see the end. we set ourselves to fall, crashing into the waving earth, rippling the surfaces apart, shattering the mirror, the light falling, the dark rising. the myth was made so we could be destroyed, so this world could end. this is what we need.

Everywhere Here

we went down the road long way before we come home. and in the interim the rain it fell round, and like a spell we found that we were empty. we were free of all associations past present and future. ghosts spoke like wheels in our skin, through our minds. we were captivated by our deaths. looking for shelter, many of us tried to stop off the path and get dry. but no turning back. we’re addicted to the end, we said, shaking our heads.
here we are, moving, looking for a farewell. ain’t gonna be peace, never. everything is wet, sliding, glistening with everything. we try to be cool, we try to be hot, we try to be something, but it slips, it falls, it rises, it melts into nothing we can hold because it’s ourselves.
well breathing with the world we come to know the road is our home. the rain it falls round and intermittently the thunder scares us, and we see things clearly suddenly before the rune has rung back silence and darkness has swallowed the world again. and death, darkness? no, that was not the fear. the fear was the light, blasting, laying everything so crystal clear, so perfectly sudden, so known before understood. and emptiness, oh, we
are shelled by the enemy of ourselves. so we are hard
and we are soft,
and we are home, now.

shots in the dark

What am I going to do with my moment? When your eyes are directed at me?

I am running for cover. I am firing rounds. I am wondering. I am still. I am moving. I am loving you. I am wanting you to leave. I am growing weeds in the garden. I wish to share them with you. Your waves are in my space, excuse me. Rippling over my surface. I am trying to learn myself when I teach you the path to my heart. Never surrender to me. I will not fight you. I will devour you, lull you to sleep with my fingers, take you into myself, turn you into a dream, into a memory, into a symbol.
Struggle with me, I dare you.

Where are you going?

Calling

weell, so here is the room, spinning. sometimes i want to scream, ya know, cuz i have absolutely no idea who i am or where my mind is going. absolutely. bean bags form mountains into which i sink. but i feel so good sometimes, when i finally settle down inside of myself and say, “yeah. i’m here.” but then everything flies apart. come, fly in the teeth of the wind. but we need to be grounded. we need a solid beat that drops in order to get through to these kids on the streets, man. gotta cultivate that mask that distances the emotions while molding them into understandable forms. ever noticed how pop singers are so goddamn sincere? it makes me sick. i’ve never felt that sincere about anything. the things that really get to me come in the form of dreams, you know what i mean? they give you these indescribable feelings and fill you up with light and then you wake up the next minute and you have to take a piss, and you have to get on with your life. what i’m trying to say is that i’ve lost the ability to define myself. and noone’s helping me do it; in fact, people just tear me apart, claiming parts of my heart, exploding through my dreams, reverberating in my thoughts. so i wait, i hold back, looking for a space where i can stand and look at it all and understand. sometimes i look into another person’s eyes and this light will flash out to me, and i don’t understand. there seemsto be something going on that i have nothing to do with. what are they trying to tell me? what is it they want? what is it i want?
should i want something?
ha ha, now the funk starts to settle down into that groove where you know that it could go on forever, and then it suddenly turns the corner and you start looking around and noticing the little changes, the little interplays going on all around up in it. let me describe a vision which i have just received. let me relay to you some information downloaded from the network of my mind. brought to you live from the energy source that now sits in the thick of the scene. this is mc duod, also known as nothing in particular. i see this: i see waves. i see bodies. i see a rustling forward, a tentative meeting of the sunlight on the crest of it, twinkling with motion, wondering, rolling away, darkening, deepening, swinging, building, desire, emptiness, rushing back up to light with intensity, exhaling, knowing now what is there from what is not. warmth slapping into itself. there is an air we breath, there is a space we occupy. sharing. clutching into oneself. pushing away. climbing back. alone.
beauty only comes out of dark places.
and then everyone comes out to look at it, passing by, shining. it calls to them. it speaks to them. it sings to them. oh, god, how scared everyone is. they think that if they follow the voices they will drown, they will be left
stranded.
well, i guess they’re right. i feel lost. the only map i’ve got is the stars in the sky, and they don’t tell me much. they just shiver their dead light silently in the vast stillness of the night. and yes, how beautiful it is. it stuns you, it touches a place inside of you where all you can say is “oh, how beautiful,” as if it were a painting you could buy and hang on your wall. but here it is, every night, ready to overwhelm you. and what can you say? what can you do? there it is. and then you’re turning to look at the person next to you and you’re talking about tomorrow, or about yesterday, avoiding the depth that sits charged inside of you, the hunger that waits to swallow you when you’re alone.
yes, i know. it drives us forward. we are the stars now, shining constellations, randomly created pictures of the moment surrounded by an unfathomable darkness. light spitting into the void. life happens somewhere. the light catches on some piece of dust floating by and the music suddenly floods together, the spaces, the silences become part of something else, a song that moves between two closures, vast emptiness and exploding lights. there is a mind listening, connecting the distance with imagination. there is a heart feeling, connecting the distance with love. there is a body pulsing, connecting the distance with heat. and here i am, sitting, the room spinning. and there you are, sitting. i don’t know what your room is doing. i don’t know what your mind is doing. i don’t know what your heart is doing. but i know that it is beating back to me somewhere, sometime. i know that out of this distance there is a wave that travels into the ocean, i know that there are fish that move, eddying with the currents, i know that you will need to eat, i know that you will be hungry, i know that there is a bird singing, calling outside of my window suddenly, i know that i need to pee really badly, i know that i will rise from this chair and do what i need to do, and that you will rise from your chair, and do what you need to do. just that. just this.

fever

Gadhills the iron fleece! Jujubeats in the rain, Circe lets down her hair and sings. Why, if I can see beyond it, am I trapped in this sickness? Shut down the gravy train and mosey down to sleep. Umbrellas, purple, scandalous. Innocence lost, we wake up to find that paradise has been all around us and we have been polluting it. Thinking that we were floating islands in the sky. The hooks are everywhere, in our fingers brushing against concrete, pictures of us nailed into the wall. Like an 8-ball, pieces of us float to the surface, and that is our fortune. Linked by hooks to the deep. Sometimes in the silence of your mind you can hear them tugging, reminding you of your iceberg expanse solid in the darkness. All that could have been, all that might be. When we fly, we get tangled up endlessly in each other. Some have chosen to chain themselves to their allotted space on the earth, making sure that they are not entangled in another’s life. But then the earth heaves, and they fall down into the heat, or they fly up, into the heat. The wires have no end, being twisted into each other. Layers and layers of netting. I love to see fishnet stockings slipped taut over a woman’s leg. Reconstructing a skin from the gaps in the cloth, imagining the fullness given to me, spread out, gleaming. Twisted around, super connected, superconductors. I am sick, and I cannot be healed. I am a wound, and open, re-open endlessly.
I imagine another layer of myself out in the sun, whole, ripe, devoured, loved. Somewhere I am happening. Somewhere I am dead. I look into the mirror and see myself winding into eternity. I am here, feeling this, gazing on the shining surfaces, but I am also somewhere else, perceiving different layers laid open then, there. I want to shut my eyes and feel nothing. I want to sleep and dream and forget.

Territory

Liquid, water forming steps. Slide down. The earth pulls. Forming and reforming with movement forward. Centering, dispersing. A motion picture as a succession of frames. On/off. On/off. The way light bulbs flicker just beyond perception. Transience, a continuous progression of establishment. There is much beyond. There is too much beyond. Focusing on what is immediate, what is sensed, what is felt, what is touched. Driving, stop go, green red. Pieces circling endlessly around an imaginary whole. Construction of narrative from selected layers. What you see is what you live confined within. A continuous passage, shuttling between perceptions. Negative capability. Man/woman. What space does the body occupy? What space do i occupy in my body? What space do I occupy in your body? Claiming, reclaiming. The only territory that i can truly possess is my own. Right here. Right now. This is mine. Always shifting, transforming. Boundaries are permeable, porous. In the search for an identity to occupy, in the search of the i for the I, i must find a space, i must fill it, and I must leave my mark, scented, scarred, burning. And then I must defend it.
You can have it. i am no-where. i am gone by the time You sniff me in the wind.

Tribe

Watching. Distant our minds grow from our bodies. We gaze at ourselves through the television, intelligence pouring from our faces like the fall of water onto rocks, streaks of lightning from a clouded sky breaking into the earth. We become objects, glistening with light, charged forms of desire, tremoring, moving across the surface of time like possessed animals, indefinable symbols.

Do you see the flood, O man in the suit, O man of the mirrored fortress?
Do you see what you have ruined in yourself? Do you think words will save
you now? Do you think that your past will teach you how to breathe
under
water?

There is no narrative that can encapsulate us. We are not a nation, we are not a generation. We are eyes, taking out the world, giving in the world.

We are love,
consuming everything,
holding onto nothing.

(Feb 7, 2000)

Did i say “love”? Such a trademarked term, traditional, safe. Not love, then. It is the experience of the moment i’m speaking of, the pushing forward like the prow of a ship through time, the forward falling pulse of a hi hat in a jazz stream. It’s the refusal to hold back any longer, the sudden spontaneous agreement to let go of everything and let yourself be whatever it is you are doing, whatever it is you are feeling. it is letting every single wave of consciousness that hits you run through you, refusing to stop, refusing to fall back onto what is known, what is certain, what is dead.

so then when you watch, when you sit and gaze at these dead images moving, dancing before your eyes, you are looking past everything you see. you know that these forms are meaningless, these words, these illusions. but you go with it, you let it take you, because you are no longer scared, you know that there’s nowhere that you can go that will take you away from what you aren’t. it is acknowledging that you could never possibly capture it, that you could ever possibly understand. it is accepting that every moment is a death, every moment is a birth.

we are the dead watching the dead,
living somewhere
in between.

purple motion

signing my name, i suddenly feel like i’m drowning. there’s a part of me here that i can’t see that’s flowing from me and coagulating into a larger system, something symbolic, invisible, representative of a certain quantity of moments i’ve sold of myself, exchanging my time for a shell, for a brand that i can exchange with anybody. i sell my freedom, my boundlessness so i can be defined, so that i can be represented, seen, and experienced. i become an image, i become a dead thing to be resurrected in others eyes.
drowning feels like breathing fire, a shredding ecstasy that consumes whatever i held as my own, whatever i held back as distinct and separate from the rest of the world. at first it’s blinding, painful, frenzied–but soon it’s filling every cell, incorporating every space with maximum efficiency into a purposeful stillness, a frozen potential, a waiting that knows completion.
i break apart then into the ocean of energy.
and somewhere, in some darkened room at some certain time i smile down upon a somnolent form and fill their current dream with light.