Static

There's this film between us, a static hissing and a loose vertical hold
but through it I can see you smiling and laughing, your voice somehow higher
rich and familiar, confusingly warm. We make these videos to remember.

Coming home to a wife and baby, feel her bend into you,
"Welcome Home" against your cheek.
You can do anything, we can do anything.

It changed though,
time changes you.

Maybe it's no different than with spiders, and in coming to know them you were able to find the knives to betray them. You knew in the end through having observed and measured each arm exactly how to cut these strings, though I don't imagine even now to understand their knots or where they met the ground.

Then again, maybe not.
It's just like these movies and the hiss that wasn't there until we looked back. Maybe you never cut these strings, God knows I editorialize, but maybe you did.
I can't remember, even with these tapes.
Even with tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes.

Advice

"Your stuff's fine... I mean good, your stuff's good."

--Andrea Ramsey on why Oscillations should be updated more often.

hazard

it's a voltage problem
an overflow and a need to be grounded

an electric leak

uncovered outlet with cartoon lightning
pouring out like a tap, like a limp hose
lightning collecting around its coiled base
lightning collecting in the storm drains

it's not safe, but you know that
you could be swallowed by an earthquake
set upon by wolves or murderers
suddenly finding yourself under the ice, looking up and gasping
shocked

you could be shocked if you let yourself be

you could drop a radio in the bath
or shuffle along the carpet in socks
lick the outlet
kiss the outlet

there are tiny deaths waiting for you
treading water in this lit pool
the salt of my skin a conductor
these lips just conduits.

Tense

I need to write something, or I needed to...
I needed to find a tense, having read the Tense Present¹, and found myself drawn along the wrong lines.
Drawn along lines too honestly assessed and even.
One side giving me four. An enormously trite feeling of being 'boxed in'².


SWE/PCE and the always otherized other, that sinking feeling
"I can't dismiss this. I just wrote a paper about how I can't dismiss this."
What do I know though?
I don't know anything and yet I run in the idiom of this thing that claims to.
What claim do I make?³

Don't mistake these twitching fingers for eager hands
I make no claim with them. I aim to make no claim with them.

¹: unflattering, coy wordplay
²: demonstrable evidence of something too ugly to admit
³: let us not forget, we present something in what we say as well as how we say it⁴
⁴: I'd forgotten.

facetime

chipped

that's what happened
somewhere along the line i chipped
and a fault
chip, fault and the lines that flow out of it
it runs up my face and around the back
like a mask
but not like a mask thematically
the opposite of that, really

like a smile