dear fabrics,

"I'm staying here to pull the summer left in me back out"
I think the idea was something along those lines
y'know, the crap we say as though we form our decisions,
sewing our bowels in and out as if we had blueprints rather than just patterns.

I guess my pattern is pulling myself through weird fabrics.
Truth is, I'm still left sweating in tshirts I leave in the fridge overnight.
Trying to feel winter, white, calm, deeper than down,
a substantial layer to heed off the sleep that scratches through skin
your red surface to my emotional tourism

In keeping the cold, there must be some new songs to chill through restless mornings of memory foam
the sounds muttered through pillows,
but maybe words are just something to lose your throat to
so I spent this week losing to a line in a movie,
the world that offers little more than acoustic resonance,
Might as well find rest in the coffee and cigarettes (I cant quit)
and I'm shutting up to trust that there will be worst trips for my words to be on:

a summer spent pending
polishing silver tongues
to cut pieces of cloth from the pillow of someone who
already knows how to fall asleep alone to the sound of traffic
the makings of a shallow bed

Ganymede

Do you know what happens to lovers? Whirlwinds
force them together, connect their elbows and ankles, their tongues.
They make you push limits, press things.
There's pleasure in pressing, certainly, but
is there any in being pressed? Is there any
in being forced to rise to an occasion?
How far can these things be pushed?
Ask Ganymede if he sighed with love when his shoulders
were in the eagle's claws, if joy passed briefly across his face
before he was borne away-- ask, does rapture mean loving but not choosing?

Because rapture's not just pecking and preening or stroking
the downy scruff of something dear, it's about
coming to blows and losing.
You'll know it when the raptor's upon you,
when you hear the wind split against his wings as he swoops,
and you're leaving the ground.
Until you're taken, you never really understand standing,
there's a reason people talk about being grounded.
It's when you're rising, climbing without looking
down, that you start to wonder about the falling,
about the ceiling on this kind of thing, how much higher you can be pushed.

Pavlov

Tie a church bell around the waist of Tantalus
and let it drag as he paddles through the wine.
Let him wriggle and ring, filling his mouth
with grapes in the hope that maybe just the sound
of his suffering could be enough.
Let him lie on the shore, panting,
and ring the bell above him. 
Trust that he suffers still.

Minotaur

If and when you find yourself sent down, know that you're not
the first; there's a thread of revulsion that runs from before you were born
to a knot in the darkness ahead, tied to the horns of the first
bastard. There's an entire history of those who chose to take the bull by the horns.

A few days in, it was the sound of him that first found them in the dark;
the walls would give up pebbles as the bull's hideous weight fled across them,
the stuttering tumble of stone on stone a measure of distance.
It came and went, but most often they were alone in the maze.

It was by following the track worn in the wall that they found him,
a shadow curled in the greater dark.
They would find him sleeping, flanks twitching in dreams,
and they would run, praying for life, eating spiders.

When my turn comes, I’ll lay with him there;
Bend my back against his chest and let him keep me.
I will reach through his matted hair to his horns,
stroke each one lovingly, and make the dispossessed once more a king.

On Atlas

Try to guess the nature of the thing
feeling only the burden between the blades
of your shoulders, and growing tension in your neck.
Surely it must be horrible, how could delight weigh
so heavily upon you? How could it not be awful?

Shrug, if you must. Shrug if the damn thing's so horrible,
but first let me plead for a moment. Though it's heavy
and hard to hold, pick it up for just a moment
and hold it in front of you. Yes, just like that.
Okay, now look at it. Meet its eyes.

I know there are a lot of them, and it's hard to look
at so many things all at once, thank you for at least trying,
but I need a bit more. See the little ones moving
quickly around the temples? Yes, the really little ones--
I know it's hard to see the difference, you're gigantic, but think relatively.

Well those really little ones, they think they're just as gigantic
as you. I know it's an outrage, it's outrageous, but they do.
Be apprised though, they think it's outrageous that you think you're
as gigantic as they are. Are you? Are you really so objectively
large and powerful, does your giving up really mean so much?

Here's the thing though, they're all gigantic. We're all gigantic together,
and we all feel the weight. Don't get me started about the ropes
around my neck, the knots-- Baby, you should see them.
What I'm saying though, is that if you want to pass it off
we're here to hold it for a while, too.

Baby, we're sharing this thing. We really are sharing it,
so if you need to take a knee and crumple for a while
let me be the first to invite you to do so. But know
that you can't drop it. It doesn't just go away, and the whole damn thing
gets heavier for the rest of us. We're only so big, you know.

concealing. (haikus)

the ceilings are high
here, my lungs are full of shit,
not unlike most things.

a day without maps
is like a night without stars,
i just want to puke

a little dizzy
from blacking out every night.
sober just as drunk.

disease, malfunction,
ability is only
a mindset if you

are not sick ev'ry
day in a body that seems
so smooth against cogs

so crunched in those cogs
you become the oil and you
know no one is free

together we can
find the edge of the world and
then find it again

the next day while we
anchor it to some heaven
that only exists

here in shaky hands
held by another's hands
less shaky and then

we'll take turns just like
seasons share a year and life
takes over death till

life no longer wants
itself nor death but something
less nauseating.

resp.

like the little man chasing the princess

like the little man, i am like him

and can't stop leaving the lights on.

like the little man i am moving backwards.

can you believe it?

I'm sitting in this gallery, an arbiter. My presence here says something to you: it says, this is worth protecting and I am a guard. Please don't touch the canvas, there is something there you could ruin. There is a meaning and these lines are important, why else would they so accurately repeat what's been said, what's so ostensibly worth saying? "Men With Brushes" and also the converse. They bump and they brush by, they have places to be and very important things to say about the responsibility of the artist to representation, to truth.

I demand the converse, the counterpoint. Advocate, please do. I want it in ways that make you angry, in ways that make you roll your eyes and just really be full of disbelief that I could even ask you t do something like that when it's so like transparently obvious that they are all of history. Representation is all of history, nothing figurative there. Ambiguous, editorialized, interpreted certainly. But never interpretive. You say there is no need for the interpreted. I say you say there is no need for the interpretive and before you even say it here I am, interpreting. We are both interpreting constantly, literally without cease. Sans cessation.

Andromeda, Thinking of Men

Now I put my faith in astrology. Not the heavens, but their turning
and the points of light that break the void. Let me assure you
though, it’s all chaos up there, and they’re only myths I whisper.
Tell me I’m more beautiful than the Nereids. I’m not afraid,
I stopped believing in monsters, and chairs.

I’d still like you to save me though, to find me by the shore in chains.
I know it’s not very modern to want for you to come to me
here, bringing me the heads of the women you loved before.
Carry them over your back until you find me on the rocks,
you don’t know how long I’ve thought of men.

Before you came it was only uncles with jewels and hands,
but we can put that behind us once you’ve loosened things up.
I’ll let you run your finger along my gums, they say you can learn
a lot from the teeth. They’ll tell you things if you touch them right.
I really am eager to meet you, you know.

I told you it’s the turning, not the heavens themselves and it’s true.
The stars have houses we can’t see and they have ways of returning
like whales and certain turtles to the places they know. The stars are
faithful, and so I am too. Because I know you’ll come back to me
if I just put myself out there. Out here.

You can read these lists as much as you'd like but they won't help you unless you let them.

It's not that you're ignoring their words or pretending the diagnostics are faulty because they've never really been inside you the way that only you could ever be, because what's the point of thinking about things that way. It's exclusionary at the deepest level. It's elitist. It's more about this reluctance to apply these ideas to your own mode of being because you just don't really know what your own mode of being is. Can you paint a landscape with language? Is that even something you're concerned with?

Though even this is evasive and intellectually dishonest. The common theme running through every entry is just that you need to write to be a writer and that you aren't going to get better if you aren't doing it. Thinking about writing isn't practice and you need to stop pretending that it is. You can hone these critical skills as much as you'd like, train yourself to be able to really finely dissect the anatomy of these things, but do you really expect that to help you create? Does the anatomist become a better sculptor or does he just become more aware of the mistakes in the marble; the problems inherent in these materials?

"I'm fairly certain that playing videogames has given me unrealistic expectations when it comes to solving real problems. Independent of the scenario - a race of ravenous sentient robots, a wife lost in the folds of a parenthetical metanarrative, and so on - I can be expected to deliver a satisfactory resolution in twenty hours or less. More than satisfactory, in fact. I will recalibrate your entire concept of success as it relates to human endeavor.

I might leave a crack somewhere in the proceedings, something to allow for a sequel, sure - Navajo rugs, and so forth. But this oil thing exists at a point beyond my ability to usefully file it in my mind. I have a naive, quasi-religious faith in the capacity of people to resolve problems, borne of three decades plowed into interactive power fantasies and utopian science fiction. It's left me more or less paralyzed by the world-as-it-is." -Jerry Holkins

black hat

and you look but there's just nothing

and you're scrambling for some justification

because you can justify anything

but there's nothing when you look

so you have to wonder if maybe this endless recursion

of feeling bad because you don't feel bad enough

and feeling bad because you know you're bad

but not feeling worse because at least you know you're bad

as though anything's better

repeating to yourself over and over that you don't understand

how anyone smart can feel good

because anyone smart must know how horrible they are

how horrible and bad and not good they are

i am horrible and bad and not good

but doesn't it feel good to say

to justify anything by knowing how horriblebadgoodnot you are

so of course you would act horrible

act bad, you don't know any other way

so in finding nothing, you find something

to justify anything because you are so fucking smart.

quiverhold

it is, eat or be eaten.

she's the only one can feel the underearth burn through concrete.

stinks like carrion, arrow-ridden exhibitionist.

she's the only one can hunt spiders, come out reeking like rot-blood and fir mold.

temptation rings in the ears. permanent damage. saltwater soft stroke.


you were gorgeous you were everything. potent congenial. bee milk galaxy. dischord sleepwave. everything.

moon dance, heart twist, hands wrung, sun shift.

blood memory. scar conscious. blood memory.


war voyeurs lick the blood off the battle scene
like starving kittens

you cook your bruises on the concrete of a dead-air summer

while you sweat out spring water,
arrow held fast and warm against your cheek.

'in medias res' as an indication of trauma

and so we look for anchors to keep us aligned

pressed, pulled more accurately, more accurately

because there are places we need to be

and these dogs need to be walked four times per day

that's why you can't lock yourself in the bathroom

that's why you can't lock yourself in the bathroom all day

It's easy to sink, it's the floating that worries me.

(--I need you.)

i miss you, sincerely

softly. slowly.

cheers to doing what feels good.

latest history lesson is how to rip the pictures out of the book.

there's a parasite in memory.

already slipping

I could brush my teeth with the stains on my sleeve, but the potential to progressively think I'm losing my shit costs more than toothpaste on cuffs after a morning ritual of coffe, rinse, repeat. Oh how terrified I am to cut everything out,to feel insanity, to succeed these ties and rip my pearls out by their already slipping roots.

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.