Ready For what can’t be known mind and body write poetry, freedom of movement, favourite food, sacrifice. Lead me through lingering rain claps, sun showers. Lead me: by hand, with your voice, by signs if pained through what remains – all I have is bent and shadowy. There’s a house on this block, licked by age. You can sit on the balcony and improve your bandwidth to the tittering of sparrows and caw of crows. All I have are bent shadows, and I yearn to stand straight in the rain. To hold out my hand to a tolerant woman. To trade faces with the ayahuasca initiate. To walk unfolded, to sit with poise, to trick with luck, wits and spirit the night spirits that have fooled me. Anyone can be fooled. It’s not a sin. It just takes moxie to trick the trickery back again. To suck venom from the aura of the heart. To bathe in mud. To bask in ether. To walk arm in arm to walk arm in arm to walk arm in arm to steal and pray.[1] According to others, I have no clothes. I live in an ostrich. Felon. Rictus. Rubric: words I would use. No webpage, no ribboning. Just an insect-ridden shack of a basement in which I pass oblong days. Recently objects have begun to look back at me. And with people, I’ve become inspired by misunderstanding.
The Worm after Emily Dickinson They cut the worm they found, and saw that it had fed, but did they cut the lower end, or did they cut the head? In the humus, there was indigo and vital green (which go that way by complement, no lie). Strands of both colours strike the eye. Indigo leads a human by way of space, and green leads each to each, but third, a voice, tracheal sky-blue forms bands of hands and leaves the deeper shade to search ever-paling greens. All this in a worm, and not a worm I found. Just a worm I fancy, as the earth is fancied round. Colours glow like infancy until light grows dim, and humus holds it all, and skin is barely skin.
Sogenji Suite #3 My name is David Foster Wallace. Cryogenic coal, I have no particulars, except a tear in the sepulchre of broad daylight. I’m cooled by tears of sleep, and drone of early morning. To get out of bed without alarm, from shunting, mountain airs and spoiling in the valleys, because the pace is set on plains. Seeing doesn’t change, eyes become pinioned. Attention, evolution, who comes for the lizard with the frilled neck? Snow’s dry laughter snapped shut in perfect crystals. It comes to play painfully, pulse and forgetfulness. Lunge and hesitation along a thread. The frequency of starless night: wide, black, bright. And between it, day, peaked rooves and colourless skies at ease in the flood, at ease. Go ahead, I’ll be right behind you. Piles of dirt, spirit boxes not corpse markers. No friends just bugs and sunshine. No friends just a quiet minute in the graveyard. Consciousness alters DNA, undoes, does anything, distinguishes hell with photons. Source of life and non-life: my well-lit, my blackest river.
[1] Modelled on John Taggart’s poem, Slow Song for Mark Rothko:
“to join arm-in-arm to join arm-in-arm to
join to take to take into …”
