Time flips the coin

When you are young and very open and see the division between things, and align yourself with the things on either side of the line. It doesn't matter so much which side you choose but that you are definitive, and that you ring clear and loud. You are a bell on the sidewalk. 

When you are young and you buy everything at the Salvation Army or the Church Mouse you are secure in your non conformity, and sure that you're doing the right thing, almost always, and most likely all the time. All your clothes cost a quarter or a dollar, and you know that Emma Goldman was right and that anarchy is not the chaos that most people assume but instead the freedom for humans to rule themselves as they choose, and you also know that the sun will come up tomorrow and that you believe. 

You consume no alcohol, meat, or cigarettes, but you try not to be annoying about your abstinence, since all of your friends do. You plug along, in bands or writing zines, putting up fliers, believing in movements that are happening very far away in the warehouses of Oakland or in Tompkins Square Park, far removed from the cornfields surrounding you. You try to connect yourself with grit, with despair in the dollar, with revolutionaries of extraordinary height and of pure silver consciousness. 

Somehow you grow away from the lines, somehow when you start to read Baudelaire and Sartre and began to watch the straight trees felled from their roots, when the people that hold up the architecture of idealism begin to stoop, when they get tired, as all beings do, because it is tiring having to be fucking perfect all the time. 

You move to a place like Las Vegas where the people are as decimated as the baked earth, where they have tried to raise families for 30 years against the backdrop of corrupt, booze-soaked, cocaine-driven, insatiable casinos and the people who thought that they'd be a good idea to start, who think that the world's fools need anymore opportunities to screw themselves and to lose their children's money. As if the bars and streetcorners in Newark and south Peoria don't already provide that opportunity every day of the week, although clothed in less glittery gowns. The generations there of circus performers and casinos bosses, pockmarked and bewildered at their progeny and their inability to articulate what exactly went wrong, except that they moved to a soulless place in a gutted environment that even the Anasazi abandoned when they could. 

So slowly, you become lost to ideas and cling to things instead, which is the inevitable process of growing up in America, because it is easier to go out and buy stuff than it is to admit that you don't know where any of your ideas went, or why you believed in them in the first place, because money always wins in the end, and at that point it becomes clear that it has conquered even YOUR consciousness, and you, who though yourself immune to such frivolity and used your water bottles over and over, you who would spend $5 on a night out seeing a band, start to believe in the lie of accumalation. That more is better, and after all, more is UP.

Your solution to this creeping realization is to drink, drink as much as you possibly can (and lots of cocaine too)and still look good doing it, since you're only in your mid 20s no one will notice will they? Numb yourself to the possibility that you have embraced the machine you hated, that you have let it fuck you on a regular basis and that even worse, you LIKED IT WHEN IT FUCKED YOU

Sooner or later you have too much stuff and nowhere to put it. The moneys gone and you're still alone inside your head. Darkness fills the alcoholic void of space between you and the past and it begins to resemble blood, and you begin to notice the sunlight, you begin to feel that you have finally walked through a door and into the light of your life, and that you don't have to be anything you don't want to be. That free will, although western and not exclusive, is either a great or a terrifying thing. 

But time flips the coin against you, time hustles you along a dark street and swipes your wallet, time puts something in your ecstasy, and 8 or 9 years later your 5 year old son mentions 'knockout drops' while shopping at target.  Time is unreal except in the tiny handprints on the clock, time is unreasonable and difficult to pack, time is lopsided and memory is drunk. The real thing is the moment, the light, the expanse of space between you and the past. The real thing is to believe in the real thing. Nothing else really matters.

Summer Drive

drive in the summer night the sensation of time flies away from fingertips music on the radio we connect to exterior scene the cornfields billow in bluish tips in segments elongated through the rows the regiments of stalks reach out to the horizon

the backseat was plastic or like plastic when we were kids there was hard round piping that differentiated the parts of the seats from each other and kept us apart too kept us from ripping each other’s hair out or from tearing off the shirt of another girl

I can’t travel anymore I am rooted into the ground I have lost my privileges to voyage beyond the confines of the present and what is happened to the day since it has lost its light as days blend into nights and become one thing that is only separating them is the clock and how it plays out hours

to remember in cars don’t fear the reaper or the twilight zone when you turn to stone and why oh why can’t we be friends in this chocolate city oh Bernadette its a hot time summer in the city with the incense & peppermints all of smells of my best friend’s girl but no one knows the cracklin rose or the king of the road and hey good lookin, Cindy tells me that under the milky way tonite

& im still waitin for my ruca i barely pulled up w/ my heina or whats tonite will be behind her and there are lights of stars ive been runnin down a dream you know a change will do you good will do you good before you know the gold dust woman and theres Christian zombie vampires I am the father the father of nothing oh what you do to me what you do to me the words escape melt on the dashboard a conglomeration between action and experience between inside our minds without speaking everyone knows the radio wants to play your song because of course humans want a continuous soundtrack a tremolo experience of within and without a reverberation of time connect between dark and light and sever the witness of time

Because Warhol was Right

Had it in the right vein anyway, that household objects are beautiful, especially the broom which is bound upright and looks so much like a discreet woman gathering her skirts against the gloom, because dust is what we dismay, what we envy, what we entreat to the corners & brush out of the day, because the bottle of bleach is so curved & circumspect in its boundaries and is the arbiter of all that may be clean

Because nightfall is imminent, because dawn is a question mark, because dusk draws the lines around conversations and words and through utterances we hope to make sure our mark is drawn upon the world

Because I am I, or what I would’ve hoped to be, or I am not, or that I am a page, or a blankness, an utter refuge from thinking of what am I, or that I is a making, or that I is part of something more than what it seems today

Because balls of yarn are unfurled, because the circle is the universe, and that what unfolds is being in time, although being is never universal, or that being is not just little terrarium stars, blinked out across your horizon

Because the meaning is yet to be discovered, and is discovered through saying, although not normally discovered, except for years later, when we reflect, or remember by looking very closely at a leaf, and for the first time recognizing that the leaf mirrors the same body as our human one, and then by then too late

Because there are systems, because everything revolves around them and to them, and that systems are endemic of the natural world, and all that is natural; because systems are the brain’s way of working out the limitless numbers of stars in the sky, the way of saying that this face differs from this face differs from me

Because I am the foothold, because I am the threshold; because I don’t know the answers to the darkness, or what remains there; because I am amphibious, because the sunlight casts its wise light on all those who choose to take its light in

Because darkness is everywhere, because there are seeds of consolation; because the light of living doesn’t always heal, because pain is superfluous, because time is a long hallway of diminishing light; because light is relative and therefore means something different to every human on the planet; and inclusiveness is a flat line, and all the hearts drum along in succession; sequestered in their closeted space

Because forever is a pinprick, because the stage the waterfall; because I have seen inside of oceans green combed black, because waking doesn’t release the dream, because a serpent rides on backs of minutes, because the sidewalk turns to a circle, because grey is the inside of the eyes, and the school of fish turns one cloud of flashing light; and we get old, and face away, and grieve small handprints; and make fluttering sounds in our flight, and stoop over a valley of papery memories, try to catch them and hold them, hold the little fishes, so near.

Sappho's Future

Sappho’s Future

Please, release me, realize me, throw out the key, throw out the idea of a key, institute perhaps not, institute what have you, get out of town, go quickly, don't go, I love you, today I kept your grade school picture in my hand, is it still true, I have contacted the pasty members, I have collected dustdrops, I am asking you simply, what is the reason for the sunrise, I am conflicted, I am less of a solid persona, there is blood in every drop of water from the tap, I don't know anymore. 



Where is the molecule, what about the atom, I know about fusion, I am concerned for chaos, and chaos the understanding, chaos the reason for any sense that may occur in the universe, I parse out the lyrics of Sappho, the lyrics are fragments, there is no reason left to the words she made, the thousands of years ago, when she was in love, when she existed and loved, when she was real, cried down crystalline amoebas from her eyedrops, glued her heart to another, felt the wind lift up her hair upon leaving the building, felt it engulf & carry her, must have been mighty, must have been clean, we can't imagine, the smell of that wind. 



I am so purely, pure of a nightmare, pure in the sense that I let down your drawbridge; down into Paris, or darkest New York, the concept of crowded is burned in our pysche, the concept of city is forever hardcored, it's become hardwired in our minds, what about us with the city, where we mark and converge, where we disrupt and hooligan ourselves and run up against poor, where all of a sudden we are poor, and look up from the last drink, and see our eyes reflect in the sky; and wonder where she is, and wonder before, the last time that's haunting, the last time is peaceful, the last time is sure to drown out the sun, forever unbending but forever relenting, I am still here waiting, waiting for more.

Sappho's Future

Ode to the Afterlife

-- after Federico Garcia Lorca

The spoons crouched on kitchen tables,
lying in wait to plug the noses
of parents orphaned, sequestered
in corners of dark sediment honeycomb.

Guards asleep at the gates.
Bricks and curbs shaking in sunlight.
Cars with no drivers, marooned in the street.
Wailing in the distance.
Blood dried to the sidewalk. The smell of it
in the hot sun.

To facilitate communication came thousands
of translators. Walkie talkies barked in their hands.
Their teeth glimmered sharply in the sunlight.

“Lie down. Lie down,” they said.
And we did.

Fingers of Light

The morning too has its end in itself where the clearing rises and shakes out the dew shakes off the night the stars fall down dusty and distant although they retain their light they aren’t heteronymous to each other anymore the beams of stars still bright when they are put into bags

Objects and people fill the rooms the rooms of our night as we sweep up our days and the separation of the rooms the walls become membranes thick viscous and sturdy walls with the plant cellulose that under the microscope are hard and discrete

Separation is necessary but connection survives if the kinship of languages is to be demonstrated by translations how else can this be done but by conveying the form and meaning of the original as accurately as possible[1] is the same the same in all ways to express a feeling or visions the sensory experiences of time

Kinship not involving likeness that the bowl and the pot are of the same ilk because they hold things because they are round but they serve different reasons for being for use as is mer to sea to poisson to crustaceans to cheval to equestrian to coeur to the body

Les langues imparfaites en cela que plusieurs, manqué la suprême that the imperfection of language is due to their plural nature and the supreme lack that happens when we think without writing no hieroglyphics to guide any future generation

The memories of other writers their languages their dialects their hometown what they had for dinner the night they died or that morning as their various lives came to their inevitable halt that collective intelligence anger hurt remorse drunkenness disease seeps through their words and weighs the pages and weighs heavy on the hand of the translator when she takes up her pen to transmit another’s words through the years and through the sieve of her mind

Ride the language seek out the corners of meaning intimation nuance syntactic ordering that orders itself according to the logics of the time so that no one syntax or grammar is ever concrete but for the participants and how they wish to call down the words into their various powers to call them down like leaves felled from the trees command them into presence into being Fingers of light begin to push up on the night Infuse the air with the air of the past the whole of existence becomes a Babelian circle like Borges’ book where the past is the future and the future the past

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[1] From Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator” trans. Harry Zohn.