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the twenty-eighth of july

I've been in a fugue since yesterday afternoon. first came a sense of feverishness, tiredness, sore throat; then pain, feelings that I was universally rejected, unloved, unfit. I reached out for evidence to the contrary, calling a friend. i also turned to media in various forms, spending thirty sleepless hours playing videogames, eating only once a bit over twelve hours in, a single plum with some frozen pizza as I took a bath break between games. I could only eat half at that time, the other half six hours later. while high in the bath I had a frightening compulsive thought loop of reality as language, language as a virus, and llms as the true and essential torture of it, a background worry brought to the fore by reading the writings of a tech worker descending into ai mysticism. this kind of compulsive evil thought i haven't felt so strongly since I was young, and then as now think of as the devil, an ambiguously loved and trusted part of myself. but something that feels clear now (perhaps its aim was pedagogic) is that my sense of unreality which I feel to be so constitutive and defining of my self is a thing I maintain: it makes me feel less vulnerable. i have known this is part of my fugues but it feels graspable now in a way that I hope will be both useful to understanding both myself and others. what follows was written first, as a diary entry exploring my fugues as a practice of emotional safety.

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the fugue as a reckoning with grief, a way to feel a particular despair while also getting small enough to escape it, a way to mark time and make space in it, to confidently withdraw, demonstrating possession by neglect, a safe and self-defeating feast of compulsion, a hysterical retreat, a hermitting, an acceptable rupture.

the fugues are me working through something: there is labor involved, fixation on doing a simple thing: i work, in them, i seek work, and maintain a sense of progress as part of my shelter. i build a treaded tank from my attention and set it in a straight line, bulldozing the countryside in its passage. i am not in this tank looking for and shooting enemies; i am not letting myself be aware of my troubles; i am looking for rest and safety, sleeping at the wheel, confident in the armor of my thick neglect. my fugues are a form of painful rest, pains of a spontaneous suicidal asceticism: i do not want to eat or have a body. i want to live inside my fixation, fixed to it, fastened to my own fascination, attending only my attention, and enjoy the difficulty of doing this as my body complains, the discipline of it: look at me transcending weakness. as my mind dissolves in sleeplessness and starvation this ability to pull myself together, to continue improving at some game or code, is thrilling and soothing.

#528
July 28, 2025
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midnight flora

oh, life is weak and we are weak to it:
to live is to face that light anyway
that we may find by it company
to care for and to care for us
to be part of something as;
a neighborhood can be just this:
a cat
on its back
in a garden
looking for affection
and play
with we who knew her

#527
July 2, 2025
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IAD LAS

i.
a game of friend telephone
a chatty wander a public park
a hickey. with just enough age
to act young wisdom at least
for two fools to melt a pint of mint
and necks with looks of direct
indirection to mount an insurrection
against time and its bells

ii.
birds sing for the morning bus
but it earls unheedingly grumbling time
companionably to motion towards
a flight delayed into the normal
morning, the connection dropped
in anticipation one can be gained
at the place all Frontiers meet
las vegas. i lost the thread
of metaphor this is just
a writ now of a feeling
in the margin of transit

iii.
the way obsession delights
in attention in what it does
overthought overwrought
sharpened to a tip and tonguing
a delay a gap a gasp

iv.
self-worth as a wage of meaning
eyes upon the scale life always
spun gold from the thread of time
we can trust our spindle
is weighty and sound
in the truist sense of the word
that we can give as we receive
we as the self receiving gift
the only over-/under- the wagers
each word must make of conversations
as it travels the minimal pressure in air
closer to none
than breath

#526
June 6, 2025
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takoma park

a place thus named must have its public grass and so I find it does, strung along the state line like angular beads, late Spring sun accreted pearl-like around the houses of that division.

#525
June 3, 2025
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the US Liberal is dead

(i attempted a poem but it kept essaying! better formatted and commentable here)

I have rarely found the idea of “individualist” (versus “collectivist”) useful; it is as sensible to me as most conceptions of agency, which is to say I get confused when I try to use it for detailed work. I’ve wanted other lenses on being an individual for as long as I can remember. Recently inspired by Táíwò’s “autobiographical freedom”, I wandered into something like a history of the Individual: what play or power is there in being recognized as a type of individual by a particular society, place, and time? Consider a Genius, the tip of an iceberg, who seems to direct or anticipate a whole society of practice: the Genius Pianist stretches what is played and how, leaving their mark on shared craft. Until recently I hated the Genius as “individualist”, but through this new lens I see also how it coheres a social practice. It turns out which Individuals have power or play in a society, and to whom they are available as roles, matters much more to me than whether that society is “individualist” or not.

In my life, before my eyes, the USA has lost some of its Individuals. It’s a history worth longer tellings, and I encourage you to ponder your own, but consider two Individuals I was raised with: the Informed Citizen and the Rugged Homesteader. I think I (and many others, this is probably what Neil Postman was on about in 1985) have seen a murder of the former, and a recent photo of the latter near the scene, sunburnt shirtless in red white blue. So let us eulogize: Born of a shotgun wedding between slaveholders and the Enlightenment, our classically liberal Informed Citizen, who loved nothing more than opening the news as his wife served breakfast, died quietly in public and RFK Jr. cut off his left hand for luck. The Democratic Party has been as loud about this as a coop of chickens, and as helpful; lost in a collective fog, they seem to lack the individuals and the Individuals they need to act.

#524
May 15, 2025
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reverse postcard

whose clouds reach halfway across a sky for trees on top of a hill whose feet sprout a black and white diamond bowtie perched on rocks whose valleys flow with birdshit towards seals parked just above a dark cerulean sea.

a photo described above and credited below

photo by daniela

#523
April 28, 2025
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The solipsist's argument for communism.

Ignore time, for now. Ignore history, material. There. Did you just experience a thought? And in perception above all be honest. Don’t think about what that means—isn’t there an experience of credulousness at the idea of experiencing a thought? Stop. Stay with that creduluosness, that perception of belief through its possibility. I’m serious here; this is just your internal monologue. Having perceived belief, then, why would we not believe? Having perceived self-consciousnesses in conflict in the process of belief, why would we not believe in external consciousnesses? Having believed in external consciousnesses why would we not perceive them? And in perception above all be honest: have you noticed? They are trying to meet us too. Other consciousnesses, with their inevitable differences (being, after all, not-self), are interested in us, in we, in ours, in I. Fuck! Goddam! We are pressing into each other! And pleasure exists, and we and other I’s can collaborate to make what is best and most beautiful—we can touch and think and cook and sing and dream. And hold on to that! Hold on to that as you learn more about this real reality, take for granted its sufferings and impossibilities, and retreat even to ways in which to see the world as not-world, as other, as not-self, to separate self from other so as to partition pain. That the world is real and us and beautiful and we can help make it more beautiful is the greatest truth, the joy that holds up the sky, that lets us measure pain by its distance and love by its appearance.

#522
April 13, 2025
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ar vida, or, in moderate churn

The train speaks only as a warning to we feeble and forgetting, for it knows we slip any schedule or even with memory disbelieve that so many tons of steel will enter our lives so soon to leave as quickly. From where you are do you hear trains louder in nearness? or quieter in closeness? Will that orientation be packed with your other things for the move? Imagine if each car had such need and means to greet, instead of their silent self-conscious roll badged like death's deputies pacing duel lines in the middle of each street.

How language can creep up on one invisible except to memory's comparisons like a fog that you don't notice entering until suddenly you're in the thick of it. Many things seem so both good and bad, vapourous joys and defeats we wander through to horns and lights and internal maps; perhaps here willpower as you said might be our lantern, put power in decision, force direction to let living prove the right of theory. Oh but it is a difficult time to sculpture so our minds! I reach to blame postmodernism but perhaps unfairly, it may be only indolence or bustle.

And even if we cannot write through it let us write at least into presence, outside ourselves and reaching to be unafraid of existence, outside ourselves in essential unnecessary ways, circling conspiracy. If ideas are just a mist of life's material breath, let us exhale hotly into a cold world and see ourselves thereby, a rather Boston sentiment but I trust it is received.

A little more of the life consisted of having to figure out how to live than had been expected when fourteen and sixteen were wrought. A little more of life has consisted of discarding fits than could have been expected! But there is much more than a little more to life than I'd expected, though it gets harder to hold on to this the further I get from childhood. But how for you, these skins and sheddings, slitherings and layerings, laminations that refract reflection, how do they sit withon and withoff?

#521
February 17, 2025
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ar vida, or, in feline exhaustion

But do we grow like mushrooms, beans, crystals or soil? Underground in networked transport? Spirals to a flickered sun? Solidifed from saturation with all prep hidden fluid, or clung to stone in face of flood and fall? Certainly some care must be taken, grace and foresight valued, flexibility rigidity maintained to stretch while holding; and perhaps simplistic metaphors more calm than help to dance with such uneasy partners as acceptance and desire. But how do you? I've been trying to consider insecurity as boon as possibility, and indeed it has kept me from the proffered grains of woods, abnegation a temperature to dissimulate annealing (consider then discard growth as optimization,) but its instability challenges connection and I yearn often for the mollusc life, foot-tight yet fancy free in surf.

Nevertheless we play, build shells from crumbled castles and dodge the tides of sand in careful distractedness, as when a third polarizer lets in more light than display and ideology admit alone. Or if individuals are the light that travels, not source or sensor, that might explain each I's strange time. We twist, certainly. But there is more in sparkling “than had been expected when four and six were wrought”. How do you make sense of things? Sense is not now in sentences for me but travels on their motion in and out. How do you make stillness of a life? Though life makes still us all. If we were pigeons stept from puddles making 4-mementoed prints one points back, and what means it if we fly?

As to which came first imagine a moment of joint origin for poetry and music, a sequence of linked sounds bringing "that delightful disorientation we call significance" creating meaning and ambiguity both, a voice out carrying an inward turn, one of those times in which understanding outwalks hearing to confuse causality. A moment of thrilling upset; "listen to me with your whole body" says Lispector, and I imagine our listener, pre-human, caught so; perhaps the ear was invented only later, physically or in that concept distancing sense and being that many think of when they think of consciousness; the parasitic ear, a false hole which wriggled itself across the scalp until its limbs atrophied of long symbiosis, though some still wiggle.

Or I read once of muscles inside that push to hear, a drummer for the eardrum, that a musician with tinnitus put a microphone inside it and heard her demon beat. What's next, a light from eyes to push away the gaze of others? This activity so intrigues me, the active ear, though through a grasp so vague that I must imagine prehensile hairs curling to bring sound down or straightening in rejection. What a strange reclusive sense, sight much more transparent to me; maybe because microphones are so simple in their actuation while our bayer-filtered cameras mimic us to more detail. Machinic regularity blurs perception throughout, grids more rigid than the weed-like growth of cells.

#520
February 15, 2025
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ar vida, or, in senescence

I've slept so much this past day, that nap for five hours yesternoon then ten the night, and now somnambulant sentences walk without waking beyond even the sense in which all word is dream. Though tasted so many times unconsciousness still has that delicious hint of poison, and part of my past months’ adolescence was the reappearance of more direct nightmares; since I started writing poetry I've been used to highly symbolic ones, but there's something pleasing to wrestling with simpler terrors, or perhaps I am too easily entertained by myself.

I find such joy in being in the audience, when all that is asked of me is receptivity, when the key is set and I can accompany or counterpoint; but that's not the whole of it, for too I quite apparently need sometimes to conduct the orchestra, to grasp perfection in articulation of sensation, but I think in such conductive moments I feel charged with inspiration, in some way not myself but ensouled and inspired, thus somehow yielding and receptive even while commanding, a candied self perception that others of course have no responsibility to join. How do you think upon the performer and the listener within you? what plays upon the stage within on the stage without? do you push or are you dragged into the spotlight?

And I would entertain your sinfully long self indulgent sentences in this time of stress and strain; it seems a better escape than many I take to weave such things, and perhaps like other crocheted tchotchkes we may find in it a way of being, of thinking in doing, amidst and amongst and through the useless beauty, the tree whose only worthy wood or fruit are sunlapping leaves and tangled limbs.

This is an email in the saddlebag of a courier long delayed in some pony express of the mind whose horses sup only on that precious nectar of desire to reach out, whatever trail mix of safety and hunger, fondness and absence it takes to write a letter. I never got the hang of email in an age of anxiety. How/where are you now? what temperatures mark or mar your days? and what have you been reading or writing yourself into? Some books over these years I've loved wholeheartedly: piranesi for its strange but calming quiet, a memory called empire for its power and poetry; in comics my body unspooled more, and leo fox's my body unspooling was a part of that, see too the adventurous chromatic fantasy, the idyllous yotsuba&.

#519
February 13, 2025
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ar vida, or, in epistolary exfoliation

I woke this night after an extended sauna with dear buds skin soft and jaw over-relaxed and an itch to write some overcomplicated sentences and delighted as ever that you'll indulge me in them. There's just something about this feeling of speaking oneself into being in a letter, expressing against the right amount of resistance to push harder, and I can imagine this feeling in weightlifting, that vulnerable sport of accounting; do you encounter your lifting as something with the right wind to run into? or how in cycling one makes one's own wind as a most elaborate fan, spinning the whole world with each push of leaping feet.

As this reference frame tango might suggest I've fallen into special relativity lessons online, far from the only thing these days that reminds me of the end of highschool, the start of college. I'm out here feeling like a teen, sullen cargo constantly strewn by waves into the hungry sea in historically accurate overwhelm. There's something so beautiful in the excitement of a good physics teacher or student wrestling a hidden world into view, kicking stones down the street pondering how we all move at the speed of light in various combinations of space and time. I miss it and wonder too that I locked myself away; there were too many things to take in, to earnestly perceive, in undergrad I was a mystic looking to part the veil of the world with a mathematized new magnifying glass, but I started finding always in the details of causality the trace of human pain, and eventually the same stubborn insistence on trying to understand which got me into engineering awe saw me out. But I miss it so; I don't really know what to do with parts of this puzzle-box brain without a joyous external universe to point at in curly scripted depth.

It's been a time to feel these months past, too much too unready or too close to fit in luxuriating sentences which glance and tangent, langorous cathode rays too shy to entangle a blushing phosphor. Over the phone sometime! and slash or do write me back whatever comes to mind from atop your snowy apple.

I am up early, and evidently to write long and lovely sentences, or at least loving, exhalations to match the careful breathes I've taken recently like cool sips of air, trying to bring an appreciation for the flavors of water to the flavors of air, the way a little liquid brings awareness to all it touches, lips mouth throat stomach and a night's errant chin drip, inspiration for respiration. O what fluids make of us, we bones in seas of pudding, skeletons with the desperation which accords rigidity or any stiffness admitting the leverage that permits comparison.

#518
February 11, 2025
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SFO - SIN

warm rain's haze sings
through distant lightning
but there are so many ways to be
that one yields to convenience
pre-occupation over choice
the calm beauties of tarnish
like my country's covered walkways
downtown malls which tunnel
to the statehouse under snow
while here they adorn sidewalks
perhaps americans would rather
they didn’t live in a society, so seize
technology as a frontier of reclusion
screens as summoning mirrors
though I speak only for myself
and appreciate our distaste for discipline
our turn towards panopteconimism
which lifts me like cocktail froth
an errant buoyancy in sugared riches
a scratch in the geography of abrasion
left by the imperial chisel
as it rules the surface plate
speaking only the one language
for power knows of angle only
as the corner we’ve been put in
to water or neglect
us orchids potted in the rot of empire

#517
November 30, 2024
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from both

on the contrary:
how could we love ourselves
before we love another?
to learn to hold with care
is easier when you
don't also have to be releasing
to that hold

#516
November 1, 2024
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material sigh

A little more of the life consisted of spilling
than had been expected when four and six were wrought
on a plate where some times morsels lept to mouth
but others barreng in the hygie silica light
of worry and the petri self stretched intricate transports
networking blinking to indicate activity and catch
eyes in only apparent ambience for each sparkle was a syn
yet when it was an ack. Fall and it chills.

after Gertrude Stein

#515
October 30, 2024
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tailing a rabbit

#514
October 27, 2024
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riviera ogallala

a photograph of panoramic vagueness

thunderstorms welcome
here in the vasty flatness
show us your extent

#513
July 20, 2024
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elko riviera

image.png

bluffs key the sky
as it rolls across the plains
disguised as wind

#512
July 20, 2024
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griffith griffith elko

image.png

i.
core an apple but quarry the earth
etymologically straining for the coeur
how surgically we hew away
what we will not eat in transplant

#511
July 18, 2024
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carlovy vary

 

at a confluence

of streams from below

#510
July 7, 2024
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rome

the cats are in the streets,
birds in the parks,
small bright pictures move
in the palms of bus riders,
but the window shows a structure
built thousands of years ago still
supporting a social imagination.
how long is a millenia anyway?
a century seems much shorter than
a decade ago, just three of me,
a millenia thirty,
and I can imagine thirty people;
but there is great difference between
being shoulder-to-shoulder
and stacking us head to tail
in time, a difference in
interactivity, simultaneous
collaboration, the depths of
the mirror of the facing mirror;
this is just how time works. banal,
but it always startles. perhaps
what shakes me is my own ache
for ruins, for a past whose bones
were not jumbled or buried
but rose up around us.

#509
June 29, 2024
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found words iii

what a beloved truth that the heart is a twisting muscle
ribbed it mandates as the skeleton of a class
the seduction of the other senses bringing
capacious momentum like an instrument played by angels
beautiful and terrible knife between the ears
cleaning corners anesthetic entertainments rising spin

#508
June 25, 2024
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aftermoon

it is the tidal, erosive nature
of our world that moves me now;
ebbs and flows too subtle for
an individual in the monthly sway
to notice are seen in every group,
and too often when paddling against
we blame our fellow oarsmen before
the current, set our expectations
to times when we were carried, and
miss that the brilliant just-so
is but a glint atop low hills of a
wind's walked waves. we prize self-
directedness, but only the leaping spray
can have that and only for some time:
gravity opposes the identity of a drop,
but for us as waves it is how we take the land

    #507
    June 19, 2024
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    a birth, a day, a week

    life spills through us
    like copper in a mine
    and this birthday I am varicose
    with time, content in its mesas,
    three dreams each little more than
    a narrated color and the idea
    of a reunification of idolatry
    and idleness. it is stone fruit season
    and I like every plum's peel's bitter tartness,
    even the watery or sweet ones, though of course one
    hopes for flavor in the flesh as well, not just
    an intricate cell for rain. forgive me;
    too long from writing it rushes back
    like a tree's first bloom and falls immediately
    to make room for the next; this
    is the abundance of blossoms, their giving
    that is receiving. it's giving blossoms,
    this june; blossoms and mushrooms and
    play in a dry riverbed; a feast for slow
    attentions delightfully enclothed in being;
    an indulgence with its eye on giving,
    its hand on the tiller of time.

    #506
    June 15, 2024
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    an open eye

    In the small wind a piece of golden grass
    curled presumably while green and fixed
    in drying twists and flys and hooks the dead
    bud of a leafless vine grown down a thick
    cable (internet?) zip-tied to a drainspout
    whose paint flakes off to reveal steel while other
    pinkhaki plates bent only enough to cover the
    last tie above the fence midst me
    and the caught twitching hay
    and so stayed part of our entwinement.

    #505
    April 18, 2024
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    burning, burning

    1.

    O tiger listing in the marsh
    without the symmetry of stone,
    its tapered temporality:
    for your ruin instead
    the hard attack of plastics.
    O fierce unlife! Yellow heat
    will break your orange
    but never the grudge of disposal,
    though industrial wastes around
    become plants and join
    this cycle called
    renewal and blight,
    flipping our land
    for how much longer;

    #504
    April 17, 2024
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    an oft-leapt day

                           

    a stranger springs from the sidewalk

    like this week's blooms, the same pink,

    same bright green. weather's taken a turn

    towards the seasonal but I like how the bluster

    makes my walk for a pocket of warm more dramatic;

    it's been a while since I got a breakfast sandwich

    here, we both note

    but I don't mention my new year's taste

    for the smoky vegan ones of the other corner.

    on return my eyes are lost in plans,

    though not so much I don't enjoy a step

    into the crossing stalling some luxury semisuv.

    is there time for laundry before I join a

    three year old neighbor at the museum? I should

    do it now to make sure, before

    the first poem on buttondown. but I find

    myself sat with a steaming mouth to write

    and wasn't this ever the practice here? stray

    observations known at their will, soft and sharp,

    mewling an ambiguity of hunger and joy.

    #503
    February 29, 2024
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    january movies, february moves

    Good evening! Alas tinyletter is closing down so I will be migrating wonder.systems; expect in February some poem twice, as the last from this old list then as the first from a new list. In the meantime I've watched many movies this year and peered into a letterboxd account. It's been fun writing there, though I refuse to rate beyond would or wouldn't watch again and indeed use an adblocker on all interface stars. To fill this notice, then, here's my month of movies:
     
     
    the 30th – Stalker (1979)
    Beautiful but not how I expected; a philosophical character play much more than landscape effects, shy of its manufactured beauties. Very different priorities than the book; meditation on profession felt its surest footing. Long and slow as is said, I'd have lost focus if not surrounded by a hundred others. But when I stepped back onto the sidewalk I felt light aware and in some reciprocal way communicative, enmeshed in society with an infrastructural joy.
     
    the 25th – Memories of Murder (2003)
    The denouement and ending are perfectly sharp. If fictions but wield the means of their production this a perfect film, presenting cops as deluded directors, dirty cameras, and eager audience to their own lies. The only good they can do is stop watching.
     
    the 24th – Tampopo (1985)
    I like movies to be many in one/at once and Tampopo jumps genres by scene. The throughline that caught my eye was relation to westernization, in genre trappings, clothing, interiors, etiquette, class. Diegetically and referentially western sources are positioned as authorities and as raw materials. Perhaps such commodious fetishism is authority's best end. And the film is a magnet for puns: I was gobstruck by my couchmate's "a spaghetti western with ramen", turnabout on my "bildungsramen" six years ago.
     
    the 18th – Porco Rosso (1992)
    Struck this time by the shadows of the cels, like the shadows of clouds on water. I found myself caught by porco and the hemingway seaplane fantasy less, the larger islands, the pirates, the radios, the women's work more.
     
    the -2nd – The Boy and the Heron (2023)
    I'd never seen Ghibli in a theater so I lost myself in background paintings following brushstrokes. It's a good one for staring at the scenery: beautiful patterns, playful colors, interlinked symbols. I can't speak much to the foreground; not much plot (not a bad thing), few I wanted to say more (the wheel-robed duo, the puckish heron), only a light message: The master sets aside his tools (of platonic modernism, of destructive underworld-bridging called creation); our boy doesn't want to take them up; perhaps this is for the best. Such directorial insert sits more easily here than in The Wind Rises.

    the -3rd – Poor Things (2023)
    A beautiful but cowardly movie, afraid of its source's layers, afraid of philosophical depths, afraid of its own lustful gaze, and so staying safely at the philantrophic-liberal surface, ending on the thought we should hire more women Frankensteins. Lovely though, especially the title card typography, and fun to see such pantomime characters – more of that please!
    #502
    January 31, 2024
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    to wake perchance

    o the joys
    of not quite put-together –
    crumbling at the seems, frankly
    til friendship brings
    the whole incompleteness
    of a bulb, its buried sugars
    in tubrous wintry stew
    we root as rain falls
    and brush this papery carapace
    with careful tips
    of long new leaves who reach
    for spring. none yet know
    what manner petals will
    overlap and furling open
    for o to be perennial
    to dormant and renew
    is to live delight
    even in a wintry garden
    #501
    December 10, 2023
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    02023.11.30

    writing just after waking, after false dreams of sweet reunion, of goatliving and elkraising, much better than those carnivorous dogs, waking to find company gathered outside my bunk dressed and on their way, a shock of lateness faded to self-reassurance that I can get myself to the statehouse (that I can become statehosier?). some turmoil last night and perhaps this is where I try lying to myself but laying down in warm just letting the words ooze out I'm more curious if fingerprints are just not that special, another edifice of identity a lie as suggested last night by who turned out to be the day's second theatrical manager of public defenders, forcing reflection on the nature of theater and the cultural impact of kid's plays, on the nature of breaking into; back at the extensive cubbyholed air ball and bucket ranch we picked at oranges and at organizing finding soursweet segments to share, myself alone in the kissing glee of a wake.
    #500
    November 30, 2023
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    hindsight horoscope

    as a climber at the tip
    of a rounded mountain
    finds the lines draw away from safety
    all roads eventually need a machete
    to pursue the gap of joint and bone
    and the tensions between logic
    and craft will break you
    again. you are in danger. give instead:
    yield to the fast and slow
    and do not blame yourself for
    being outside your own control
    we are not here by choice
    which means coercion
    cannot control us either.
    be captured by your own attention
    to joy, not torture
    for chastisement is a gift
    which sticks in the mold
    of its givers' hands.
    surrender to gravity
    as seen in waves and felt
    in orbits; against it make
    common enemy with
    your own haunting. squeezed
    together in your little toe
    you may find the electricity
    necessary to relax.
    #499
    November 23, 2023
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    night writing

    after the style of The National

    the shadow lines across the wall
    make that low hum of time hiding
    in the gaps between attention
    half-drawn in misty fall
    smudged by my own careless hand

    i only dream when in the wake
    of something i want to think
    is greater than myself
    this rubber band around my ankle
    the problem with service is the chain

    so
    give in
    to it
    inspect me with great care,
    check me over ! i
    mesmerized by it,
    showing off in
    every other
    way

    concrete bruised with water
    turns out a hammer
    excellently
    describes the shape it made
    where a poem would falter
    oh, waiting for the day

    to
    give in
    to it
    inspect me with great care,
    check me over ! i
    mesmerized by it,
    showing off in
    every other way
    waiting for the day
    #498
    November 16, 2023
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    three score and ten hallows

    it's an ibix day
    even an ibix decade
    & everything is doubled:
    glossy or dirty
    hots small, large
    the halo fringe of two
    white birds precisely
    in front of each other just
    as fast forward
    as reverse


    for N on her birthday
    #497
    October 31, 2023
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    eighth the ides

    I am swollen, leaden, overfed
    on that old dream of social expertise,
    the humming virtuous leviathan,
    that all this training might yet mean
    in shimmering potential for elegance and
    just-so just-rightness engineering promised
    to be worth again my past obsession;
    I am in other words in danger nosediving
    in wings holed from chatter with
    one of the Chilean constitutional
    convention on the heartbreak of the careless
    plebiscite, the return as ever to patient
    organizing, the bloodied but still beating
    drum of popular power, of Allende
    and Cybersyn,
    and I don't want to pull up.
    #496
    October 15, 2023
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    home is a living

    home is walls partition heat
    from cold, sounds fade to noise
    like a theater entrance, solid self
    limen melts to one more fluid
    intern in its cell
    and home too is who transits
    the carried bit upstairs alarm
    exiting cans roaring cars
    and each reflection they make
    in flight; and home is host
    but barnacles itself on dirt
    parasites a hallway highway
    or other artery, plumbs thirsty
    roots in beating publics, alive only
    in imitation, the mirror
    that frees the model to move
    #495
    October 13, 2023
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    wiretap 1

    more wonderful that can be shared
    a paddle around
    this great blender sinkhole of time
    and as a mussel on a hopping tour
    I know those blades their appetite
    the iron taste of abandon and of longing
    this gift of yearn
    what perishes in its drought
    the soul an itchy thing
    whose tender calves
    imminent in every intimacy
    yet erode to silt
    though I yearn at times for clay
    shines of glaze firming mortar
    forming control but also abandon
    to the world and future
    that all is strange and possible
    that we are here on earth to ramble
    precisely in these turns that I try on
    #494
    September 5, 2023
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    summer emails,

    emails containing summer, summer as an attachment, as worldly, as something you can hold; containable, translatable, made of more than sun and angles and time but also those and golden grass and sedimentary memories of schools' ruptures, of heat skin and cold water, summer where we as plants reach up while summer scatters rainbows like dragonflies and like the river-bathed skin they land to sip, summer as this skipping touch, the nights whose insect calls surround the stars and days that feel unbounded, fence-hopping, pausing but for breath if that, summer phrases to track this bounce of time as it nears the horizon for one last party.

    #493
    August 7, 2023
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    ruby throats and bright perches

    sunshine inside the day inside the way
    the air holds us sunbaked beside
    our dappled potted prose
    slow-grown
    of intermittent soil
    for we builders we planers of wood
    the process yes is torment
    but the writhing form has such
    hips, such spicy petals
    that what can we do but garden
    #492
    July 29, 2023
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    the making of

    but perhaps between our vehicles
    there is a real dualism
    a true in-car nation, windshields modeling
    cartesian theatres for the ghost
    in the meat is a lie but the meat
    in the machine? folie à deux part two,
    more travellers who won't survive
    la tour when their separation
    is ever dissolution, horse but rider
    not one nor two; writer but written
    speech but speaker have more claim
    to independence
    but spring clear only on forging
    muck in fury to a deed but hence a doer
    but a thinker but a thought
    so the problem again is how to stop
    at two? or form one when every boundary
    pores over infinite intersection,
    any arithmetic of an empty zoo
    assuming collection or absence
    rise above the fray,
    but where is the point
    of things imprisoning other things?
    and all this just to say
    if not contain a morning
    and exaggerate the melancholy of agency
    as I procrastinate going to the gym,
    driving, so forth.

    #491
    July 22, 2023
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    to a July pomegranate

    you ever feel your petals thicken
    and contract, as when a sea-strolling
    octopus idly jets with closing arms?
    that is, when wrinkled tips flare and fruit
    first realizes closure, full of not-yet
    but empty of nectar opaque flesh new
    as legs to a lamb in amniotic shivers
    when letting go shimmers
    on the summer horizon
    and each day shortens the work
    holding and extending sugars
    genitals aspiring to the navel
    of that bombshell whose six sparks
    seduced Spring, when skin weathers
    and breathing ever heavies?

    no, just me?
    #490
    July 13, 2023
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    twentyeight

    how beautiful
    how rare it is
    to be perfect, the whole of one's
    fractions! A harmonious pause, a book balanced on twenty before, five hundred to come.
    #489
    May 30, 2023
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    before the eclipse iii

    walking we collect the sights
    of trees strung lights and other stems
    plucking the smells of a rose
    the sunset disked by coming fog
    to tie these in a string of night
    and make of them bouquets
    star lit
    by the winking hill
    by the moon’s soon intersection
    with bright Venus
    #488
    May 25, 2023
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    if we are just slugs spiralling in moonlight in pursuit of flight.

    I find myself curious to make a joyous conspiracy with the reader, after the form of gnostic or anarchist writings and perhaps of organizing conversations. Such a second person collective, implied or explicit in psychic connection, takes all else as our defining them, then reaches through this mirror to see the world ape our dialogue. A lie, of course: looking down it’s clear I stand in individualism but once removed, and in such riverine sentences will accomplish nothing but cold feet. What is is too real and vast, our ideas but a leaky sieve it slinks through. Feel the silt it has left on our tongues, the dusty clouds our eyes stir pushing through this paragraph! We need purchase in the flow for leverage about these surface words, this fulcrum of our shared delusion. If long levers need a distant place to stand, then we find ourselves in paradox rather than a lie. And so in hope let us wrap ourselves, in loose yards of belief, to follow the real outside our brief connection. As we dive to gain that distance, as we break the silvered surface, I wonder: what does it mean to work upon your breath? If there is never a return, always an and then;
    #487
    May 14, 2023
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    sunshine in an orange wine

    joy is hard
    or simple either
    or both like the blooming of a rose
    and the hips it leaves behind
    we each of us think so much
    and yet the world moves on
    how could we rest from the passage of time?
    and yet joy is easy
    or difficult or neither
    like finding beautiful words you hadn't thought
    still in the air in your voice
    and so joy is shared
    like food like encouragement to sing
    in the luck of difference
    and the abundance of harvest
    #486
    May 8, 2023
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    the anti-disco ball holds a counter-revolution

    i.
    it's said we weave a web, or
    that writing seduces my friends
    by its perfectibility; we work
    to sharpen this fang against
    the stone, to fashion escapism
    into escape, time-loop stories
    a clean read of our era, windows
    we climb to from hopes of air,
    us foolish readers of others en-
    dangered by our limitless desire
    for a future outside the mirror-hall
    we're told bounds subjectivity.
    
    
    ii.
    one plinth in this bazaar of gall-
    erists attracts a crowd: it holds
    a Platonic solid, ideal form from
    another age -- but this one's eve-
    ry face reflecting our times with
    a one-way inwards mirror, so that
    under our eyes infinity undulates,
    projecting imperfections until we
    see fractals twisting out of each
    telescopic octagonal navel, anxie-
    ty as inward beauty with such art
    we might imagine it art's purpose.
    
    (google employees got free tickets
     to this event, where pieces with
     listed prices were $1-10,000; when
     last at fort mason I sat quite near
     this octahedron's spot, lost myself
     in the dances faces and regalia of a
     Two-Spirit pow-wow and left
     beaming and bashful reflecting
     so much outward beauty)
    
    
    iii.
    we cannot see the future and yet
    must catch it. so weave! to this
    end. we chew our selves with analysis
    too much to be a tarantula and not
    fall prey to paralysis, so weave! together
    and strongly: we'll need a tangled web
    to find an order better
    than those we're shown; so help us weave
    a world better than those we've ever known.
    
    #485
    April 25, 2023
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    commonalities

    Speak, O muse, of having something in common,
    of shared traits, as if our patched selves saw
    an identical limb or color on each other;
    but then pull back to look at words directly
    for to hold in common is to have a commons,
    an unowned land not yours nor mine
    that yields to both;
    to share a trait we must exchange it,
    and identical limbs overlap because
    they have the same identity,
    questioning again identity's relation
    to the individual; in every depth we find
    a breadth that in secret commons we take
    to fill our lung, & in each kiss a sharing
    in lips that reaches to confuse ownerships
    of pleasure.
    #484
    April 14, 2023
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    augury

    I'm walking home from the post office
    when a dove leaps from a highrise roof
    how a man might: head between
    raised still arms it falls belly-
    first towards the street;
    my heart 
    is in
    my throat
    too long
    before
    it decides to use them
    as wings & rise again
    into bright morning sun
    #483
    March 1, 2023
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    tempest in a teacup

    yesteryear I broke a teacup
    then another the better
    to repair the first
    which fell, the second
    hammer-struck. later in my
    dispresence slipped two
    bowls who have now waited
    long months for me
    to mix again epoxy
    into an existence more heated and
    temporal than its two components.
    bound too by repair and destruction
    are my relationships with time,
    or by disposal, which absents both
    in waste. disposal like waterfalls
    is better visited than
    inhabited, lest one cease
    to hear for it lacks the attention
    of destruction or repair both
    of which I see a yearning for,
    a striving alternating
    or synthesized in salvage
    and ferment, who triage
    and create from a centrifugal
    stubbornness; repair and destruction
    combine much better than
    despair and restructuring,
    which together make but
    acclimation.
    #482
    January 5, 2023
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    ripples on the surface of a calendar

    it's a beautiful rainy new years here in oakland
    drips
    on asphalt
    and the garden outside my window
    plants reaching to the rain
    as my ears do to its sound
    they in their flower beds
    me in mine
    #481
    December 31, 2022
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    evening camraderie

    the joy the lift
    of fellow-feeling of spontaneous
    recognition in people new /
    familiar of company –
    let it spring from trellises
    of hope and woven gossip / mere strands
    supporting our lives – throw not out
    the web with its tangles

    #480
    December 31, 2022
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    a poetry of weights in equilibria

    a polyvinyl headache
    contra the float and indicate
    oaths that state of scoring under standing
    and the cracks it leaves
    in so much transportation
    in getting it all out there
    in reply to pasts what goes on cards we sign
    of winter off aging raising
    discomforts' floor and lowering its ceiling
    are calls to douse and eat

    #479
    December 25, 2022
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