rain turns outside in;
the roof walls windows
tap their presence
in rippling spread
across one's sense of boundary,
across one's skull. the solitude
of rain slips from
this revelation of an other;
rain's sleepiness rings in
its thousands of alarms,
and isn't this just how it is:
we burn to melt ourselves on time,
only to find time dripping down our backs.

at the beach I combed for metaphor
but found only sensation, like the lone line
of seagulls flying so precisely so close
to the crests of the largest waves,
their compatriots sighing bored
beside me, while low clouds revealed the sun
by dimming it to a bounded circle;
stymied I prompted simile,

but when writing is like cooking,
for oneself or (anxiously) others,
it is unforgiving of rationalization, kind
only to the honest laze;

and though writing is like a muscle
when we lift our words so we may grow,
so too may it plateau, require unlearning
and humility;

thus it became clear I could lean
on no analogy to speak for me
the joyful worry of attraction
in a time of careful distance,
the savor of each drip of context
against the backdrop of kitchens, the hope
of a thing unquantified finding form
amidst virii vain with numbers; oh!
the thrill of uncertainty
in these overdetermined times;

and pondering this I drove home, barely
noticing a spiralled cloud looking just
like a rocket's first-stage exhaust
before it turns
to find orbit.

as I ate I saw
a cool breeze tease a strung hammock
til it pulled one edge over the other
as if drowsily attempting
to stay warm. I was struck
by this autonomic act: did you know
that trout swim into upstream
rocks, in clever fluid resonance, when
they are dead and not a body any longer?
rotting, they hit the rock and flop astray,
to rally downstream and charge again.
and maybe this is all we can hope for
from our artifice: something as alive
as a dead thing.

there! standing on that corner,
wrinkles lined with sun,
is that the second-story porch
and duct-taped lawn chairs of
old routine? spoor of character;
we think shelters hide us
but skin too is shelter, and clothes,
so we (if lucky) make our house
only as our house makes us,
weaves our tangled webs in its spans,
constricts our vulnerability
like a crab's hermit shell.
to sleep is to pull surroundings
about oneself, perchance to dream;
to dream of home but be arrested
from realizing it, from arranging
its entropy, is every time a tragedy.
and so from across the street
we imagine inhabitance, drawing
the detritus of gardening, the
variability of maintenance, the
accumulations of care
into a skein of story.

y entonces los caracoles
lamen vagan entintan
senderos centelleantes
a través de los anillos
crecimiento
galaxian en espiral
para ser encontrado
por el papel

animals we sit

joy like touch
is far now
I am used to dreaming

in this tub I am thinking

I don't know anyone

and read, we walked

light rain kissing screens

we chatter and read aloud

pollens joining breeze

quarantine is a dissociation
and so what maddens is reality
bursting through itself, rising
from the sea, axiomatic inertias
of what promised to always be
revealed liquid, sloughing through new
ruins, through our cold bones.

importance alit anew in grocers and
teamsters, showed all the nobility of nurses
and the wretchedness of authority.

it became clear that it had always been
    just people,
that food and toilet paper could not be taken
    for granted
that neither evictions nor emissions
    were inevitable.

in a land wealthy with scarcity, nothing was assured
as of its shipwreck we built fear, and hope
in the bitter salt air before a storm.

This sensation of sweat, of too many legs. A ghost dews your lungs.

[ a bit tongue-in-cheek and quite mad. looks better on its site, if you've got a wide screen ]

as with poetry the rhythm
of a body is found only
in its reading, halting iambics
smooth / scratched as guesses
to pronunciation in ribbed
gaps, enunciations of silence
when teeth mark a cradled
neck the breadth of an arch,
an inhaled back, an open
fermata reverberates,
invertebrates listenings
with the kiss of stanza

As the feminist struggle
used to remind, the personal
is political.

She'd shaved her head,
as if for frictionless escape.

America is perhaps
the first psychopath
nation: It does not act as if
it has considered
that other countries
have interior lives.

to cleave past from dream
when lunar fevers never
did body poetry or hold
in limbed strangeness so
as last evening’s round and
bubbled words who posed
in tender flames risked breath
and rose

i have always wanted a personality
like an unsettable clock
so i could know where
to put my hands
when dancing.

but maybe the self
is defined by who you disinvite
spitting out
what you almost swallowed.

or in those you don't
invite in those you breath
instead of swallowing.

for long had i swallowed anger
like swallowing air
instead of breathing it.

and it came back up as discovery
like a bag of rice burst
in your pack as you walked; the first,
foolish thought: how to stuff
it all back in. you blame
the plastic bag, the grains,
the clothes and books and
other surfaces now smuggling them,
yourself,
so that you don't have to move
from that first thought,
so that you don't have to acknowledge
a mess which is only a catastrophe
of timing.

but if grains will not
collect themselves a mess of self
must. or at least must trust
in collection
for things may happen
to no reason but reason happens
to all things or at least
rationalization does
and what is self
but the ticks
in a tale
of necessity.
don't worry: it could not
have been otherwise
because otherwise
it would not have become
you.

and so the metronome tocks
and we call growth what we cannot stop
and set ourselves in time
like concrete. but O my hands
always wave and flutter
to others'
to hold and know
the time. to catch tempo
in another's
breath
and swallow
is to know self as a lie
we must all learn
to be true.

like sustainability, like kindness,
is mostly a yearning; language's whole purpose
is to describe how it cannot hold
the world and we, taking
our finely cut prisms of mind
on these walks, these crystals we've polished
so long and sharp, can only play
with the colors shone at us, can only
light others by our facets
with shine so opposite shadow
it is the same, liquid projections hungry
for any truths mythic, meaning gone,
and igneous.

m john harrison is a british writer whose ideas of writing and of realism are bleak in a way that always surprises me with how practical it seems for a practice of hope. his novels can be a bit much, but his blog is stunning. listen here to me reading aloud his most recent post, Politics after the disaster.

precisely beyond understanding
technology's design as the
carriers and seeds of individualism
as various crises
spiraled upwards [deeper, or higher?]
finding a way in
a crash course
to death, collapse, regeneration
collective shadows
and family constellations
a box labeled new metaphors
containing
"midwifery"

when did a pattern of living become a life,
an indolence, an indulgence in the impossibility of action,
a relation to production, produced, compressed, now missed,
as if misses were wishes, instead of being,
like time, a thing which can only be opened up, and not revealed,
this feeling, of being, unbound and overgrown, cracks in
the whitewash, the whiteness, the whitespace,
knots of the soul's sensus, making given all the time, and space,
and care, needed, to learn repression, sterility, utility,
cosmity, panaceity, university, ductility, progress
shaming the kudzu and the cherry blossom both
while pretending its nemesis is the rootless
but life roots, rudely, reproduces, loots,
and words are always first themselves as they slip
from tongue to tongue like butterflies. to live, then,
is a matter of forgetting to time, and death a time
of forgetting to matter.

for
    your
        poetry of life;
            you
                by
                    your
                        being share the beauty of the world,
                            its quiets, and its possibilities with those around
                                you
    how
        you
            bring attention and appreciation to the world!
                you
                    are such a warmth, an insight, an encouragement, an inspiration:
    your
        curiosity and
            your
                care; through how
                    you
                        live
                            you
                                make intent and a life of the mind seem possible
    your
        bold rigorous and laughing appreciation of ideas!
            you
                inspire me to do things the right way, someday
    your
        awe of both the world as it is, and of how it and its ideas might be
    your
        boisterous discernment,
            your
                caring humor
    your
        passion for the world & what it could be
    your
        rumbles and
            your
                flashes 🌩️,
                sunshine 🌅 and
                    your whispers 🌬️
    your
        slow and fast attentions,
            which make the world more beautiful in its being seen
    your
        curiosity, careful and sharp, the slow sugars of
            your
                enthusiastic roasts,
                    your
                        flights of fancy;
                            you
                                inspire me towards thought and recklessness both
    your
        heartfulness,
            your
                thoughtfulness,
                    your
                        striving to make the world more beautiful
    your
        earnesty,
            your
                willingness to go thin-skinned and find out what
                    you'll
                        make of
                            yourself,
                                the jazz
                                    you
                                        make of life
    your
        eye,
            your
                laugh, the way
                    you
                        learn and the way
                            you
                                apply yourself to the world
    your
        fierceness and
            your
                care;
                    you
                        are a center of craft and of hope
    your
        playfulness with knowledge,
            your
                dissatisfaction with easy answers
    your perceptiveness,
            fierce warmth,
            sly questions
    your bright smile and making hard decisions look easy
    your listening and
        your
            wink,
                your
                    systems and their mischief
    your craft and
        your
            improvisations,
                your

being is ever

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