An Attempt to Free This American Soul from Materialism
He’s a fugitive walking through the neighborhood. Trapped in the town he’s running from. Choruses of frothing loam biting at his ankles.
On those silent nights clouds pass by mob-like and at sunset they are pitchforks and torches. But at night, under moonlight; a weighted down hatchback packed to the brim.
Anticipating the getaway is all he has left. Every secret scratched and peeled by the wind, like the one that goes; maybe the dogs love is the only love I ever knew. Poof. Through the trees.
Don’t run my love
don’t run from
that quietude, embrace
this silence — without
it our voices could
not carry, let it be
the canvas on which
we paint our lives.
Take this cell for example. Its birth is violence, its product; beauty. Can you keep it. Can you hold the bursting. Hold it like the flame. Hold it, it’s yours.
We passed each other in the hallway, nodded and smiled. He went into his apartment and closed the door, then said: Alexa, set a timer for thirty minutes. And she said Okay . . . Convenience will be the death of you. Master.
And I thought, what if we are erasing ourselves with technology?
Casting Nets of Convenience
Scrubbing this diseased
skin flaking
into ash and sand
piling
like salt mounds taller
than the great mountains and
stretching from horizon to horizon
this is how we reach
such great heights and far distances.
How we communicate with the dead,
or loved ones across whole oceans.
scrubbing to get clean
erasing ourselves is a process.
Start it all over again.
Climb further. Thickness is
numbers, piling.
Numb to the bone. Scrub the bone
hide behind the phone.
Those people on the screen? those aren’t people,
they’re CGI and they have rights too;
sons and daughters of a corporation. Now’s
the time to explode. We are piling high
laying in beds feeding the sloth within
while casting ourselves into the net
lying in beds
so that we can be everywhere
but here
this fiction is growing
this future we’re sowing
evolving
into that which we
can’t recognize
our brains are spilling
liquefied and
pulled out from under
us like the table cloth
Stomach on the floor. Evolving
into something we can’t classify.
there’s no winning, we’ve already won.
Numb. We don’t have any friends anymore.
Numbers. Numbers, lying on the bed
a pile of numbers. We don’t have friends
we have numbers. Numb.
We are numb to the bone.
Stupid commercials!
I saw her again, this time standing on the sidewalk, no bags, or cart or anything to own. I recognized her face, though she is only a stranger. Everything else had been washed out, empty of any other kind of existence. I wanted to run up to her, grab her by the hand and to tell her the good news; your face, it’s still recognizable! But she would’ve thought me crazy. So I kept walking, with all four dollars in my wallet.
the thing I love about futballers is that they’ll keep running at and trying to beat an opponent, they rarely give up.
It’s amazing how quickly and easily their joy becomes your joy, your joy becomes my joy.
Seeking
a new seed to
cultivate
winds cracking
husk / splitting
shelled reaped
store-front window
proclamations
throwing daggers
your eyes—
another type
of seed
weeping
harvested or
transplanted your
heart aches
to be known
children of
ire lost
generations
sow gmo
stitch
dna strand
to make man
whole again
We had a family art night where we tried out an acrylic pour technique and these are the results.
How was it that your skin and my skin got wrapped up in these melodies. Vibrations. Incantations and memories. I can feel you now, closer. Can you feel me too? We look to the sky as if it holds our meaning. You are like a ladybug living in the creases of a door jamb, who may not ever know the full breadth of the sky. Still we wonder why. With your look and my hook we fall back into each others skin, drifting, to our own rhythms. Still, the way forward is back and we’re always trapped, trapped, trapt. Still. Your eyes and my lies are like oceans of sky and we are creators of clouds and rain and mountains of waves. Leave. Don’t leave me. Bleed. Don’t need me. I do not get lonely, I am lonliness. I hold you in my caress and it’s always me me me. Leave, but don’t leave me.
And your body is the harp of your soul,
And it is yours to bring forth sweet music from it or confused sounds.
And the wind and pine combine to whistle a melody, but what of that melody if there were no ear to hear ?
and what is the mind, but the engineer of the body’s will
The above quote: Khalil Gibran from The Prophet pg. 81
