a distant reflection May 5, 2018

these echoes return
lion cubs raised and released
a cheese, brought up from the cellar
a weed skipped, which becomes a sapling, and then
the hand of the Giant, who placed us here
. suspended in the void ()

light.

i wish to collect every jewel that i find of the world
faceted gems rolling across my fingers
falling through the holes in my pockets
down my legs like drops of urine
staining my path like
light through the jali

i have built a camera that takes sand for film
the shutter, a strike from the sky
and in the red bathed stink, i pan up diamonds
on my palms, glistening red and black
their thousand faces encoding a thousand angles
revealed in rainbow when shone upon
by the sun

there is a world layered onto the common one
where the walls are alive, splattered with collective unconscious
visible only to the clued
a maze of treasure with value only to us
beyond morality and belief, a dimension which stretches in every direction
with beauty and truth

ice.

it is curious to look in a mirror
and see the room frozen at an arbitrary point in the past
even as i move side to side
the perspective the only detectable change

the eerie feeling that you are not alone
lights, human forms without faces
cold metal instruments, levitation
an echo of a hospital birth

and out the window the roads
laid out over this night like frozen blue rivers
veins in the hills, the backs of hairy hands

above the sky, the planets don't twinkle
somewhere out there a man died on a world so foreign
we don't have a name for it
but someday we will retrieve his body
decorate and bury him in the earth

fire.

have i been sleeping?

even when we are alive, we only exist to each other as ideas
why would it be different when we die?

how did i forget what sponges we are
how we suck up stories and our souls are so untainted by reality

is it too late?
it is never too late

when i let go of the kite string, it stung
as it raced across the skin of my palm
but soon standing on the shore
looking out over the ocean of scrawled journals and many legged clocks
standing in my sandcastle i started to wonder
if i kept the kite there
or if it kept me
(the sort of question which is immediately an answer)

i feel my brow warming, a weakness in the arms
a tremble

don't lay your eggs out in the sun,
they will warm on their own, with time, and sprout
i don't know how it works
but i believe in it, because i have seen it happen many times

there is a place you can get to
(an adjustment, the kind you make to a car or a bicycle)
simply by going there

earth.

we are the stories we tell ourselves
mirrors reflecting endless echoes of long dead choices
made by gods who did not know what they were doing, either

we are dancing and we cannot stop
a fever is in our blood that cannot be cut away,
not with the sharp edges of the new black god monolith
edges we do not yet see, on the floor in the darkened hallway
in the early hours of the morning when we wake to
exorcise our daily calories

a hunger is in our blood, that clouds our minds and our eyes
until we become vampire, the antiphoenix, consumers and stagnation

please bite my shoulder unexpectedly, to remind me of that lost moment
and understand the sadness in my eyes—how can you convey this?
how can one ask for these things, and not be wrong
how can happiness exist in such opposition?

there are so many corners here,
always coroners hear(se(e)) with infinite new combinations hidden just there
it is never a good day to die, for every story on the news,
there is a man who just died without having heard it
there are years that so many have not experienced, and yet we get to and remain unsatisfied
you ingrate

we have fed our souls to dogs and forgotten how to experience directness
we pretend like it never happened, and pretend that is enough to repair the damage to the warp engine
but in a few lightyears, the ship will break down just outside gamma leonis, and who will hack the consoles when we are all in cryosleep?
we are afraid of each other. we are afraid of the ship.

i listen to sad music when i am sad
and it helps because the sadness is no longer my own

you are gone and yet you linger in my dreams
walking ahead of me in the snow
sometimes in the other room, just having left, sometimes
standing right next to me, touching my neck
my least favorite kind of ghost and yet i

rain.

what am i supposed to do in this world of narrow pipes
and i with my tiny voice, too slow to keep up
i duck and weave, peering down alleys, sitting by fire hydrants
watching, waiting, a gatherer of lost stones
occasionally spilling out a still life of linework dandelions in black and white
or a stack of books carved in the shape of the die of an intel core 2 quad q6600
i am a processing unit created for a purpose which no longer seems immediate
into a world of protected areas, sloppy with glue
drying out behind the labels

someone once said, it's always raining here
something less than epic, a prince of cats tripping over you
in 14 nights, they said
they said yes, it rained last thursday

now, now every children, you might only raise one fist
to the sky in imitation of the mirror thief
but what is gone is already gone—
the mirror shows what remains

water.

an accident, spinal fluid leaking all on the wood floor
in the corner twitching and heaving
she begins to dissolve into purple gelatin
struggling in the growing puddle, the image of a cat travelling up my arm
the world growing blue and purple, the puddle twisting
with phosphorescent lines, voices muffled and distant
i am so ███████, like her
beams emerge from my fingers, fields of energy from my palms
the color of the wood is returning to normal
the tiger head floats toward the door
at the threshold collapsing into an emaciated body
i put my hand on her, tears in my voice
she is a tiny crouching face of feline anger amid a pile of skin and bones

i have to tell you, something i had forgotten
i've lived a billion years
i lived the life of a dog, i don't remember when
i was—i am a shadow
i know how you feel

air.

everyone sees something different when they look in the mirror

unrequited really doesn't begin to describe it,
does it?

‌

a distant reflection

links to:
- a lie i needed to believe
- cold star
- make a wish
- self-portrait in a spoon
- we all float down here
- weaving spiders come not here

linked from:
- a direct teaching
- like coming up for air
- long ago
- mirror on the mountain

all writing, chronological
next: what happens now
previous: Decaversary Interview