Waxing blankly,
to soothe and mollify,
her hand (nails polished electric blue)
gagged my mouth (O-shaped in ache)
with a hint of phrase,
rouge to the touch,
and blatantly sheer in its
umentionables.
Waxing blankly,
to soothe and mollify,
her hand (nails polished electric blue)
gagged my mouth (O-shaped in ache)
with a hint of phrase,
rouge to the touch,
and blatantly sheer in its
umentionables.
There’s something
blankly paranthetical
about the ghosts of memory
which become us
in breaths taken
to host
and devour.
In this season of longing,
the pluralized itch
and wraith
of you and I,
coursing parallel tracks
to cross imaginary lines
where distance mounts
the spreading horizon.
Everything always going on. People worry about everything not going on but what they’re really saying beneath the waves what they’re subliminally saying and worrying about is them not going on. Everything going on and them not. How to reconcile I not continuing I said and gone. If it feels like the world is ending it is because you are ending. Individual endings magnified to worlds ending. Autumn is a sonata. A soft lisping grave for lost hours. Fall falling is the sense you have when mortality grow magnificently yellow inside you a wistful flare and you ending becomes all ending everything ending. Every generation spells doom differently yet the same. One of the older meanings of apocalypse was revelation. We waiting to be revealed to ourselves as apocalypses unto ourselves. In the dust of lost blue hours we grow silent. As if practicing to be dead. Then we talk and come back to life and the cycle renews with us wondering about everything always going on and everything ending and what is there to do except cherish and bless.
Youth passes in fleeting doses, and doesn’t die a single death, youth as concept and cheat code disassembles into ghosts, into many ghosts which proliferate and spread, in pursuit of seances and possession. Youth, in its death, moves in many directions at once, it becomes a horde of hungry wanderers, a cadre of bottomless-feeding ghosts, youth, in its dying, screams for mirrors of any and all kinds to substantiate unverified crises, to metamorphosize them.
Memories keep us in a state of cinematic dismemberment. Spliced ribbons of footage everywhere. Identity diced and chopped. Fractures and fragments become us in motivating assembly. We are always puzzling together aspects of our lives in dimly lit corridors, in recessed chambers. Chambers fated as operating theaters for our repurposing. We want, we desperately want angels to paralyze our origins, to wrap and mummify us in white muslin, and burn through our posture and assembly, our falsehoods, with celestial laser rays that leave us in hallowed scraps.
Memory as a course charted, as grooves cut into void through perennial retreading.
Have I been here before can be replaced by have I been here again?
It is part of the tease and conundrum of endless.
Ask yourself—have I been here again? how many times? was I the same person? in Memory’s wardrobe of existential drag, what did I wear and who did I become?
To be lost is to be found wanting. Some choose lost as an outlet, or alternate grieving process. Some choose lost as a sense of subterfuge and misdirection. Some choose lost so as to give their wanderer relevant use for compass and moonlight. Some have loss thrust upon them.
The footprints you are following in the void may be your own.
It was fun having an in-depth conversation on craft, creative process, and the writing life in For Page and Screen’s Summer Interview Series.
New vinyl has officially dropped.
The back story goes like this: Musician, Ben Wright, and I, played together for many years, at many venues and gigs, performing our eclectic bop and groove fusion of spoken word and bass (occasionally accompanied by drums, flutes, guitar, and other instruments, depending on the iteration that manifested for specific performances). Ben and I developed a fun and fluid creative bond in our collaboration, and about twelve years ago we decided to record an album’s worth of material in his studio, which never saw the listening light of day. Enter Christopher Shoust, and Lost Telegram Press, who wanted to branch out and release the press’s first vinyl album. Lost Telegram became the catalyst in helping to bring Morphic Trespass out into the world.
The album features sixteen tracks, ranging in style and tone from apocalyptic bop to vision-grooved vaudeville to street lyrical to psycho-erotic swing. It is spiritual and psychic kin to the likes of Dylan Thomas, Patti Smith, Lord Buckley, Jack Kerouac, Lenny Bruce, and others. The album also features the grittily poetic and urban flavored street photography of my Brooklyn brother, Anthony Distefano.
Vincyl can be purchased at Elastic Stage: https://elasticstage.com/lost-teleram-press/releases/morphic-trespass-album
