Souring on victory

 Everything is everywhere an email a koan a fingernail an iPhone the future a pube some piles or puddles no money great clothes no sleep good drugs some fish and eggs bad world good time new love some dance a plan rough draft strong feet loud songs long hair far off no mom no dad so scared or glad not sure and broke but you in time and art and light so hope for us close now or when we touch you me you all night to day a love is thus and so for words to go push fast and slow but time is light we know a bit of this

of this

of this 

of this

of this 

of this

Poem for Polly Jean

A slant for a song, a four-sided sound
A very strange woman, a real-life siren
A desolation as big as the sun, a loneliness for a building.
Replete like wet earth
Saturated for better with worse.
Her world. 

Limning Dance : Experiment I

Laying on the floor the body of a world 
Like a used placenta disposable in the moment of its use
Slightly distended you lay
You you you unconcerned with movement
Movement finds toes and outside of hands
The space outside of limbs moves and suddenly the world moves 
Forces very far stir me until my head tips back and I begin traveling toward you
An entire world travels through me as I travel toward you
Splitting atoms burn the edges 
Wrought for you
Wrought of you
My heels move my pelvis which is my stomach which is my fists which are my face 
You reach the point in time where you must lift your world to your face
I don’t know if I should be writing in the first or second person
You turn and rock into your face
You are a rock star in this light
You tire of your life and fall to the ground in an atonal state of surrender
Green plants are scraped by wintery gusts of wind
Like them you writhe and maneuver until absence becomes merely a line
You rise to all fours traveling contralaterally in an asynchronous, short-lived cadence
Geometrically confused you know you are human yet lizard you feel
You laugh silently as you fall to your knees in a slippery puddle of quantity
Your hand finds quality inside your groin digging to peel yourself open to the lens
Sitting with repose in mind your face becomes a line 
You massage your groin until a circle appears
Your legs become bicycles you stand upon as you find a way to balance on this tipping surface
Buoyancy is everywhere
The earth tips in your favor
Your favor is up and down these days
As if traveling through a revolving door made of jello you escape space
Falling to lower air 
You return to scraping via faraway force
Reaching your left hand to your left ankle 
Holding as if clarity could be permanent
Loss of meaning is epic in your body
Fold your laundry and place it on the floor as you take a shower
You’re pointing toward a slippage that causing our creaking boat to tumble down down down (A futile sailor trying to save the ship)
“We should mutiny more often,” you think. And by mutiny I mean hang out.
But you do dance amid the wreckage in this haunted sunken ship 

Living aquatically is never easy but in such conditions you find out how flexible your back really is
How strong your front can be
How dying you can truly be
How do you die? 



How do you die in this light?
How do you remember how to die?
Repeat
Repeat
Cause yourself to transgress
No progress
No digress
Being dying is never easy but I am not an easygoing person
Dancing dying is strenuous but I am committed to this boat
I am committed to being a ghost
I am committed to you knowing the cause of the wreck
I am the shipwreck and the tragedy you live in 
We reside, descend, or transport
And you just watch
You are the lens 
The only thing I had time to think about saving was my typewriter
It was just down down down
No time
Water everywhere starting at the feet
Typewriter and camera 
Music played 
As we went down 
I knew it would happen
I knew the descent would shape me
To survive I repeat
As if clarity could be permanent
I motorize my memory to reverse the descent
I’m deadening to myself as we decant
The boat that was life is now submerged in a viscosity without names an intelligent artifice
The ocean
And I knew
All along I knew
To lament time’s pigment I hold my back in my hands
As if to remind myself where the past is
Life underwater isn’t all it’s cracked out to be
I sometimes miss the weight of air
I sometimes mess the weight of you
The velocity of a fresh and crunchy salad whirling through my body
These days time is very wavering
Sift and thrift through the space until you find something to point to
It could be your calf or your finger
Or a sun-drenched bench 
Or an upside-down umbrella
Or a small poodle dog escaping your leash
Or a footpath full of epsom salts
Or a yoga teacher you want to fuck
Or a trajectory across a diagonally shaped room
Or a spinning pole surrounded by mirrors and you
Or a heap of infected birds their dead bodies collecting in your hands
Or an entire body of water with a new name traveling through 
Or a cordoned-off region of your house
Or a broken hospital bed 
Or a basin for catching mosquitoes 
Or a wicker basket
Or a corpse in a wicker casket
Or the sand between the fibers
Or the loam gathering in your joints, groaning
Or the death in your body 
Or the dying we create together in a coffee shop
Or a digital place we store ourselves
Or the waste from a botched surgery 
Or a beam of light traveling through subterranean latitudes
Or the deep sea divers’ letters home
Or the twisted bed where you lost track of your face
Or you just want it to end.

Alit

In a darkened vestibule you used your flashlight to find the door handle. I looked out a windowed door at a figure approaching. This wallpapering suits you. And I can see your paintings! You look so beautiful in this light. Their light again. My hands in your canine hair, through all your fights and battles. Everything that happens exists for us to look back on. To become something to look back on, hotly. No mistakes. 

The Particular Feeling

 Lay bare the laying bare of it all
The flattening landscapes of it all
The into my eyes of it all 
The winnowing pages that make up a life of it all
House the moments of it all
This reality being of it all
The me because of you of it all
Our being but nodes embedded in an infinite web of causes and conditions of it all 
The infinite web being this infinite web of it all
The Deborah Hay of it all!
The deleted apps of it all
Unburdened by the veracity of it all
The shards of myself falling to the fake-wood floor of it all 
Growing tired of it all
The endless birthday of it all
The rarity of it all
The predictive text of it all
The finance bros dictating texts on the train of it all
The modern dance of it all
The modern dancers of it all
A world becoming specific of it all
Surely not of it all
When Merce Cunningham said, “There’s nothing abstract about this technique. Because it happens in human beings. As soon as it happens in human bodies, there is nothing abstract about it.” When he said that, I felt that. 

The more you look the more you see

If you told me all about me I probably wouldn’t know what you’re talking about

If you told me everything about me I would have no idea what you’re saying

When I look at my body it means I am a looking body
I am unconcerned with how I look
I am only looking

I am looking at everything that is not me but is not you

I have all the time I need

I am unconcerned with tiring myself out or proving that dance is here

I am very young and very strong

The entire universe is not even something to look at but something looking

I am completely committed to what I am doing even if I do not know what it is

I am purely in time and that is enough for me

I am okay with losing everything because I am looking at losing everything 

I count or become human 

I reach and swerve  and nothing turns me away from myself and my looking

To lose everything you must first be willing to lose everything
Half the fight is all the fight
A total willingness to lose everything
And protect what I have lost
Memory of the past is like a saviour to some 
I am learning to do that thing that I did before
To do the thing I don’t believe in requires so much effort …
To be the thing I am requires an attention pancaked and crystalline like a ballerina’s face 
No disaster in my life there are no disasters in my life
I am looking at the disasters in my life and I do not see them 
I am only looking

Time is a Natural Disaster

 1.

Standing up is very close to falling down. Up is just a certain kind of down.

2. 

So the title comes backward in time. Like video of a melting ice cube played in reverse. A shower made of falling. A self-annihilating character. 

3. 

"There's no fictions in it."

4. 

I'm standing in a hallway

I'm standing in a hallway looking out a windowed door

I'm standing in a hallway looking out a windowed door you're approaching 

I'm standing in a hallway looking out a windowed door you're approaching with a letter

5.

Lay bare the laying bare of it all

The flattening landscapes of it all

The into my eyes of it all

The winnowing pages that make up a life of it all

The modern dance of it all

The modern dancers of it all

6. 

––I just want to swim in the brook.

––You're so wild.

––If that makes me wild, then I just want to swim in the brook and I'm so wild.

7.

There's nothing wrong, there's just this moment. Even your thinking of something wrong is just this moment. This moment is all wrong and just this moment. This moment just this all wrongness and nothing wrongness is just this moment. There is always a house for it as long as you are alive. Thinking of time and you in it and all the alacrity and routs of the day is just this moment. This moment is a house made for using. 

8.

What makes this reality this reality? 

How am I opening my eyes to it every time?

9. 

I am here due to the kindness of so many.

That man who handed me paper towels at the club also handed me my life. This moment.

The fact of that old woman wearing a t-shirt with "God Belongs in My City" is the reason I exist. Everyone else is. 

10.

I think we all just want to feel sometimes like we're doing something we're not supposed to. 

11.

Growing cold you're growing cold

What do I want for my birthday you ask?

I want a world where I can look back at myself like watching video of a melting ice cube, played in reverse. 

12. 

The character I play when everything is not okay. Burgling and shaking and erupting and texting.

13.

I'm not in therapy for this. Repeat until it loses meaning.