Cache Culture

alignment

I am full of emergencies.
-Ann Lauterbach, “Chalk”, from Many Times, But Then

self-portrait afternoon glare light. Oakland, CA (June 2015)

Read this as a horoscope:
you can understand a future
when Pluto enters the scene
but only if orbits retrograde.

The point is to keep your forecast
grey and also very specific.
What makes sense is yours to summon,
to own, and always let go.

Do not hoard misunderstandings.
Saturn will return and ask for their receipts.

A two-headed calf is born alive
just up and over the mountain range.
Rumor persists they continue to live happily.

We are told threats penetrate the softest targets first.
Similar to how human bone char was used to make sugar
for morning tea and aristocracy’s afternoon cakes
or how it’s now too warm for cold snaps,
that necessary step to create the juiciest of peaches.
To ask why starts to sound stupid and theoretical,
a conversation buried by power lines.

Neptune wants you stay curious. It is harder to stay afraid.
We heard gossip that the sun will eventually burn itself out.
What happens in the interim becomes your refuge,
a particular trope of heresy. Look for casual reminders,
those moments unfractured, soft enough to break.

make this useful

Spring means hunting season.

There’s melancholy in wanting renewal.

The speed of our consumption now at sacrifice.

What we will remember depends on optics.
Are you reading from obligation or pleasure?

________ *** ________

One day the trees are barren,
next week our horizon is flush with new lines.

Will you help me memorize this transmigration—
its pools of light and their complimentary shadows?

As chemtrails thread the clouds, our one life continues
finding its way. Birdsong blasting around unpaved curves.

let’s pretend

The future is
a season I can’t imagine.

Ruth Awad, “The Chariot”

These words will form a pattern
taken from memory and borrowed
from belonging and unspoken blessings
whispered just behind your tongue
broken from grief and unanswered prayers.
Some of us will believe and some of us will know
the difference between honest forgiveness
and having eternal debt as talismans. Mirrored poetics
of suffering and ecstasy find a home here.
Take this interpretation with you
when you ask for help, a gesture of emotion.
Let’s pretend time will render joy
and devotion will save us beyond survival,
beyond stimulus and response.

asking for permission

Take me
in. Want me how a sentence wants
an end, how a memory wants to be
spoken. With the urgency of breath
when the bag is finally removed
from the head.

Savannah Brown, “Current events”

What reminders of fate exist?
Will you find them
according to the difference in hours
when the mountain exists
and when it is absent?

admit, openly

“It’s enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”
—Gabriel Garcia Márquez, 100 Years of Solitude

28 Jan 2012.130pm. Oakland, CA. photo by edward atlee

Send me your questions in written form so that I can see your thoughts in advance of my response. I want to see your intuition mapped out fine as the Saharan sand that now drifts inside the borders of France. To reclaim and to consider that our own personal horizons are simply a fated line of slow-moving clouds evolving into spontaneous prayer or recognizing the speaker’s voice is coming from inside you. In this story, we must learn when to interrupt and when to no longer be polite. When the speaker realizes it their turn to show up and be the hero. Beneath the froth and fury, a reflexive style of aversion to perceived risk, we will ride out the drama organized before we were even born. I must admit what I really want is to see the body formed from your words.

tending

“I know what I have given you. I do not know what you have received.”
—Antonio Porchia

I love when Easter Sunday falls on April 1st. The gothic drama
tells on itself as a comedy of betrayal—a necessary sin—
and love—claimed through suffering—a compulsory virtue.

Now imagine the power of conformity in this way, a consistency
and an understanding. Knowledge becomes a place of felt sense.
For some of us, it was this specific fear that kept us alive.

Peddlers of divinity will want to exclude the nonbelievers. To declare
the bounds of tenderness through touch, but every seven seconds
the ocean’s waves reset. A closed circuit continuously reborn.

Pleasure is straddled inside transience. At this rhythmic shoreline,
a future is eternal. More mirror than veil, I watch my reactions.
Instant memories now forgone by conclusion. A state of divergence.

I unravel my hands still held in the shape of prayer. I remember
how the tides, in their permanence, are measured by their separation
and absence—in crescendo and interpretation of return.

what is the occasion

Magnolia flowers push through their felt cocoons.
I play the anticipation game, which fuels my attachment fears.
In my defense, the seduction is honest and hard-earned.
In the time it took to reach this conclusion,
Mt. Hood glowed peach. When does it become wrong?
When it becomes too much?
Restraint feels good too. Different.

Anticipation becomes the preverbal call and response.
The in-between. I can hold hope here, gently and with full intention.
I am looking for something real—an effort unchallenged. Less questions.
More of a slender inquiry like a river narrowing, entrenched.
Spelling out exit wounds as two bodies enjambed.

Taking is a kind of giving,
sometimes. This is a lesson
etched inside of me. It is hard-wired,
a learned behavior. I’m spying on the self
and its tendencies towards destruction.
Choices made at full speed—from spiritual delusion,
rapture and ecstasy.

Science says twilight is that time just before.
That too exists.

what ends up in museums

Life is boring, except for flowers, sunshine, your perfect legs.
A glass of cold water when you are really thirsty.
The way bodies fit together. Fresh and young and sweet.
Coffee in the morning. These are just moments.
I struggle with the in-betweens. I just want to never
stop loving like there is nothing else to do,
because what else is there to do?

—Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems and Song of Despair

The French say l’esprit de l’escalier. It’s always too late. After the fact.
Wait, there might be a spectrum here. Is it enough

that the thought occurred? An attempt was made.
Artifacts of the rich appear most often. A theory of having

to deal with less broken things. Their objects as lives
saved because they are the most stable. Their history

preserved as bowls, jewels, armor, enlightenment, art. Beauty
beholden or owning, depending on your perspective. Your experience

of fragments and feeling safe when it makes sense, to you.
Preserving patterns. Time is dense. Consistency can feel good here.

Until the loop closes we won’t know any better, or differently.

Their affect as lives valued is our gaze, one of attention.
Taken and loved. Theirs is a rapacious enthusiasm.

Felt power in isolation. Your allegory our memories.
Production becoming the means. Their wars our history.

Their knowing is the loudest in quiet rooms.

what you deserve

“I do not force myself, ever…I have regard for the inner voice.”
—Lee Krasner (1977)

Genocide, immolation, massacre, breaking news,
poetic language, one million acres. Plan for the futures
in front of us and don’t look too far back.
There is nothing there. Just begging for mercy,
for immunity, for more than you deserve.

The bus is a warm refuge. Foggy windows blur
still naked trees. I trust their knowledge
on when to show up. A sky threatens collapse
and still a rainbow appears. Like that
kind of majesty. That kind of being in witness.

In sensuous fuzzed-out light,
I was held long enough to be astonished.
All this dedication textures delicate.
Fresh consciousness. In this flex,
my ears are open and eyes quiet.

memory as ___

I was eventually to become one person, gathered up maybe,
during a pause, at a comma.
—Lyn Hejinian, My Life

Mankinholes Methodist Chapel, Todmorden, England, 1975. Martin Parr

When the physical form of a dream becomes a body:
___daffodils announce closure as a thesis
___shawls of fog expand into what was unseen
___memory becomes a choice of endurance or loss
___release blooms into the shape of an open fist
___curious, dull moving light is radical devotion

slow joy

As Robert Frost says, “way leads on to way.”
But every day is a portal to the rest of your life.

—A Conversation with Marilyn Nelson

In this transition
spring feels close
enough to believe
in evolution.

You’ve heard the saying
comparison is the thief of joy?
I know better than to borrow desire
from future seasons.

It feels good to feel
good—in all its slow glory.
Taking it in. Change is beautiful.
From flower to orange.

how life moves

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

—T.S. Elliot, The Hollow Men

clouds break
blue sky

sun-starved
cloudy light

felted buds
stretch out

certainty
arrives

resurrection

The miraculous is everywhere and in everything. Waiting for us to notice it. Waiting for us to appreciate it. Waiting for us to love it.
—Kobi Yamada, Noticing

Dec 2023, Oakland, CA _ photo by edward atlee

We moved a lot growing up.
There was no logic
to the dynamic loops:
only uproot and start again.

I learned how to memorize
places instead of people.
Absorbing landscapes by relearning
the way a sun found a room and
trusting seasons as my calendar
to digest thresholds of familiarity.

And here?
I seek forested paths back home.

prologue

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work. ― Mary Oliver

Richard Kalvar. Woman looking at herself in store window. New York City. 1969.

Winter light hits different here.
Golden hour now has a margin.

Still, I’ve been here,
or a version of it, before.

As the recent past fades into fragile oscillations, I wait for a new bus
on a new street to and from a new job in a new town.

In the deluge of new slants and in between
breaks of fast-moving clouds,
I too embrace the unpredictable.

a tradition of rapture

“Poetry is nobody’s business except the poet’s, and everybody else can fuck off.”

—Philip Larkin

The dictionary tells me rapture is a feeling of intense pleasure or joy, a noun. Born from urgency nineteen years ago today, cache culture has maintained this spirit and intention to feel rapture as translation of the ordinary. Showing up here has been a way to consummate the act of becoming whole.

To be a container, a form to hold myself accountable. To take blank space and create conscious choices in a world ever narrowing under the weight of algorithms and omniscient corporate influence, and to always resist the pressure of insatiable extraction. The time spent here is productive response. Its outcome generated is useless; it is art.

Or, maybe, sometimes, this is simply my best attempt at a graceful release.

What has been left behind is a harbor. Hidden in full view, between each sculpted line and its break, is the discipline of affect. Each post and each poem holds only the briefest glimpses of a life lived. cache culture has been a way to capture the energy of immediacy.

In this kaleidoscopic place, I am irreducible materiality.

yield

There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning,
the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom.
The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

—Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (1977)

A new year begins tomorrow.
Just like that, we must adapt—

devour what remains.
Extract what feels like success.

This annual closure is a practice of trust.
What seems true: the future is in motion

and its relationship to being in witness
demands us whole because this year’s event horizon

finds us waiting at a finish line yielding
a parade of roses and rapacious bombs.

I will remember the good and honest times—
a trick of light, slants of perception.

Let’s release these whispered translations
and bury the vanishing year.

evolve | repeat

We have to look…How else will we know exactly what happened?
Even if nobody else cares, we can tell each other.

—Howard Norman, from “Milk Train”
Kiss in the Hotel Joseph Conrad and Other Stories

can we having one more meaningless conversation? (artist: unknown)

There is more beyond the binary.
How might you prove this?

pace outside the lines, suck all the juice

What is behind your mask of sociability?
Please demonstrate.

there is a space inside the white of your eye
(behind the ephemerality of seeing) that absorbs light
and measures the distance of missed connections:
language, temptation, traces of miracles

Rumor or poetics?

the shape of a poem

Without using a metaphor, tell me a prophecy.

days will pass through me and I will leave this place satisfied

end of the 4th quarter | 2023

I am doing something I learned early to do, I am
paying attention to small beauties,
whatever I have—as if it were our duty
to find things to love, to bind ourselves to this world.

—Sharon Olds, “Little Things”

What lies on the other side of this year?
It’s probably something simple and complex—like love

shaped by the cumulative affects of borrowing grief from the future
then trimmed all the way down to knowing my worth.

This year was carved from modest moments of exchanges eclipsed
by better circumstances when I decided to unlearn

variations of devotion that left me prone to seek forgiveness.
This context remains as measured promises swallowed whole.

Of course I did the math. There are two eves remaining this year.
What I carry forward will hold language large enough to be found.

light refraction

Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.

Mary Oliver, “Mysteries, Yes”

self-portrait, Berkeley, CA (December 2023)

I know how you want the world to be easy.
Properly packaged, categorized into objective value
on fully-stocked shelves. Sold for maximum satisfaction.
On sale, discounted at markdown prices. BUY NOW!
Pay later. Want is relentless and pleasurable.
I keep reading with your gaze. I should stop.

I know you think the world should stay numb.
Look away. Your regrets will filter through as dreams.
I saw you walking across the street the other day.
Your ego never looked up from your screened in time trap.
You missed the morning sky still bright with a crescent moon.
Venus bent its glow in imbued response.

I know you want the world to pretend its innocence.
Atrocity and repentance are cousins like falling stars and comets.
Your body is a commodity too. Our holy stock market rises in aspiration.
Occupy takes on a new perspective when fire-scarred redwoods bloom.
Mothers and their promised sons become museums in times of war
as sparrows line their nests with scraps of grocery lists.

I know you want the world to bend to your will.
You think this because the house will almost always win.
When you hear my name on commercials think kindly of me.
The shape of your smile is what I’ll choose to remember
when the last words of your future self apologizes.
In this redirection, I’ll write a poem that reaches you.

eat the fruit with the peel

It’s that time of year when the light finds you.
Tell me how you discover its presence.

When I am in witness to oranges turning orange.

It’s the time of year when memory chooses you.
Share what remains.

Grief becomes an extravagant home.

It’s that time of year when ascendant darkness requires faith.
Map out your rituals of living.

Listen to the hissy rustle of palm trees;
observe the jade tree bushes thick as thieves
and their starry blossoms popping off pink
during the winter months; absorb the audacity of wanting
to pet the family of gray and white feral cats on Balfour Ave;
and return to a sense of arrival.

close your eyes

It was not a war.
It was people.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, “It is not a game, it was never a game”

from THEY LIVE (1988), director John Carpenter

It was only a month ago. The setting sun, around 6:15pm, illuminated the golden crowns of the majestic oaks below. Now, a few defiant leaves hang loosely in a 5:30pm darkness.

I thought about the phrase “threatening clouds” to explain the immediate energy found in ordinary language. I had been influenced by Kay Ryan’s essay “Derichment” a few days prior to observing how early winter sunsets’ slow movement down Mandana Blvd was all in present tense. Ryan wrote: “There are ways in which pleasures become deeper when they are repeated.” It was the consistency of pattern seeking; a divining rod, of sorts.

Agnès Geoffray, sans titre from Incidental Gestures series (2012)

It wasn’t exactly participatory if you never said no.

A theory: hands tight around throats force a mutual feeling of enlightenment. I saw planets shining bright even in all that light pollution. Somewhere, a cleaved iceberg floats south unaware of its significance to the project of witness. Volume has multiple meanings. So does martyr.

As you told me stories of your life, you let a wasp kiss
your open lips. Held in both fear and in raptured fascination,

I closed my eyes to feel something new.

a poet’s prayer

Undoing what is not real,
I count backwards from 98.
Dawn’s hour absorbs blue darkness.

There were many hotel rooms. It lacked imagination.
A kingsize bed, occasionally a lonely queen,
a series of men beg for their comforts.

An audience never entered this scene.
As curated experience, this is control.
Behind the private shadows, real life

remains hidden outside this repressed habit.
I wake up knowing which ghosts were lies
and create what was never given to me.

Somewhere, an ocean wave breaks in refrain.
As a new sun rises in a sky scrawled with contrails,
I invite time to spread generously.

What goes unsaid becomes the poet’s prayer.

neither revenge nor prayer will save us

It is no surprise
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.

—Jack Gilbert, Horses at Midnight Without a Moon

Romanian supermarket, 1970. From the Budapest Municipal Photography Company archive

There is only one way in
and one way out.
In this urban supermarket—
above the wandering consumers—
a disembodied voice loops autonomous
zero zero zero

Rows and rows of cereal, pills, quick-prep meals,
personal hygiene products to mask odor and wetness,
chips (corn and potato), red meat, postmodern fatigue

Hollow charms bought with no obvious or imminent threat.

Once outside, a November sun draws a light bright—
enough to make us feel shapeless.

Human need spreads contagious.
We, a nation-state of hypoarousal.
Avarice and man slant disaffected.

Congregations of violence gather to worship.

when the line breaks

We believe in the power of gravity: weight is worth.

—Kay Ryan, from her essay “Notes on the Dangers of Notebooks”

personal screen capture from film, DERRIDA

What calls me this morning is dark matter.

It proves its own existence by showing up.

Interred is in the news, again.

Transitive, it needs an object to be understood.

***

In a land of myth, timelessness marks its specifics:

- - There were no people here before us.
  - We made this place useful.
  - Our destiny is unbought.
  - You belong here.

****

This place is measured by its sunlit hours.
Warm colors seem closer to the observer.

Apologies are evidence: absent presence.

*****

The sky is percussive.

Rain falls in delight.

******

There are exactly ten Sundays left this year.

Is this concession, a thing conceded,
or translation of a revengeful confession?

The point is to be inside entropy, a sense of border and calculation.
Not quite religion and the opposite of science, something more
like keeping time and understanding place as landscape, salt, and glare
of light regardless of season. It is the sound just beneath
your most emphasized words that hums a necessary undoing.

*******

Topographically speaking, a saddle is the gap between two peaks.

Offset, understood in this way, is why distance is a hungry ghost.

Kiss the back of my knees like a desperate symptom of anger as luxury,
as a transitive verb and an exercise in yielding when the line breaks.

how we transcend

What is left after the essence has departed?
—Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

John Hyde Phillips. Bobbing For Apples (detail from Saturday Evening Post cover, 30 October 1943)

Two men speak loudly about numbers as proxy
for success. The loudest lectures on “execution”.

They both agree scope is a form of worship,
which they named “synergy”.

I notice trees are slowly undressing themselves.
Even light sheds, abstract in its positive expectation.

Another war; more rage. Drones and rumor blush bright.
When impulsive is reparative, fear is sacrifice.

Two women discuss leaving an abusive partner.
One quietly asks the other: “Does god exist?”

I almost mistake the lure of absolution as pleasure.

when you are sad, learn something new

Can I say it? I am of a darker nature, one that might ask
a man to do something worth repenting. Say, a whip.

A harness. Say, pleasure any way I want it. I want a body
with another body to say more than words. The light

furrowing of nails on shoulder blades to signify you
and forever and yes. A hand on the breast to signify: I want

you like a pious woman wants God’s middle finger to scrape
the psalm from her tongue. …

—Traci Brimhall, “Self-Deliverance”

It’s possible
I should be worried—
terrified even—
at the number
of lovers I kicked out
of my bed,
rampant job insecurity,
righteous war,
pink snow
as positive feedback loops,
endlessness.

But I’m gonna be like Jesus—
spit out the lukewarm.

dive towards the light

Forgiveness is letting go of all hopes for a better past.
—Lily Tomlin

Imagine a river flowing north towards ancient coniferous forests.
If you are into unbinding desire, you’ll understand the reference.
This immense verdant abundance is a secret hoard of light.
It is a felt experience where light casts both warm and shadow.
The machine logic of algorithmic propaganda will not understand this.
We swallow the discipline of seasonal change and its nostalgia—
the purpose of death unfolding before our eyes with brilliant fascination.
In this portal of harvest and grief, we remember why even the gods rest.
What remains in the graduating darkness is a promise of something better.

if you’re being honest

Like I’ve been waiting for permission.

—Carmen Maria Machado, “Real Women Have Bodies”

BORN FREE, Milwaukie, Oregon (September 2023)

You slip out of your blue-collar monotony and break through
standard-sized button holes. You name your choices:
a sense of time, proper words, or belief in objectivity.

You chose sense of time as focus and as a discipline.
This makes you believe that you can reclaim meaning.
Time feels like a soft demand—venerated submission.

Dedicated, you leave behind a destabilizing body.
This way of being, an inversion, becomes its own conversation
in response to and in relationship with finding expression.

Attending, active, alert: dilated attention.
This explanation means time was devoured.
What a sense of honest ownership that must feel like.

make a wish

The German word for sea is meer and more
is mehr. Residue, residual, knowing difference.

—Madhur Anand, “Satyagraha in Tübingen”

pre-dawn, Point Reyes, CA (December 29, 2016)

Maybe this will clear things up:
even our galaxy is filled with corpses.
Dead stars make for obsolete
maps and unmoored gravity
along with other tricks of perception.
What persists is memory,
which tends to isolate itself.
Essentially, no one is home.

It’s the light, still emitting,
that we diligently remember
and direct our wishes towards.
That feeling of possibility—an appetite.

every Sun is a star, but not every star is a Sun

To find me now will cost you everything.
—Larry Levis, “Whitman”, from Winter Stars

Mouth-to-mouth proximity—
devil’s tongue, a ghost
shimmering in acute silence.

Why is no longer a useful question;
when takes a subversive edge; and
lack is the ripest want I recognize.

Beauty and tender terror converse:
a cadence, a glossary of touch.
Extraordinary truths ask for needs

that do not exist, a posture—
more fist than caress,
like the slow devastation from rising tides.

Memory is now suspicious resource.
Gods form their spiraling prayers
as exile blooms grace:

empty sky, the sea, transitions of solace.
Vacancy resurrects interpretation.
There is light burning inside this loss.

Dear reader, this isn’t about you
or related to the sins of melancholy
caught in the throats of liars

or found in the illusion of waning summer shadows.
This clarity, right now,
is mine.

I recognize this scarcity, and its capacity
to dream inside expansive absence.
This resuscitation familiar. The odds predictable.

Abandonment is a primary outcome
when seasons are fragments born
from intermittent desire.

Please, show me
how your observance of trust
is sacred ritual.

waiting for you

I try to calculate the time it takes to scratch these words. Thoughts fade and flare. Ink across the paper registers a kind of time theft during which I fictionalize an ongoing present, the ever-elusive me, you, here, and there, all existing somehow in a slightly fraudulent now.

—Gretel Ehrlich, Unsolaced: Along the Way to All That Is

An ache, August slides through us. Anger is a desire.
To be over, to feel done. It’s exhausting to be inside this repetition.

But there are people to love as dirty dishes sit waiting in the sink.
You suggested I seek forgiveness—self—and absence—perspective.

I felt ambitious in the suspense and tried to relax my anxious heart.
I waited for the world, for the arc to return to a luminous point.

As reference, I believe love is best when it is enduring—
steady as starlight or accountability and September light.

Notice who is around you; who shows up.
What will be left in this new space is courage.

at the moment of surrender is happiness

Always, all my life, that thing about time passing. All my whole life long.
—Marguerite Duras

I told myself—
things have been worse and
you’ve been poor before or
this is temporary…
then, a familiar urgency
of sharpened clarity:
absence owns desire.

Neglect wrote this edict.

This half-life was born within
circumstances with no horizon.
A hopelessness earned honestly.

You might read this later
and ask who is to blame or
what failure becomes the real lesson and
demand your worth shouldn’t be so dependent.

This attempt at politeness transmutes your, not my, shame.

As polyphonous form—
I source the weather
as oracle’s explication
and trust the heavens
beneath me to mouth
my needs so eager
to release another witness.

This claustrophobia. A weighed salvation.

I heard a galaxy sing
midway through this journey.
Nothing but implicit openings
conflating the darkness
with beauty.

I know you want
the fantasy of rescue:
at the moment of surrender is happiness.

between the lines

“You were deep down as I’ve ever been.
You were inside me like my pulse.”

—Marilyn Hacker, Nearly a Valediction

I watched the empty horizon undulate in the early morning light.
Filtered sunlight glittered inside barrels of breaking waves.
The blue haze expanded. Energy crested the ridges.

It takes so much to get out here, at this outer edge,
where commitment merges with devotion.

The lines swell then inevitably crash, a primal rhythm—
fold inward to return—as the wave finds itself, again;
a prayer, a purpose, a merged whole. A sky wants to be seen.

Estranged claws, feathers, and shells; a whole crab,
transparent jelly blobs, fog burning light as memory.

What permission exists out here—in all this openness?

What forgiveness lives inside consistent change?

What is found between these concurrent lines?

Yielding, a conditioning, and finding oneself prone
[ironic that our lungs find more oxygen in this position].

Timing the sets and their swell periods measures quality.
I ride abandoned. Renunciation follows embrace,
I leave behind what was holding me back.

measuring time

Why do I write? To investigate the mystery of experience. To tolerate myself. To get closer to everything that is outside of me.
—Jhumpa Lahiri, In Other Words

Why do I come here every week?

Is it to confect a process of accountability? Or something closer to sacred ritual? A starting over, again and again. To try. Is it an attempt to document a life stained by survival, and to honor being born from a place where emptiness is its feature—past, present and its imagined future? Maybe and yes, all at once and so much more.

What is found between these invitations of connection?

In the slack—where the tide is neither ebbing nor flowing—where dreams and paying attention to the way light moves across our lives becomes a place of knowing. A way to find the seams of meaning. This longing, more of an urge—an embodied sense—is to feel safe, enough to extend outward. To practice being brave.

SO YOU WANNA BE A BADASS? Berkeley, CA, August 2023

Are we what we do with time, or are we what time does with us?
—Mahmoud Darwish

I come here every week because it feels good. It is a way to make time feel productive, pleasurable, and creative. It is an ethic—an affirmation towards abundance—to transform energy of idea into material of language.

I come here to remind myself that the distance between my integrity and the truth of an always-evolving self is what I must discern. I need the opportunity to practice making confident choices. What I chose to share is mine to own, to forgive, and to hopefully expand the edges of our divergent perceptions.

This is my blueprint, my map, of showing up alive and ready in a world that is on fire.

For 18 years, I have come here open and willing. To feel divine and beloved. To give generously and honestly during this time. To slip into reverie.

daisy chain

NO UMPIRES NO MANAGERS (Oakland, CA, December 2022)

There is courtship, and there is hunger. I suppose
there are grips from which even angels cannot fly.

—Mary Szybist, “In Tennessee I Found a Firefly” from Granted

In tricked-out light, I wait.
Impatient and in longing
for a tipping point—
when I can believe the score
my body has been faithfully keeping
all these years
is enough.

When I am able to touch
that sweet edge of possible—
where I am, in holy fact, good enough.
Where brutal memory,
now committed muscle,
concentrates into rebellion.

I listen for wisdom
just beyond the loudest voices.
I hear only questions
like how does scarcity show up
for those who only know how to take.

When sounds of man and their magnitudes
of scale are casually removed
from equations of their own destruction
only bright, sacred ache
is left in its wake.

Remembering, again,
that I must hold space
for what was once unbroken and good.
For without this ritual of justice,
I risk becoming corrupt—
endlessly looping
into lulled measure and conditioned response.

mean feelings

we’d entered that part of July where the days begin to swallow themselves
—Bryan Washington, Lot: Stories

Technically, my shadow is shorter in the summer. All that light absorbs.

I, as audience, am distracted and bored. I recognize how my obsessive seasonal observations are necessary in this never-ending series of California summers. This persistent consistency starts to feel unrecognizable as ignoring rising heat signatures on concrete. Not unlike how the ultra wealthy call interactions with other humans “touch points”. It’s more like the theory that black holes have been singing for billions of years. The darkness around us is deep vibe.

I can’t afford the apps that sell healing frequencies by the hertz.

Venus is currently retrograde in Leo, which echoes the apparent motion set in late summer of 2015. It was not the first summer you disappeared in dramatic fashion. Yet another resurrection with the burden resting on proof of return. I told no one to act as if it never happened. I was like the California sun—indifferent to the calendar season.

Our collective horrors are not equal. Neither are the songs we sing to self-soothe. Instead, teach me the wonder of your despair without ever touching me. Listen to my empty hands.

ecstasy of crowds

You’d be so pleased to meet people who do not wish to govern you.
—Leonard Cohen, “One of These Days”

swimming, photo from Museum of Things, Berlin (October 2017)

prophets listen
prayers neglect
read psalm
hear song

the sun sets blush
before lilac blue
performs
its last light

annotations

“…I wanted to propose writing as a material manifestation, an embodiment, of desire for reality.”
—Lyn Hejinian

Screenshot from They Live (1988) dir. John Carpenter

Eventually, I could no longer swallow the tension.
Clouds held brightness while leaves fell like stars.

Unmeasurable: the patience of a ripening orange.
By all estimates, I am failing.

The idea of references are spacial.
A Farmer’s Almanac predicts an endless summer.

Strokes of lines turn a phrase.
Waiting in the shadows, salvation.

the smallest habits

We’re in the wilderness now,
confused by the signs,
with a shortness of breath,
and that postmodern feeling of falling behind.

—excerpt from Big Grab by Tony Hoagland

I want the promised inheritance
of cheap summer thrills
found in dogeared roadmaps
offering the seduction of roadside attractions,
ghosts of winter breezes haunting humid nights,
disposable film photos obscured with thumbs,
green tornado skies, retroactive forgiveness.
These are the smallest habits of living expanded
into the fullness of ordinary time.
But what I crave
is a casual pleasure. One that absorbs
the radiance of wholeness
as night fireworks explode
bright inside the thick marine layer.

finding where the choice is

What if I want to go devil instead? Bow
down to the madness that makes me.

—Ada Limón, “Late Summer After a Panic Attack”

Mary Frey. Man Fastening Pearls, from Domestic Rituals series (1979-83)

Please pretend you are listening.

What takes precedent in constant states of emergency?

This is a trick question.

The emergency is a distraction, a talking point.
A lullaby. The meter of any poem is its rhythm.
This commitment to repetition removes doubt.
Our cathedrals were built on these antinomies.
Their ancient meridians now too faint to be understood
as well-worn adaptive signals. You reference memory
to form approximate futures: a slip of breath dislocating.

the cast of its shape is recognizable

“It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top.”
—Robert M. Pirsig

Screenshot from The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser. *Werner Herzog* (1974)

A summer sun lurks behind the marine layer.
Patient ambient light indicates scale
and relation. What is arriving?
What counts is the hope. That demand
to experience a transformation.
Revelations of perception
act as units of active witness
after past lives fade.
The sensation of an idea—
like walking on green plastic lawns.

altered sensorium

“You can’t separate the disaster from the star.” —Jorie Graham

early morning flight, Oakland (October 2020)

White-stacked clouds
pull shades of wind
from green swaying trees.

You wanted to know,
how long does the affect of birdsong last?
Now thoughts evaporate inside my head.
It’s ok. I can embody
unwritten memory.

I painted a sky empty of clouds
to abstract its brevity.
The horizon arrived
at a moving blue-gray ocean.
Almost like the minute we were born
when Saturn squared exact
to an early June Scorpio moon.

Remember: summer and its want for neglect is to be expected.

aping a good life (what success might actually signal)

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
—Gustav Mahler

Some days everything collapses. Tessa Posthuma De Boer (2007)

There is always a promise.
A hint of certainty—an offering of control.
Then, a volcano erupts after knowing its status: active.

As covenant, trust and belief mutually inspire.
I know you know this translation and how it must feel
when holding sharp fragments—intergalactic vibes:

to want summertime oceans and prairie skies.
All this suggestion begs for minor mysteries
whose performance is a habit. Asking for discretion,
a hint of sin, and longing that chooses you.

apparitions

Remember the lessons of the past. Imagine the possibilities of the future. And attend to the present, the only part of time that doesn’t require the use of memory. —Sarah Manguso, Ongoingness: The End of a Diary

You want to know the details so you can tell the story.

There was a feeling of a passage of time, then a return
almost sacred in its magnitude. This fluctuating affect
bound to ghost objects still holds their shapes after all these years.

There was an act of becoming visible, inventing new ghosts; unclenching.
Why this instinct? From who, and where, is its intransitive source?
But those answers are not the reason we are gathered here today.

This is about our roots growing deep underground, unbothered.
The details I want you tell the others when they recognize
themselves in a familiar situation. Your intimacy—and mine—
now consequence of bright flares inviting creative echoes.

litany of facts

Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.

excerpt from ‘Messenger’ by Mary Oliver

The Gleaners and I (2000) dir. Agnès Varda

It was like a dream.
Downtown was covered in fresh tags.
The city bus sped through red lights;
I read the scrawl as “cosmos”.
The next day, on the exact same bus,
I saw a lone pamphlet asking “Can the dead really live again?”.
Its answer, and its implications, was unknown.
Clouds scrolled by already having lived a thousand lives.
When the light hit blue, I knew an answer—
the astonishing present cannot be ignored
in the unease of ongoing questions;
rupture false integrity; seek what calls me.
I don’t have a prepared response.
My geology is still being written.

revised: a life

Now that most of the neighborhood trees have leaves,
there is extra music, percussive, inside the offshore winds.

Grieve the affects of a closed throat. No sound, only devouring.
Bright—brilliance in its injury. An echo. Observe the moment,
vestigial and temporary as spring’s abridged shadows.

In the end, it’s only abstraction and phenomenon.
I hope you have choices too. The ability to revise.
That you demand the real, and push beyond memory.
This movement is discretion at its finest.
Refusal, grace and her technicalities, extends perception.
That angle, visceral, is what creates this poetic materiality.
An open prairie, a reservoir, raw mediums of nomadic attention.
This urge is to live my life swollen with blank spaces.

insubordination

“Process is never not a walk into the unknown.” —Eva Hesse

‘Irises and oranges’ Henrietta Berk (1919–1993)

It’s the commerce —we are told—
that keeps us happy, wealthy, & wise.
But my hands are not shaped
to wield those master’s tools.

a following sea

“Thinking is more erotic than calculating.”
—Byung-Chul Han, The Disappearance of Rituals

I’m dreaming of digital music evaporating inside fancy buildings,
of piss-stained city sidewalks, of stars born inside black holes.
I’m dreaming of facts not found in science, of poetry observed,
of what goes unsaid when the wrong people have power over me.
I’m dreaming of words and phrases forming infinite questions,
of line breaks matching my psyche, of wilding time to stay feral.

receiving horizon

You insisted on an open casket. Hard proof, evidence of generous witness.
I remember it was rhubarb season, early spring, and your absence
deepened the long shadows laying gently across your receiving body.
Lilies (yellow, your favorite color) and fresh cut dandelions,
still dripping defensive sticky milk, held the light of your horizon.
Your life’s silhouette now full circle. Our mutual failures
vanished into pedantic memories and obscured the reverent silence.

I force myself to swallow the always-disappearing now.

There is pleasure in this remembrance, a type of muscle memory,
while I actively grope for a future. Even this specific meaning-making,
if shockingly ordinary, is superstitious in its suffering.
I’ve learned to gather these blurred edges, glints of everyday living,
as gravity compliments a recursive temptation towards animality.

making time

Deity is in the details & we are details among other details & we long to be

Teased out of ourselves. And become all of them.

—Larry Levis, “Elegy with a Bridle in Its Hand”

When I am able, I sink slowly.
Shadowed in warm marigold sun,
I shed my skin and all its identities:
scripts, claws, bruises.
I felt nothing sinister, just adrenaline
from knowing I was doing something wrong.
An ambivalent refrain—courageous as an eclipse—
pure movement vanishing into exhalation.