NEW ROOTS

(lyrics)

The dew kissed eyes of new blossoms 

Open to the warm smile of the horizon.

Give me a seed, forest of tomorrow: 

Oak and pine, juniper and laurel.

The dreams of roots, the songs of ages

Heal our scars, turn sprouts to sages.

We hold one another, fold into ancient memories.

The dreams, the dreams, the dreams, the dreams…

SPINDLE PESTLE

(lyrics)

The seed spins the ancient wool,

Training entropy as it pulls.

New growth, hope of tomorrow.

Tangles melt, new meanings woven.

Confidence, carve out the rot.

Mitosis, ratchet from chaos.

Spindle of necessity.

Pestle plunged in the darkness.

Working the cosmic mortar.

Card the harmful into softness.

Spin the thread of wonder

And beauty, beauty.

Combine our tapestries,

Build new realities.

INTO THE MOUNTAIN

(lyrics)

Nestled down into the forest floor,

Murmuration of stirring leaves overhead,

Reverberations of a lone bluebird’s song

Tell the shape of the soft-vaulted cavern.

Angled pillars of sunlight raining down,

Running through the fingers of the old architects, 

Sculpting down to the tempo of generations,

Sentinels of epochs.

All permutations, all possibilities 

unfold out on the stage of fallen leaves.

The joys and sorrows all melt into the soil

to nourish each breath in the chaos, the chaos.

Uncertainty of Our Stars

Celestial gears churn the current

upon which our hopes bob,

Racing, swept down drops—

It’s several months past, a decade.

Alarm tears us from slumber to recall:

Dreams dashed against rocks,

A firmament—a vastness—of occluded possibilities,

Poems never to be written,

Written poems never to fall upon gentle ears,

Spectres of loneliness in company,

The reach of an embrace

But the arms are dust.

Tomorrow is forever a stranger,

A promise unkept,

A moment cut in precarious authorship

Between our wits and unforgiving waves,

Between attention and inattention,

Between joy and sorrow—

We ready our legs to surf, to dance

Along the edge of the quantum knife.

NIGHT RUN

A storypoem

A man’s face is in the window. Boy wakes with a start. 2:54 glows red. 

The room sits pregnant with velvet inertia.

He levers his torso up, back against the pillow, breathes the back of the skull into the headboard. Jolt. Wall stops wood. Wood stops bone. Roll. Follicles crackle. Bespeckled black out the window. Feeble winkings gaze back with longing. No moon.

Need a run.

The legs miss their sericeous geode. Wiry carpet meets toes. Straightening. Electric nerves quicksilver down inside the head’s hourglass. Tingling to equilibrium. Soles rove over woven furrows to confront the neutral-expressioned dresser. Shorts plucked from the right eye. Shoes pinched from under the dreaming belly of laundry. Dress. Doorknob. 

Quiet needed for the hall. Haunting the wall, breath held high in the chest. Key up on the hook. Flesh’s warmth mutes its icy rattling. Doorknob.

Pillowy charcoal. A leaden, sunken silence: eluvium from overhead wind. 

Starting up the hilled street. A light jog. Cornflake leaves perforate the plenum. A lambent, suspended womb approached and abandoned for viscous ink.

Midground: gales aloft rustle looming pianists, fingers dancing ceremoniously upon power lines. 

Background: ___. 

Vacuum.

Up, deeper into festering black, swallowed into hillside stirrings. A foreground of unrest: a constellation of swollen güiros and insisting syncopations from moist corners. Surging gusts threaten the vegetation. Roars rush the heart. 

He climbs higher into the terror. 

Mind tunes to the night, laminal motion carries now. Plunging, rising, seeking nothing. 

Nothing. 

…

Tinnitus. 

A harmonizing ring ahead provokes attention. Heart skips. 

Feet, weighted, plod to a stop. 

Piercing his sight through the pitch curtain, he almost imagines the bony white figure on the bicycle, clicking down from a pinched vanishing point. The vector is—to him. 

Stops just before. The man leans forward in address:

Gaunt, luminous grin. 

…

The moment suspends itself another lifetime before sinking back into the gloom, whirling away, downward. 

Hypnopompic paralysis. His manubrium a singular point within endless, cavernous carbon.

Warm terror pulses. Benthic baths deluge the ears. Caustic chills perch on the chest and tunnel inwards. Nerves alight, stinging. Eyes open or closed? Testing convergent tectonics with eyelids, burrowing to white darkness. 

Open eyes. Dense, peppered grey. The room. Indifferent dresser. Slumbering laundry. Billowed curtain. Open door. 

…

Tinnitus.

the bad news is that you previously missed the importance of this event

the bad news is that you previously missed the importance of this event 

an even more profound labyrinth of deconstructed ideologies 

the mythinformation can navigate absolute chow 

siren emergent 

gutenberg dragon 

dramatic ubiquitous 

erudite hallucinations 

symphony warscape 

rocket eye radioactive 

satellite arithmetic for the cultural thunderstorm 

sea dragon of the new mesopotamia 

back to the atmosphere research of the fragmented 

wind vector of the negative spacelab 

magic engineers for the neural resistance 

weather watch for a new improvisational 

the season is digital entropy 

a period of abnormally warm media

silver visible cyclical classical 

we also have an embodying function 

we also called the computer human 

in museums of a geometrical abandonment 

the volcanic promises of the digital finite 

chameleon garden party 

utopian arithmetic for the frontier body

we need a set of integers greater than the tornado of meaning 

back into the body of the new euclidean 

in this end a real tyrant could be any sort of feedback 

air that originates in the tropics of mathematics 

an algebraic giant clam that studies parasitic libraries 

numbers that can predict results for the first fiction philosophers 

weather facsimile of our institutions up the encyclopedic tree 

in both the digital individual and the chaptered reality caves 

satellite instruments who the engineers of shrimp murder

electronic offended

mindstorms ideological 

cultural helix 

humanist knife 

turing symbiosis

viscerally mathematic

viscerally cyborg 

symphony crayon

morphing immutable

renaissance mainframe

hammerhead mcluhan

ratio anomaly halfway in each enraptured electrical caterpillar 

and the principles of algebra moved infected neurons from the gutenberg associative to the redemptive hand of the new divine knife 

sea slug of mathematics 

the decay of mathematics concerned the toothed topological 

a drought of memory 

radiative numbers that accompanied others 

back beyond our humanity to the bottom of all clawed promises 

megahertz zebra 

Infra-dite

My rose wears its petals like an assemblage of blades

It did not awake gently from pillowed tear-kissed glades

But fused into blossom form from furnace winds and angry sand

Radiant armor from shrapnel hands

My rose’s ballet is frozen in imperceptible largo

It does not burst like a firework in exuberant glow

But it stands the sentinel of epochs awaiting its hour

Desiccation syncopates burning salt tides to train the flower

Yet while my rose is devoid sweet perfume and luscious red

It recalls the lunar star and its constant march overhead

Carrying a lone torch through the viscous unknown

It projects a frustum of order, a beacon of crystalized foam

A wax cylinder for encoding the slow songs Ananke spins and stirs

From salinic to selenic, through χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά, its message endures

Ό ΤΉΣ ΑΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΞΕΩΣ ΟΡΧΗΘΜΟΣ́ | THE DANCE OF THE FULCRUM

Original ancient Greek lyrics with word-for-word English translation (not adjusting for grammatical oddities)

Πρός τή οδώ όπου αι τ’άνθων ξανθοφαών έλικηδαι γεωμετρίαι έκ τής άσφαλτου συνεξάνθουσαι πάρεισιν

By the road where (of golden-gleaming blossoms) helical geometries out of the asphalt break out together all about

Καί ή χαμαίβατος προσαιθρίζεται ίνα τόν μάραθον απακονά καί ό μάραθος γλυκός τό βάτον κάμπτει·

And the blackberry [ground-berry] sending fennel into the air sharpens it and the sweet fennel (acting upon) the berry bends it (in turn),

Αυτή ό Ήλιος Πανόπτης Άργον αγασάμενος, ό δέ πανόπτης κατατηξάμενος πρός τόν πόντον ερρύη καί υπερεξέτεινεν

Here, Helios/Sun the All-Seer (at) Argos admiring, and the (other) All-Seer [Argos] melting under (his gaze) becoming a river slowly and overwhelmed in bliss,

αί δέ εκατόν θυρίδες μιτορραφείς αργύφεαι πυριμάρμαραι διεξήναντο καί ό κυανομαρμαρωπός τήν ελάαν άπεβροχεν·

And his hundred windows, composed of threads, silver-shining sparkling-like-fire separate, and (this) blue sparkling eye (acting upon) the olive tree swallows it

καί ή ελάα χαμαισχιδής ουρανίζουσα

And the olive tree branching from the ground upward reaches to the skies

τήν τε παραντίχειρα καί τόν αντιδάκτυλον αμφία αγκύλω επεκτείνε ίνα τώ τού πόντου κόρακε ζυγοσταθμά

The forefinger and the thumb on both sides wrist-bending stretches open, here, for two cormorants, balancing

ίνα τώ τού πόντου κόρακε ζυγοσταθμά
ώ τοίσπερ ισθμοίς διαλυγίζουσι καί διαλέγουσιν

Their two necks twist and discourse

τά πτερά διευτρεπίζουσι ίνα αναπτεροφορώναι καί μολπάρχουσιν

Their wings preparing here for flight and for conducting the song-dance. 

To My Parents

The beauty that is the labor of forming the stubborn rock,

Collection of nascent jags, 

when every prohibition and instruction invites 

contemplation of perpendicular possibilities

To avoid the extremes:

Turning to stone oneself, abrasive,

Dissipating into breeze, empty,

But holding the balance: 

Remaining the succession of waves

That confronts each unlearned edge

To seek new orientation 

Yet teaches the base to hold fast

Brushing, crashing, smoothing, 

Until a point emerges

Directed upwards: tracing, following

Swirling celestial wonders

Unknown to those

Who were never given 

the directed finger 

with which to point 

And who were never left 

the wandering curiosity 

with which to imagine.

Insomnia

(Lyrics)

The moonlight, the moonlight

Traces the space between the trees on my walls

Fragments my windowpanes/pains

And my thoughts may sleep

But not my eyes, not my eyes

Who can sleep,

Who can dream,

Who can think,

When reality eclipses imagination?

You are lambency, you are lambency

You flush me over, short circuit my introspection

I’m left to observation

What more can I do

With incandescent eyes, shadow-casting eyes?

Who can sleep,

Who can dream,

Who can think,

When reality eclipses imagination?

Daddy Long Legs

(Lyrics)

Daddy Long Legs makes his way

Angle by angle hunts his prey

Hey little spider, you’re gonna trip on all your legs

Asymmetric calculations will take you down

Daddy Long Longs marks his path

Every step makes crooked math, crooked math

Hey little spider, you’re gonna trip on all your legs

Climbing up the walls, you’re bound for a fall

Climbing up the walls, you’re bound for a fall

…

Tenuous, precarious

You’re better off suspended

Hanging in the air

[A: Alexis, B: Brit]

B:

Quilt

you keep

me warm

the feathers

probably

came

from cold

birds

Title: LONELY

A:

Terribly cold

isn’t it?

Is the

weather nice

where you

come from?

is

it?

can you

respond?

now please?

i feel dumb.

Title: FLIRT

B:

I would

love to

marry you.

You didn’t

ask?

That’s

fine

I’ll marry

you

anyways.

Title: YES

A:

Water is

on my

face

get it

off or

don’t you

touch me

I swear

I’ll kill

You

Title: INDECISION (TEARS)