Alt Cinema 7
I walked your flowers to the streets edge
reds and yellows
pure from your hands, fragrant
and I fell into
the soft cup of the earth
dampened, low
on our tears together
and the knowledge of wounds that
soon should heal
I walked your flowers to the streets edge
reds and yellows
pure from your hands, fragrant
and I fell into
the soft cup of the earth
dampened, low
on our tears together
and the knowledge of wounds that
soon should heal
I’m summoning a portal with my plants
a half-moon congregation
a hallway that wasn’t there before
like the ones in House of Leaves
and extends into everywhere else
a darker black and a couple greens
Fox stares into the ink
his eyes two starry pours
we’re scared of the first steps
I’ll carry a coin now
and flip for every indecision
The weight of two cosmic faces
flung from my pocket
And I see my futures
in flashes of sudden memorial
Seven times a week I wake up different. A quick look in the mirror, a five-alarm snooze. Still recovering from the night that I watched 30 planes fall short of the runway at the same time. Still staring at the sky and the wings with the orange glow. Still grasping aimless for the polaroid I lost I didn’t know I had. I woke up in another morning, I woke up for the green grass. I woke up in the same sheets wrapped for the winter. I woke up with the same name but needed to be reminded that the picture pieces of dreams are only altered cinemas of sleep.
I am a body full of wires, strung in errant Christmas rows
and the subtle energies of the matter run the circuit open.
There’s something more to this, like learning to let it go.
Like shaking my limbs electric in ode to forces I don’t know.
There’s something more to this and my heart just overflows,
always full submission to voices of my own.
I am a body full of wires, criss-cross overgrown.
I am stumbling disposition, and happiness is a few seconds I’ve never been comfortable in.
I’m thinking of the weird ones while I play the same album over again to memorize the feelings. The words are the feelings, the words are not the feelings. It’s a trigger in any event, it’s a melody unlocking a door in a hallway you passed by a thousand times but didn’t recognize until the open swing and the burden lifted. Its personal in a way that everyone knows in the same stories with different names redacted. I might listen to it all night because it’s the only home that feels the right kind of warm. I’m thinking of the weird ones because I like the way their pictures fill my memories, and the colors cool with mine, and the sound of all these voices singing about times I remember I missed out on. I recall them in other songs, old scenes I’ve wandered into unassuming just to slip into a wall, a specter, golden.
Treat it like an inhibition
Treat it like a friend
Treat it like a distant memory
Treat it like a last goodbye
and pull away
it comes again
Treat it like a crime
Treat it like a penance
Treat it like a prayer
one last last confession
for the last years of your life
Treat it like a song
Stuck in your head
dead battery in the dashboard
repeating dashed white lines
Treat it like a mystery
Treat it like inspired
Treat it like a lifeline
Treat like the worst time
with the best friend
you’d never leave behind
I forget where I am and I separate. I always sit and I’m always separate. Even now glancing out the window in dashes every other second when the outside yellows glow peripheral. There was a car, then a delivery, then a raindrop leftover from last night sliding out of memory, then I decided I had astigmatism and the lamp was looking suspiciously luminous through the glass so it must be the north star. These stories I find in perforated little fits. Stories confessing themselves all around me on pages unrelated and I don’t have time to finish them all so there’s never endings and the beginnings are never-ending. I forgot where I was, I was at work and the keyboard revealed itself. I forgot where I was, I was eating an apple and found out where it’s from. I forgot where I was, and this is about forgetting.
I remember the first time someone told me I had sad eyes. I thought I knew myself before that but I know I didn’t know myself after that. It was a subtle public trial, and I quietly left before the world witnessed the tears I’d been holding back for years.
I didn’t know I was sad, but someone else that knew me said so, so it was true, and it lives like that, through regular reminders I forget to remember to feel. So I’m a sad person now, and sometimes a stranger points it out for me and I can roam restless under my breath in aggravated acceptance.
Sometimes I want them to acknowledge the weight in my eyes so I know I’m doing a good job and I can go home and listen to my favorite songs so I remember to act right.
The nightmares are cinematic spins from my night-self,
left spinning in the morning.
The morning is 2am.
The morning is midnight.
The morning moves with me.
The labyrinth walls of sand lined streets,
confused in all their shifting and
so am I.
Another day came, I lost Fox
in the same neighborhood
and kicked my keys in the sewer,
scared and trembling
The dreams of dreaming are moonlight easy
The dreams of reality all terror.
The lighting in here is great for contemplation. I imagine a loud stillness filling my apartment, disrupted by the high pitch buzzing, blasting both my ears. It appears my physical form knows something before me and the party started the second I woke up wondering what I’ll do today. I didn’t get out of bed until eight so the sun was wasted and perhaps I’ll waste with it and feign nocturnal. My monstera must be overthinking too because its dying in its front row window. Maybe we’re both great at contemplating, and the lighting in here is great for contemplation.
I think I’m living now. I think you’d be proud of me, I was waiting all this time to tell someone about something I’m doing, and not another idea of something I think I might do. I’m so full of hobbies I forgot to start. I’m so full of heart and heavy delays. Turns out I was living all the time and got so stuck wondering when I was going to start that I started. Blindly, and staring eyeball wide at the secret sun burning down the road ahead. I’m pacing it. The clichés about slowing down. The irony of missing a memory when you’re only worried about what you might be remembered for. I remember a coyote blasting off in the Badlands at a prairie dog. I saw it all, branded in real-time, the coyote was living and I was small. A spectator in the hallway, watching another life living while I waited for mine.
It’s an unfair advantage.
It’s your brain in non-time, trying to remember how to forget.
The dream wasn’t real and you know it
in the dark of the room from
the dark of your heart. So you grasp
in the dark for dim reassurance, high on shaky post-midnight-oil vapors
lined up with the window blinds reflected in the mirror.
Flipping through the night channels
for proof that the dream
was a dream and not a memory,
knowing that as long as you feel the scene it becomes real from
remembering.
I sprawled horizontal on the back of my truck
cold and grey
come to life in the haze of expired rain
and I breathed the sun splattering through a few leaves
wavering in split screen
the edge of the trees should always glow
brightly against the cloud sky
spicy coals begging for breath and a minor disturbance. cold legs, a few feet away, and I'm way back believing it.
there could've been a smile out where I shined the light, there's a total loss of color twenty feet out.
there's a cricket in the mix. there's a dog in the dark somewhere. there's a couple other dogs in three directions screaming into the night.
the cricket is on my side. the dogs are days away.