1. |
Signal
03:24
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An ebb in the pain and sight stretches bridgelike
Etiolated with glistening jewels
Noxious gems set heaving, sloping
offering themselves to the dank
Hysterical light mirrored in the abyss
There is something lively and consummate
in this jealous elixir
Muscles ripple under a lithe coat of sable
Coursing in the tissues,
a slow-moving, burning oracle
Emerge, consolidate, become pure
Vision shining in coals
Fingertips on knees I bow,
rise to mount these treasures,
not a word out of place.
Aureate poem glows like pain
made of forked tongues,
mineral eyes, and teeth blazing in
alchemical fire
The people of old, old times
under my own skin, alive and walking
The dead
are a frequency, current as sound
caught in the ear
And they are still writing
As I am willing
to entertain
Frightening to hear
and terrible to read
Things I exterminate
in spells cast a thousand miles wide
Radiant bandwidths exonerate everything they touch
Neutralize poison
And turn enemies
aflame in supplication
I dissolve our manacles
An awe inconceivable to the untrained senses
It’s not what you have, my enemy
It’s what you do with a certain etheric yearning
that marks the welkin
While mouths of wish-granting beasts
open full of embers to devour and transmute
Emissions too fine for the physical eye
circle round reptilian dialect
Explanations slice orange flares in the haze
And sunset gathers countless reflections
My cigarette is imaginary, a ghost
Smooth scar where once shone a rosy gash,
glossy as the jaws of bloodthirst
I was glittering, raw and single-pointed in my aim
Pouring fresh from the wound
Yes, I am empty of phantoms now, though if my gaze lingers
glancing across my body
I recoil, soften
dematerialize
My appearance
translated as signal, proof, and sign.
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2. |
Unlock The Gates
03:19
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My blood is a red desert soaking into sand and drying onto stones, baked dry in my veins, cracked earth stiffening my chest. Airless plasma runs toward the neck and folds in the dark under the skin. I feel gravity run deep and oceanic, wet crimson waves that lick the sand, sinking and sucking. Sand pulls away and I breathe, oxygen filling my cells up to the thickness of brain.
Fear. The sea stirs in the distance, and I feel heat in my chest and cold in my hands. Wind moves the tall grass by the shore. Night sky becomes powder in my fingers. Stillness and empty space chase me like air on clouds, invisible in the blue. Mental energy cuts swordlike, bloody and wet with smooth force. Pulse pounds at great speed. Air moves untroubled. The precision in me is not mine. I close my eyes and watch it blankly moving across the plain, thundering out of sight.
White steel grinds, flashing metal, teeth dent shining aluminum. Heaving wheels hurtle to a stop, grip and tear out the brain. Flesh cleaves from bones tumbling sleek and glossy, cold and undifferentiated from the sky.
Sparkling sheets float above millions of tiny luminous spikes. Sun dissolves on the horizon. Tall wide trees shimmer with leaves. Their patterns shine over people walking on footpaths and sitting on benches and lawns. I'm up there, liberated from fear, free of anger, using my mind to deploy itself out of existence. My suffering is a thin line that stretches across a wide expanse, a broad borealis of self-pity, flush with hatred. Wincing, I see but can't feel some force whipping at me. A super dark and deep furrow gives way, no hold on me now. Inner shadows radiate.
Empty space is listening for me. My steps sound out. I am being traveled, slipping over time and places. Words are like pictures, thin photographs, scattered papers fluttering skyward. The edges of me are being lined with fine stuff, softly rendered, seamless like love, divine focus, chiseled in relief.
Walking –
peace –
peace –
peace –
unlock the gates for me now –
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3. |
Blindness
02:25
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Opening to the first page of a book while waiting for the subway. Abiding uneasiness creeping inside me. Hot, sunny outside. Holding a card from a nearby Mexican restaurant to use as a bookmark.
Reading, it begins, "On the August night in 1933..." and my mind darkens. I look up. What I see is an evenly lit subway platform, dingy and filthy, barely populated at this time of day on a Monday. People stand calmly, waiting, bored, eyelids heavy from being in the sun.
So my mind isn't darkening, but slowly growing creepy in a familiar way. Something in me rises formlessly. I feel mist climbing evenly from a wide trench, somewhere behind my back.
"I've spent a lot of time in that part of life," I remember an old poet once saying to me slowly with a fixed smile, as we stood in her kitchen. A fixed smile of openness, a fixed smile of boundaries. A fixed smile like a fence or a cloud, levitating. What is important but a stone, or a person like a stone, existing for thousands of years.
The wind blows,
my eyebrows,
distracted now.
I have dropped a lot of things in the garbage. In these ideal moments, I feel like I'm running free. Seems as if everything would fall into place through this tunnel, this thick tornado, wind and garbage.
Later, on the sidewalk, walking to work, I think of a hand reaching out from a hole, twisting to grab the surface and pull it inside. "I'm afraid to die."
What does everybody else do? Sometimes you see it glance off them, a bright flicker, something to get away from.
My shadow, cast in front of me on the pavement, evaporates into a dot.
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4. |
Tiger Tattoo
05:15
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Tiger turns dirty circles in my veins, shredded into a radiant angel, red haired demon fluttering inside.
I sit while calm ecstasy grows in me, watching light curl upward through some distant sparkling spires. Facets of a diamond point in all directions from within. I move away from myself, shed a tired husk. A final spark flickers and dies.
Channels of a dry river.
White lamps cast icy grid patterns through the metal cage of a pedestrian overpass. I’m alone and full of determination with no purpose. Entranced by the sound of my own footsteps, I suck in the crystal angles of city night like the coals of a sentient forest, strewn with arcana, fluorescent bulbs flickering in a bright field of dreams.
Vivid and pungent. Aurora of craving, a halo in the skyscrapers.
Under moonlight, I am counting, thinking of food, pouring drinks in my mind. I imagine consuming silver-white clouds as I cross the street, gray stained with dark smudges, shadowy and black. I walk past a couple – relaxed and warm, human and soft – jean jackets, sandals, backpacks and backwards baseball caps. They turn, pulsing, into demons, and I evaporate, a ghost.
I arrive late, move through the thin crowd and vague hatred in the air, climb carpeted stairs lined with mirrors into colored lights and thumping sound. Hungry or full, I speak to nobody, burn holes through the back of strangers’ heads. Transfixed, bivouacked, my fear and separation are jewels, precious stones melted into an elixir that I drink. Alcohol wouldn’t sate me, drugs are for humans, but my inner toxins feed me and brighten my sight.
My eyes are lined with bronze and emerald, shining like rubies unexcavated, fixed in their bed of rock and sandstone, sleeping fossils beneath the earth. A cold reptilian flavor, forged in the fires of burning graves, ashes and wood turned to stone and concrete – life’s history dissolved to powder, frozen liquid trapped in snow. My feet dwell in lower realms where the ground’s like psych, luminescent iridescent endlessness, seamless walls.
I feel something in my throat like a voice but what I hear comes from across the room, the words of a man with tattoos and a black shirt, his skin inscribed with curls and flourishes and tiny black cursive:
I am tired ~
I sink in like poison, a fragrant blue blossom with purple eyes, red and
psychoactive, mood changes…slowly winking into a dream, a subtle high of intricate feelings, veiled messages, sleeping pictures awaken in the mind…smell of flowers enliven the air and melt into green…walking in the warm light of millions of candles, sweet intoxication washing and melting into waves of brightening beauty, ripped up in light.
Forgiving palms touch, fingertips move through the flame of a candle. A tiger tattoo. Eyes, claws and teeth leaping forever at me.
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5. |
U.S. Blues
04:05
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He pulls the cassette out of its casing, clear plastic over a screen-printed insert, colored card stock filigreed with irregular slanting letters, illustrated faces, and alphanumeric sigils duplicated in metallic black ink. Flipping open the tray of the boom box, he sinks the tape inside and snaps it shut, punching play with a savory click. Sluggish echoes creak from dented speakers, growing to a loud hiss, peppered with irregular clangs of unidentified origin. A dire thud, then a blazing howl. Distortion, screams, links in a chain of unintelligible rancor; thud a heartbeat and clang the circulation running the length of veins, cells of static sibilating and cleaving into ever-smaller atoms of noise.
Turning the case over in his hands, on the inner fold of the spine he spies a couple of initials and an address: Massachusetts. Always these New England P.O. boxes stamped inside the cartridges – Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire – captioned with sublinguistic runes, abbreviations, and half-words. Lexical antipathy, as if words lay beneath or beyond such painstakingly crafted vortices of isolation, stoned daydreams, and anarchies in woodblock print, silkscreen, or rubber stamp.
The tape’s literal magnetism mirrors some auric charisma emanating unseen from the cloth-draped merch tables. Amulets of...aggression? A complanate, void descriptor for those high-pitched, sterile-sounding cries, layering on top of one another bounded by the walls of the warehouse. Hypnotic, thunderous sound beckoned him those nights, when he felt his mind dropping things until more was dropped than left over, and he began racing toward this emptiness, then plunging as if into a deep pool, bottomless, shining, rippling intonations quenching his thirst, resonance bent millimeter by millimeter, reaching luminous maximum.
Culminating in phonic dullness like a dusty screen over his eardrums. Deaf and weightless under the streetlamps in the parking lot, fixed with a sense that he stood where he was most intended to be at this exact time. His sneakers floated on the moonlit pavement, organs of divination positioning him perfectly in some endless hereafter, detectably separate from his own vague awareness of kids wandering past him, filtering out of the venue, muted utterances echoing backward like distant water gabbling.
The tape runs out, snaps to a stop as he gazes out the window. Sunlight gleams on iron bars, snow drifts, dead leaves. Patterns form in the litter in the gutter. Dirt darkens the undersides of his fingernails and haloing the holes in his t-shirt is dried sweat mingled with the finest layer of firmamental ash.
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6. |
Poison Pen
13:17
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Soap Library New York, New York
Soap Library is a holistic cassette tape label in New York City.
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