earthcoil

also blogging @marykateultra

[earthcoil]

two halves make a whole and you crawl out the hole

The world ends so slowly,

Inverted facsimile of orgasm,

Grease coagulating, hardened white.

We grow bored with the descent

Into collectively conjured hell,

Its edges we obsessively trace in our minds.

It happens not all at once.

You keep online shopping

For used clothes that sometimes fit you wrong.

The decrepit concrete

Of the sprawling unwalkable city

Is not swallowed by a sinkhole.

Most importantly, we do attend work.

Energy becomes a grailed and shining currency,

Becomes the only way out. But even

That is only the sour punchline to an old riddle. You don’t know

How to convince yourself, anywhere,

Of meaning.

[earthcoil]

Dialogues

“[REDACTED]…! I never thought I would see you again. Like I did, but I didn’t.”

“…” For a moment, he doesn’t say, “Oh, wow, hi.”

They look at each other, regard each other. A thousand appraisals taking place in the time it takes for an eye to blink. It is difficult to categorize the fleet of emotions that make a half-show in the face of one or the other, not daring to fully emerge. A cavalcade of caricatures each anticipates they should emulate.

Hurried, to fill the elongating silence, he rattles off, “How’ve you been?”

As if she hasn’t heard this, she continues, “I mainly see you in dreams. Sometimes they feel so real…” She pauses, limning his face as if mining for a precious metal, choosing her words. “What is something that you’re thinking about right now?”

“I, um. Like anything?”

She nods.

“I’m… thinking… that it’s half-four on a Tuesday and I didn’t think I would see you here. I’m thinking about the way it’s making me feel that I’ve run into you, I guess. My mind is full of a lot of things.”

She smiles. There is the familiar, unbearable and almost violent urge to hold his face in her hands, to draw him to her. As it always had, it pains her physically to ignore this urge. The ache of this pain seeps somewhat into the corners of her face, her eyes and lips.

“What are you thinking about?”

“I’m trying to understand. I’m trying to say something that cannot be said. In my mind, you always knew what I wanted to convey without me having to say it. I have no way of knowing that it’s true, except that I just feel it. When I look into your face, I see my meaning reflected there.”

[earthcoil]

nothing less than ruth

Hungers tore from within

I don’t think there is a way to love

That can disentangle itself from prostration

The milk of limerence is that dance

Played out in the field

Of the mind

Nervous energy full of behests

In the wetness of my tears we started kissing

Stop for nothing less than ruth

[earthcoil]

mars in retrograde

Abrogation of a way back, binding and yet full of holes. To talk to someone who knew me so very long ago is like breathing again, waking from a dream. Myself - untouchable, unreachable one - made manifest, the sharpest-ever ghost, with soft words, the surprising tenderness of a remembered dialogue, a way of speaking (relating / being), aged and refined, yet with a kernel of the recognizable, the non-dilutable original.

In order to arrive at that which demands to be born, I must trace the lineage of my wanderings, my palpitating heart. Those things that seemed wayward in retrospect have a hard and undeniable logic. The mystery I seek draws me backward that I may taste it all anew with a newfangled tongue, virgin experience of the once-known thing. Omnidirectional cohort of confluence, selves taking stock of each the other in the prism of my incarnation.

It is difficult to say what, exactly, happened to me without attempting to birth the entire world through my mouth.

[earthcoil]

Gold Star

I’m like if a gold star

With a small but irremovable flaw

Was a human being

They say the soul

Is filleted into sheathes

That penetrate ever-more deeply into Truth

Excavating old layers of self like

Peeling back the soul

Into oblivion, into ???, until -

[earthcoil]

the pitch of my want

[earthcoil]

playthings

The muddy ache

Of what remains,

Soldered in places

As crossbeams,

That which caught in your high beams

In a forest meandering toward the coast

In a year there is no getting back to.

The nexus of timelines terminating

At the crook of my heart.

Each give the lie

Of what was to come before,

What coming to pass.

Parallel grammar gives a glimmer

Of meaning beyond the word.

If I stop too long to grasp at my tongue,

I shall fell the thought that so limber

Escaped capture.

No longer can there be simplicity

Or discretion with respect to

The poem’s addressee.

Reactants cannot be disentangled,

Entropic tendencies of our playthings.

In the speaking of the thing,

I come to understand You are

The extra-dimensional amalgamation

Of all I loved and sought - that is,

Each angle of the self, each tender temporal

Container of being, each moment strung to the

Pluri-temporal others, each swearing

of liege never quite broken, though mended,

Affixed, appended.

[earthcoil]

anyons

Snap-shut jaw

Of anyon flock

Instigates brutal harmony

Of inescapable proportions

Cleansing grief runs through

Me like you

Infesting every cell

In every corner of this

Body of illusions

I came back to the mouth

And lips

Of a cavern

Where once we worshipped

Daily imbibing the silvered

Cleft-syllabic mischiefs

Of our boredom

And tears

I never thought

To miss it

Fingers of grief

Bid me speak

Again

And ex-press