Thorny sky the possession enjoyment brings suspended in a circle of blue messages. The flotation a person settles is an ear in sound where appearances give us their all. Bringing focus to the flagstones, early morning walk and I’m doing nothing. The hole where lights are seen. Star in a vise so we experience headache. This gives us the brightness we reflect onto others—faces yet to be grown, the walk still needing to be taken, another imprint on awareness. Things don’t begin the way they used to—if we gaze into linear reverse we see that death has preceded us.
Arena in pieces, the electric maw of the city. Behold my hand, itself a sinister word, an invention marred by its own relation to departures: giving the boat a push, counting down, a wave farewell … See you when the arena is rebuilt, I’ll say my first word then.
He had never once used those words, nor even learned to handle the instrument that would’ve made their written form possible. The words in question were discovered in a volume formed in concentrically rippling circles, flat like a sundial. Between each letter there rose (or was it emanated?) a fragrance that could be seen by those standing at a slight angle to the page. The curls and indentations this fragrance left in the air was enough to cause the onlookers to be paralyzed. If all hallucinations could be true, and not only a matter of physiological perspective, the world and its words would be held captive by a possibility of olfactory interpretations and reinterpretations lying over the seasons like a palimpsest of the brain’s canals during monsoon.
A cloak of linen, the back of a hand, a falling through space shows what musculature has given us over the years, years spent listening to the walls of a room that speak with an exhaling known to grant favors. An adherence symmetry avoids, feeling pitched to a previously unknown elevation. The dandruff of stars because they are a desert breed, something we didn’t mind shouldering at the time. Not like the weight that accompanies expeditions like these—quietly in a house of sonorous doors and thresholds opening onto amber hills where caretakers divine water with crossed eyes.
Inside my body is an anti-body.
Bowls …
Across barrier mired and fen deposits, for many days the delta silt adhered to his feet. Sometimes a shuffling of events through which he could see the continuous plane of another moment. On the side of the road he counted the bits of dust floating along the surface of my eye
Medallions of potent sound stitched taut and hung on delirious rafters. Feel free to enter
The gate remains locked. The doorkeeper off sunning himself with leaps of his own calm predictions. Out here we can observe this, but behind the walls of the city we have no choice but to purge ourselves of summer and caresses. What will come, severing this instant from all others, is best viewed from up above the surge
Saw “Death Before Dying”
Kept until the swerving ceased the boat in repair—kept were the remnants of my house swerving was this matter
A boat made from oceanic din. Medicine from venom
Artery with my name on it
A gift was sent recently to the one who administers all worldly affairs. After unwrapping the box there was yet another box for her to open. This kept happening until all that remained was a tiny box the color of egg shell and with the scent of wild herbs. Inside, tightly wedged was a piece of paper with the command, “begin to intone”
Dissolved
the solitude
herb-sensed
and local
Not a specific ghost
Suffering pagoda like a kind of plea in this specific place. Unhindered in change and inferred sounds. Lungs, not bells, partake of silence within temple walls
Enticed into the innards of a lotus. Hum the course of surrounding trees in order to see anything but the sky
sea-holly, sickle pod, knotgrass, Indian long-pepper, citronella grass, black pepper, rose-colored leadwort, turmeric, menthol, fenugreek and anise
Rose of holes Roseate void familiar scent
Chasing sound through and through
Hope to hold the house
—For Montien Boonma