The Confession, or, “I am a thing that breaks” – Laurie Sheck

On By N FilbertIn Aging, being, Complexity, creative writing, Experimenctes, fragments, time, Traces, Writing2 Comments

I’ll map it out for you.

No, I’ll inscribe it.

47 cuts (myopic) in everything.

  1. That’s as far back as the lineage has been traced. A patchwork of stitches, genes, and lines (or lies).

Unfinished.  Inability to understand apparatus.  Has not accomplished death.

Librarian, parent: attempts to track, preserve, and access – things precious, silent, useful.

Pseudo-scholar (any otherwise?), thinker: an inability to avoid pollution when considering or engaging relics of world.

If desired sexually, probably will… it depends.

Begins halfway.

Sometimes only in pieces.

Life is hard to figure.  Mostly illegible, as well.

47 marks on anything.

Read what you can, listen.

Smells are.

Skin-shaped textures.  Walks on land.  Occasionally tree or canyon.  Mountain, river, ravine.

As easy to trace as wind.

Whatever being.

Kiss for kiss.  Breathing.

Something (someone?) called “melody.”

Hurts too.

.

Intimate uncertainty?  Certainly not.  Perhaps.  She would know.

Maybe furry, fuzzy androgyny.

Offspring reveals: “Crow’s a Decomposer.”

.

Decomposer.

.

What is poet?

Said all things grow, cannot hold, to dust and such.  Singing.

Some might remember.

Touch.  Taste.  Trying.

.

Loves deeply.  Expects nothing but passing, passage.

Fabricates patterns.

Dances.  Slowly.  Grasslands.  Prairie.

AND.  OR.  NOT.  (every day. moment) +/-?

What equals?

.

Like erasure.  Accumulation.  Obscurity.

Sometimes.

.

Decomposer.  Lover.  Friend.  Everenemy.

Anonymity.

.

“Love” (used, spoken, felt, lost, wished-for, pondered).

.

Language, landscape, living organism… perhaps that equals.

.

Sing “You Fucking Did It”

When does death arrive?  Why?

.

Glossy haze = language, landscape, living organism.

.

Children.  Music.  Language.  Elements of play.

Emotion.

Sex.

.

Stretched out.  A boy and a girl (E. Whitacre).  A boy and a boy.  Girl upon girl.  They and them.

Exchanging foam.

.

A poet working a way to an underworld.

Death is.  (a “thing”).  Exists.  =.

.

Kansas:  what gives silence for silence.

As easy to trace as wind.

.

Igloo.  Cabin.  Family farm.

DNA.  Bacteria.  Cancer(ous) cellular cell’d activity.

.

The living.  The dying.

.

Unfinished undoing.

.

47 paces toward the dark.

.

Re-membering foam.

.

How life gets made.  A ratchet, a sprocket, an engine and a wheel.  Add water.  Fuel to the fire.  Desiccate.

.

Perhaps it will rain.  A slight ritard.  Some sounding quiet.  Remediate.

.

Take 47:

Watching flowers blooming to dissolve.  A capture.

Sight slated to dim.  Shuffling ensues.  The stoop.

In a chair nearby, another.  More better for company.  When alone.

Exchanging foam.

47 paces in the fog.

Take three, four, and so on.

.

Circle round.  Loop back.  Never again.

Erasure.

Easy to trace as wind.

.

Leaving lights on.

Reading words, far from men.

Lost facilities.  The stakes.

Dwindle toward final.

The effort, the offspring, the progeny.

Prognosis.

.

47 accounts of the night and the wheel-well thickened with road.

Splashes the mill.  Grinds crank.  Pressures to turn,

turning back, away, toward.

Another.

47 gaps in the shawl.  Inconnu.

With something like delight.  How to stand before them.

Poeting down for underworld.

Looking back.

Slows.

Was there ever progress?

Thinks over.

Takes the hand.

Strikes the key.  The 47th.

.

Saturate for stupid.  Loses steps.  Must wake.

A happy mess.  Weighted results, dependencies, accumulation.

As easy to trace as wind.

Utilizes snow too much.  The rain.

Abandoned places.  What removes.  The melt.  What remains.

The unfinished.  Undoing.  Become.

.

For ‘I’ is a thing that breaks.

.

47 footprints from the hands.  The notable.

Swirly ways of working.  Feels like – .

Inspiration hopelessness.  This language.

This living organism.  Landscape.

47 miles to go.  All the cracks and divets.

Bolt after bolt unscrolled as flesh.  Laid out.  Stretched out.  Smoothed.  Sagged.  Ironed.  Smelt.

Felt for quality.  Caressed and examined.

The lonely wonder.  Represent.

47 X x = ?

.

Confusion persuasive.  Revelation / insight.  Chords resolve.  Dissonance.

Language + landscape + living.  47 measures.

Months go by.  Chairs and couches filled by others’ beds.  Warmth weighs.

Waits on wisdom.  Depletion.  Adventure as excited strain.

.

Poison intravenous.  Copulating cells and fluids.

Ends of the guilty.  Interpret unfinished systems.  Dis-ease.

The long whine wail across the prairie.  Animal manual.  Wind wires rain.

What gets whispered and transcribed.

Stumbling toward the underworld.  Looking back.

Eyes up, ocean bottom.

Some things are out of hand.

Like danger.

The grey and black.  The dimming.

47 warnings.  The morning comes.

.

Making it.  Happens.

Diagnoses and analyses.

Shuffles, stumbles, strikes the keys.

Easy to trace as wind.

Chorded coagulation, confounding,

comprehending (very little, almost nothing)

language, landscape, living,

another note tunes the swing on the porch –

inconnu – 

what’s wide open, open wide

.

Shrewd and undiminished.

Minimize = understanding.

A matter of scale,

for I am a thing that breaks.

.

47 slices of nothing.

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Taking the word(s) further…

On By N FilbertIn Writing2 Comments

Once again Jean Lee (https://jeanleesworld.com/) digs up an old post of mine that was useful for me to revisit… Thanks!

Precipitate Flux

Part the Ninth: At the Thresholds: Afraid

“the torture of meaning is the vain and interminable agreement between what there is, on the one hand,

and ordinary language, on the other”

-Alain Badiou-

“Fear is the original and basic feeling of man; from fear everything is explicable”

-Friedrich Nietzsche-

“Fear is the basic condition, and there are all kinds of reasons why we’re so afraid.

But the fact of the matter is, is that, is that the job we’re here to do is to learn how to live in a way that we’re not terrified all the time”

-David Foster Wallace-

“Only reality has frightening us as its goal”

-Helene Cixous-

“We produce imaginary causes because an explanation of a thing helps to alleviate the fear of it”

-H.L. Hix-

“Our culture likes to think of everything as true or false – this is…

View original post 729 more words

Remembering. Repeat.

On By N FilbertIn human, Loss, memory, thought, Writing4 Comments

To try.

Try to

re

member.

Stitching together the dismembered, again.

It is “us”?  “That”?  A substance?  A trajectory?

A subject?  A story?  (Fable)?

.

What might re-member, and re-member what?

Sensations?  Who?  Events?  When?  Experiences?  How?

Is re-membering an aspect of Why?

Moods?

Times?

Being?

.

Where are the members to be re-stored, re-gathered, re-composed, or freshly constituted?

.

That pre-(before)-fix (secured, pinned, stayed) “re-“.  To do over, again, re-peat.  Peat is a furry humus, a difficult detangling.  Nigh impossible to dismember without caveat or faith.  Some belief in categories or divisions, de-cisions, parts and wholes, composites and particles, atoms, scales, cells, waves or functions… no longer “peat.”  How would one forge that again?

.

Moist and messy tangle, eons into bog…

.

I thought.

Thought “it” – “I”.

Knifeblade activity.

.

Peat.  Re.  Member(s).

.

Desire.  (Mood?  Emotion?  “Drive”?).

.

Prompted to thicken.  The caked, flaky, dry – toward some humid, muddy moor.  A memory.

.

To re-member one must pre-fix.  In order to carve members to append and rivet.  Desiccate to gather.  Continuous forgetting forging together.  Organic?  Decomposition’s ritard?

.

Where does one go for the matter of “parts”?  Ingredients for concoction, for the rotten mixing and blend.  A meaning dependent on decay.

.

What is it we spoil in re-membering?

.

Experiencing.  Out of – perceiving – in to.  Wherefrom, wherefore, this ‘out of’?  And the in-to flows – ?  The membering limn.  The meeting-joints. The fields of grave. Are there objects?  Is it obstacle?  In-to-eruption?  Happen-stance?

.

Vivisection for autopsy – our arbitrary blade.  Figures cut.  Marking the joins, indivisibly.  Perception.  To sieve-for.  For what?  For whom?  In the mire.

.

Try.

Try to re-member without division.

Immersively, immanently, experiencing… without within, within without.

.

Re-peat.

More fears….

On By N FilbertIn WritingLeave a comment

stumbled across this old composition… and realized how little I’ve changed…

Precipitate Flux

This post does not occur formatted as I have written it, but near enough.  The inserted quotations are actually sidebars in the original text, not inserted, but I couldn’t find a way to do that here.  Let me know what you think!

“Fear – No Fear” by Robert Frank

“Experience teaches not to trust experience”after Robert Frank

-Lynne Tillman-

“It may be that to understand ourselves as fictions,

is to understand ourselves as fully as we can”

-Jeanette Winterson-

The “Talking Cure” they called it.

Fear

It occurred to me to talk to myself again.

“Finally, after five months of my life during which I could write nothing that would have satisfied me and for which no power will compensate me, though all were under obligation to do so, it occurs to me to talk to myself again”

-Franz Kafka,

Diaries 1910-

I’d gotten lost. In images. In…

View original post 947 more words

for LMK: Living Mitigates Knowing: the Sirens’ Song

On By N FilbertIn being, desire, ecstasy, eros, Joy, Living, love, meaning, Other, Poetry, relation, Writing2 Comments

Birdcall.

Morning.

Activity-signal.

 

Somewhere day arrives.

 

We are in bed.

Day neither comes nor goes.

Neither night.

 

We inhabit a single chair.

A reciprocal rebellion.

Atemporal, atopos.

 

The other.

The relation.

The kiss

 

that undoes the you, the me,

joining any separation

as touch

 

along with bodies of skin,

skinned together,

indeterminable

 

without one, another

within, without each –

a combinatory beast

 

where components are absent,

extended, present-ly,

be-coming

 

birdcalls and signals

dependent on immanent surrounds;

nothing undone,

 

anything in their crafty work

and wrestling,

Eriegnis, evental –

 

a pleasure and desire

formulating forms

without priors –

 

echoed and originary;

unpredictable, unknown;

tandem happenings

 

we sometimes describe

 

as love.

Sparing Language

On By N FilbertIn Writing1 Comment

To be read attentively, considered… comments, thoughts encouraged

fragilekeys

To continue writing poetry, one would have to believe in the universal human value of expressions of singularity. Not in ‘big’ singularities (poets supposedly), but in small ones that coincided with their expression (delimited, circumscribed, contoured in the poem). But expressions too of a generic potentiality for thinking―for speaking the truth―faced with the empty page. Along poetry’s route, this necessitates the sparing of language, which can be described in multiple registers.

Language is spared whenever it is not enchained and constrained to a sharp finality (e.g., the instrumental purposes of capital, but also the brandishing of identities, the definition of objects); whenever language is played with, to open a world, to expose the miracle of one, or in one way or another to exhibit its capacity for conceiving wholeness, totality, the indivisibly singular―the thatness of whatever is such, the it-is-ness that poetry deems refractable through images. Such language does not have a…

View original post 1,470 more words

Light, as a feather

On By N FilbertIn Art, creative writing, friendship, Image, Perception, Photography, Traces, Writing5 Comments
Lee_Light Feather 2018
unfixed photographic print of a feather – gift from Summer Lee

How seeing depends… opacity, clarity… foggy horizons between tumultuous sea and sky…

Light, as a feather – the dawn in darkness, or the hoping carrying despair.

What is seen, then?  What fore- or back- grounds an image?  How?  In mist, in motion.  In a dream that waking brings.

In which direction, grounding?  And wherefore?  Lightness limning itself again, again, in midst of darker swells and slighter traces.

How seeing depends… on light, the eye, the stimmung – the stemming of mood – and graver swirls… beg-ins and sets-out from.  Within.  Without.  Finding curious concord.  Even when there’s barely there.  Either.

Deepens, depends, opens out, away, in deep ends, hollow holing, turbulent tunnels, seeing unseen, a groping for/in light where none.  Peering is something, as the closing of the eyes – telescopic blindfold.

Perhaps dawn is down, where despair is rising.  Hope precipitating beyond eithers, or… differences imperceptible save the seeing…

How seeing depends… and deepens with what is searched for, what wants, who opens,  what feels, within each where-when, becoming there-thens, seeing how.

It begins, then, all seeing, between.  Bounding back-forth in light and light and any weighted things, ever shifting seeing-sea and emptied sky, re-membering differences to seamlessness, with opaque clarity, as such your “I.”

Lee Letter 2018
Text included with photograph – Summer Lee 2018

Last Days of the Year (12.31.2017)

On By N FilbertIn absence, Aging, Art, Blogging, change, creative writing, Experience, Literature, longing, Writing2 Comments

after Helene Cixous’ First Days of the Year (all quotations from)

 

642177

“…writing doesn’t know the story…”

– Helene Cixous –

Writing had dissipated, eroded and erasured, “the stream, the slender silent stream with its singing arms,” dried, swallowed, scabbed to dusty ground, hardened wounds, simple soundless scarring – unmarked, unmapped, uninterpreted or deciphered.

“Writing, that link, that growth, that orientation” and mysterious connection in the veins – beneath earth, across times, that leaky, throbbing, flowing, trickling tickle in the fingers of the throat – evaporated to ether.

Space is full of voids again, the entire body is corpse.  It was air that was missing – oxygen and hydrogen – a liquid, invisible, fluid force and blazing trail – its quiet tireless effort coursing, a desert without shore.

“’It has been many years now,’… thought the author”…many years of dwindling, echoing thoughts…many years without solution or solvent, no bed, no pull, no sea or slope – an eviscerated wandering lacking movement, without promise or retreat, direction or return, rather something absent, lost, unknown.

Bedrest – a way to heal by falling fallow, running out, caesura and inaction.  Some old trace viewed from scale, an only remnant held by wind – a sentenced shrub, a stop of phrase.  Riverbedrest and desertduned unwinding – depiction’s dearth, branches clotstopping gravity’s swill or swirl, deadwooded filaments tumbling anywhere the green had been, the iron bled from vein.

“I am going to write,” he had thought at first… but I weigh 47 years and “writing is eternal [knowing] neither weight nor time,” it will not lift and carry me, breezing past as it always has every present unto present – ageless phantom, foreign phrase I am unable to pronounce.

Vanishing link between the bodies, submerged and buried and unspoken – “writing doesn’t know the story” – dumb and blind as memory’s ‘I.’  The lost and forgotten, what will not come to be.  “To me, this is a blow, a threat.”

“…the book we do not write.  There is a book.  That we do not write…” … wordless and disobeyed, unwritten extinction, disordered and undone.  Passage and passing of this now here.  This book that’s not here.  Irrelevant utopia.  A desiccated thread, a wilderness with imperceptible end, some perhaps forlorn and far-off song, long since warbled into stillness.  I “do not have what it takes to make a book,” long-lost imagining and fabricated dreams, suffered weeping for what-is-not, what-never-was, the known and haunting will-not-be, pains of life assigned to us.

Sightless, flightless bird without brain enough or claw for scribbles, vision canceled by the crossings-out and scratchings, greedy skimming scamper seeking recognizable seeds, some words less foreign or forgotten, that might crack in the craw and cackle a sigh, a chortle, some wheezy whisper… anything other than absence, the starving shame, the empty marrow, acrid arteries, and granulating groin.  Wretched rictus claw, blindly scraping at a pen, a page, a flesh-as-grass, a drop of dew, some ancient call –

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL

…and thank you

“Winter Solstice”: ‘The Stealing (Litany + Logos) of the Hours’: ONLY. EVER. EACH.

On By N FilbertIn Writing6 Comments

The longing for human solitude.

The fear of it.

Left alone / all-one to ‘one-self’: “one” “self” (being).

“Thank you ‘god’ for clear pee”, it says, standing over the toilet, after hours of only drinking water (in its alternate forms as well – vodka, fruits juices, coffee, vegetable, including ‘straight’ H2O).

Cobwebs woven on moving shoes, slow, and methodical progress…

death.  Impossible.  Inevitable.

The shallow deeps.  (The quick (shallow) & the dead (deeps)).

Radiance, swallowed.

Each.  First.  Day.

Begins.

“Human Solstice”: every longest shortest.  Every.

  • It’s never more or less than: this.  This one.  This.  Now.

Begins: only always.  Only ever.  Only each.

Do you have a sense of the ‘present’?  The only, every, each, NOW/HERE?

Without recall.

Only ever only each.

NOW.

HERE.

—

Happy so.

Grateful so.

Miracle THIS.

—

Just now.

Anytime, wherever.

 Begins.

Ends.

Now.

Here.

All-Ways.

‘Hello, I wish…’

 

[HAPPY HOLIDAYS]