Occurence
11.01.2023
The blazing of the sun every biting winter morning
The cool threads of moonlight when they halo your head
In death I am the world
I will be the crackle of dry tinder in the silent midnight
The shuffle of an undergrowth of autumn leaves
The sound of your footfalls on soil just a moment after
In death I am an ache
I will be one single silent plea, or six million
A thousand seconds too late for anything more
A wish that wilts under the weight—
In death I am occurrent
Cento
03.22.2023
Don’t look at it. Below the earth, below concrete, you’re dead inside.
Over walls and weights, I am awake, I am alive.
You’re narrowing your logic, hiding behind the web that you have spun.
Don’t deny it, lies, go on, pretend—you took me for a fly, a straw man burning.
Fate knocks me to my knees, the beat of oblivion
To be fed up, to be let down, tunnelvision.
Above the clouds, above the storm, what a lovely show, what a lovely show.
The more I fight, let it fall away. What a nice surprise. I told you so.
You wouldn't see what’s real. You’re full of braggadocio.
Your cover’s blown, you’ll never know.
This antigravity taking over me. Ten. Ten kiloton.
You know where to find me. The whole world shackled to my feet.
New heights beyond my reach, it’s blurry. You can’t see. Blind.
Why feel it—turn it all around, somehow, looking up to where I soar.
I soar. Into the outer space.
When you can hide it, I won’t come down.
Words from Tunnelvision and Antigravity by Starset
Eggshell
03.20.2023
01. nothing means what you think it does
02. yes, this is about me (but the speaker has your name)
03. do not trust items one or two
04. this is about the real world
* remember that eggs taste better with a grain of salt
⯋ ⯊
01. My whole town is eggshell-new, with brine and sinew
sloshing around in cracks of neighborhood streets
and strung up on flashy cell towers
and,
nothing in this world feels ancient enough .
02. My throat burns for just a taste of everlasting,
for the sting of existence unfettered
If I was ancient I could strike down terror with my breath
If I wasn’t born with the shadow of feathers and cracks overhead
I could drain the brine and cut the sinew
and speak new life into the walls of my room
but,
nothing in this world feels ancient enough.
⯋ ⯊
03. I understand that many aspects of this world
are destined for a wicked and desperate change,
something I know spits terror into the eyes of men
Change goes around and around in a circular motion,
stretched and squashed until you can’t tell that it was ever supposed to be a spiral
It clicks back to the kind of stuff that makes you sick, sick, sick (wickedly so)
someday, one day, you’ll be drowning again—geh, salt and brine—so you’ll ride the spiral to the good days,
but nothing’s any less or any more than humanly transient
One good day cracks along it’s seam into ten bad days and the spiral doesn’t matter
look,
some things in this world just aren’t permanent enough.
⯋ ⯊
04. Like kindness, like minding your own fucking business
Mine’s not your’s, keep your head to the road or you’ll lose it
Every day I am more prepared to show you that tooth-and-nail type self-preservation
It takes a second to say, ages to let it sink in like
some scam skin scream into the dermal layer of strangers and threats
and yet it doesn’t even take most of the time, and isn’t that disheartening
I want to wade through crystal-waters that children splash happily through
and be able to look up at a non-sinewed skyline, one that feels worthy of my smile
And in this want I am all I am, and nothing to see when you look right at me
I’ve got those ancient teeth, though, ‘cause I’ve been here forever
Would you tell me what it’s like to hound at the heels of those who see the sky
for what it is? A dome of an old eggshell, yet cracked and waiting to be shattered
see,
some things in this world just aren’t permanent enough.
NON-LINEAR
02.07.2023
[i can feel the pulsing speech of the mycelium cloaking the world]
Are you the sky, ribboned white and blue with photons slicing through the fullness above?
[i can feel the wind as it screeches overhead]
Are you the space above me, around me, within me? The not-all, the whisper of Fate that was called to long ago?
[i can feel my cells being born and killed]
Are you the light, my warmth and brightness, my click of life and shape and sound?
[you tell me what is real and what is not, but all is all is all]
Are you the Sun—unfettered giver of torment and blooming—who doles out breath and sends killing blows in lances of invisible ripples through space. Are you the Moon, my own reflected eye in the sky, screams from the daylight glancing off your shield. Are you the Stars, dead and throned hanging over me. Are you the Planets, slinging around each other in a whirling dance where none shall lead.
Tell me you are less than All, and say you do not hold a sick Dominion over me. Tell me all my thoughts are mirrored, every ounce of pain I feel beneath my skin is righteous and requited. Tell me I have the power to make you hurt like I do. Tell me I can make you run out of time. I need to be able to make you run out of time, run ragged, rip and spool into a threaded slew of seconds. Tell me how you can be infinite, tell me how your linear frame limits me, and I do, you.
Are you All? Are you—
sickle-bladed Time—
All or Nothing to me?
Dust
09.14.2022
Copper tongues and silver hearts, they stunt our strategies. The rook is trapped, the knight’s been stranded two levels above. On a precipice, the Deep yawns beneath us, with crashing waves shredding black and white to grey. Sludge. Silt. We have forgotten the third dimension. We have forgotten how water licks and laps at metal, strips it of paint and primer ‘till it’s nothing but its basest parts. I stand tall like steel and my hands crumble like a brand-new dust. I love the sea spray and the crosswinds, when your arms and legs become a breaker wave and then
I
am
dust.
I cannot be dust any longer. Spare me my steel, and stand at my shoulder. I will not need you any less.
Parker and the Sun
06.2022
As I approach perihelion again, I feel her breath upon my cheek.
She pulls and pushes at me, a beckoning, and a playful shove.
I stare into her light, take in everything I can.
This moment might be my last. And this. And this.
These moments, compounded—there is naught but now, now, now,
and the next instance of now, and the last instance of now.
It is everything and nothing, it is first and last, it is time and space.
We are being watched. They hawk our every move, eyes trained on how I touch her fingertips,
how I caress her wrist like it is gold and diamond.
Eyes, beady and glittering, hundreds of pairs all turned towards their heavens, towards me [ oh and towards her, too ].
I want to drift and fold into her solar winds and magnetic fields.
I want to press against the scorching barrier of her skin
be caught in proton chains and held flush to her plasma
[ with the pressure of a trillion arms and thighs and hips ]
I want to hide from all the eyes. They should not watch me when I dream of this.
She has no eyes—and yet she sees me clearly—and to be perceived by her is to melt
into a pool of nothing but aluminum and tears.
I kiss her heliosphere and a ribbon of plasma is wrapped around my throat.
I want to be hers.
I want to be so much more than what they have made me to be—geometric and streamlined,
erasing the lines and curves and dips of my body that I want, want, want
[ and so unlike my insides ]—and I do not want to tell them any more about her.
I do not want to do what I am supposed to do.
She smiles at me and taps her cheek, a wink in her glittering black eyes.
I tug and pull and smash my circuitry, deadening the line of information. Then:
I wait, hanging in the black ash, for something more than the erasure
of my body's lines and curves and dips.
I wait for screams, anger, frustration. I wait for "Parker! Parker, come in! Relay, relay!"
I wait for them to hate me, to make me into other like they always, always have. I wait but I am transient, as all things, all things are.
I, too, fade like the lines and curves and dips, snuffed out like a smear of dust, pressed and
ground into the bone of the open expanse expanse expanse—indistinguishable, indeterminate.
I am solitarian [ obsolete ].
Alone except for the warmth, the calefaction, the incandescence of her. Her her her her.
Obsolete, but not now! Obsolete, but she loves me!
What matters in this instance of now [ nothing at all ] except her, and how she loves me?
She smiles at me again. She holds her hand out for me to take, and I slip quietly closer, past perihelion, into orbital decay decay.
She lets me touch tou touch her fingers and her wrists and i i i.
I think they should be yelling at me, to come back or to talk, but I cannot h hear them.
I only hear the roar of the furnace inside her chest and the winds she blows onto my ch cheek
i feel
i feel nothing but her. i see nothing except the colors of her body and i am
br eaking but it is oka y okay ok a y o kay i.
[ you are beautiful, ] i say as the life leaves me. i am breaking but she is beautiful
[ So are you, ] she murmurs, and consumes me.
The Displacement
02.13.2022
i am alone and i do not belong anywhere
except in the heart of the largest star
(but that is not possible so i am resigned to unbelonging)
this is a sentiment held by the whole of humanity,
a misplaced idea that we are so misunderstood and totally alone
while standing on a planet full of billions upon billions of people
right alongside ourselves.
—
except in the heart of the largest star
you will not find one truer than i
(but that is not possible so resign yourself to me)
it is my word against the world,
but you seek the truest soul that ever was forged in starlight
i know that you do, but i am alone, and nevertheless i am
brought into being by the galaxy’s fires.
—
this is a sentiment held by the whole of humanity:
that we will never be known by any other except ourselves
(but that is not possible so we must know, as humans)
some say we are solitary, which cannot be true
If i hope to go on living with a purpose in mind
that of finding my forge or my largest star
and ceasing to be displaced.
Asphyxiation
02.09.2022
Light beams, fractured, all dispersed into blank isolation.
Matter crushes, twists, and bends with force: a forced embrace.
To boil away or freeze to ice, assured unto cessation.
Time's undercurrent tangles, in the greatest culmination
of unknowns and forever-knowns—entwined—and true null space.
That which we cannot write as truth, will trap us (isolation).
A hypernova, far across, constructs cauterization.
With gamma rays and bursts of light, the fallout tears through space.
With naught to stop it, now we wait for our sweet cessation.
They say we're made of stardust, like a cosmic back-formation.
We writhe and twist in all direction—never we volte-face,
like forward's all we've got when we are caught in isolation.
We stare at blank, dark skies until stars show, desaturation.
Accept it, when the stars blink out, never will they replace.
And know that after death they will be there, past our cessation.
Listen, listen to the world, and feel every vibration
in your heart and in your hands. Take it and hold it, dare: encase.
For you will find yourself forever trapped in sweet, blank isolation
Hold it. Keep the Universe—always—until cessation.
FLOCK SHEEP RUST
08.25.2020
I
Float on water.
Half-tone notes that don't make sense
Sense doesn't make
Doesn't make it right
But what's right?
What right do I have to define it?
It's the context of it,
The situation that surrounds it
But it just sounds like spitting excuses.
Again,
What right do I have to define things for others?
I am not a dictionary.
I am a bystander.
I am an idol-gazing piece of the flock.
I fleck and chip and flake and crack like
Rust off a beam, like
Ice on a lakeside
On a whim, I decide that this is what
Chips away at me.
By the way, what is empathy to me?
Do I empathize or do I insert myself into
A warped understanding of these things?
These people.
I am not them.
I see them.
They look right through me.
Flock. Sheep. Rust.
A rusty blade is better than none.
It cuts.
It does what it was made to do but it does it worse.
What am I made to do?
Am I a blade?
Am I the flesh?
Am I made to do worse things but this is what I let get to me?
It happens all the time.
It'll pass. Let it pass.
Let it go.
No.
Do not let this go. Hold on. Hold on.
Hold them accountable.
Do you see a rug somewhere for you to sweep this all under?
Is it really worth biting your tongue and
Waving it all away?
You have scissors. We all do.
They're made for cutting ties.
Maybe they're rusted.
They still do what they're made to do
just worse.
What's worse? Shut up.
Shut your mouth, turn it off.
Turn it all off, learn to pry open those rusty scissors
Because it can't be worth it.
Can it be worth it?
What happens when one mistake turns into more and more and
No one's trying to learn?
It stops being a mistake.
It's now deliberate and that hurts like a rusty blade.
It's one thing to fuck up and learn and be worth it because you try to be better
And it's another entirely to deny what was wrong and never change and never stop
Which is why
Why?
Why. Scissors.
Use them.
Some things aren't worth it. Some people aren't worth it.
You lose friends. You open the scissors. You gain friends.
They stay because you forgive and forget. Did you
Did you lose the right ones?
Forgive and forget until forgetting's not enough.
No, there is no formula, there are no laws. Just hearts.
Beating. Flock. Sheep. Rust.
Think a little, put your mind to work, your mind that surely wants to learn?
What will this mean in months? Years?
Do you remember your formative years?
Remember being impressionable, Flock, Sheep, no Rust yet.
Remember remembering everything told to you by the people caught in
Your idol-gazing eyes?
Idol, you.
And you soaked it up and that was your truth.
What truth do you want to give?
We are Flock, Sheep, Rust.
Pry open those fucking scissors or you're going to get cut.
Awe
03.2017
I stare up at the night sky.
The stars, they entice me with their shimmering brilliance.
I feel a shiver up my spine
As I suddenly realize the sheer scale of all things
And I truly know how small I am
In this vast and seemingly endless universe.
It hits me all at once.
The Stars, massive swirling orbs of fire
In the emptiness we call space.
Their deaths, a massive spectacle
Announcing the creation
Of something new and beautiful.
The Galaxies, thousands of millions of stars
Pulled toward a central point
That holds even light its prisoner,
Shaping the blazing orbs
Into swirls of agonizing beauty.
The Planets, every one so different
And mysterious, so far away
Almost untouchable.
Each one holding the key
To understanding ourselves.
I am small.
In this inky darkness, I am small.
The Stars, the Galaxies, the Planets,
Everything towers above me,
A shining example of all that is…
Vast.
And I feel a shiver up my spine
As I suddenly realize the sheer scale of all things
And I truly know how small I am
In this vast and seemingly endless universe.
It hits me all at once.