Five pages

Emboldened and Intoxicated

     Time quakes the rattled nerves that lie disrupted in connection, floating in fraying pieces under the surface, that become light and heavy in stringy expanses to contain steadily defeated urges, connecting to sinew and straightening out as they toughen up, coarse, turning into tendons holding a person who has gone liquid to their skeleton.

     Cattle in spaces just beneath the future leather, or man’s neurological tissues strewn to full pertinence in blurring vision - in those times that you need to remain upright, when something else shifts you in whatever direction more than you move - leather and sun and skin with sweet tinges and bitter scents rising through the pores, for every tomorrow settled in dismissed recollection.



Learned from Time Spent Watching Demons

     Shuffling their forms apart from shade in concealed movements, remaining coupled to the absence of light, strands of shadows grow out of their screened seas tendrils dithering in pieces to panting soot and elongating into ephemeral fibers, spiraling forward as they tighten themselves into twining. 
     Then the blackened cordage slips around the victim's throat unnoticed.



Turbulence

     Pestering conclusions surround then the empty closes in, it takes a person like they’re being swallowed by the boundaries of their own selves, which suddenly have become an open shaft with slick walls and no way to climb out.

     Falling, colliding and thinning with air and sinking through current, being dispersed along the bottom of the sky.

But still on the ground.



Parts of a Tree

Fell out from inside the ridges of the bark in dark long strands of half bodies, contaminated my clothes.

(And slept on the branch on my belly, awoke with the woodened patterns of thick waving vertical bars pressing into one side of my face.)

Fell out of dreams rooted deep enough to reach moist soil, startled at the distant sounds of birds excited to eat insects flying at sunset.



Personality Testing Character

Fell the tree-line if you expect release.

     The open expanse is just past the appropriate act, but the bible is full of those types of quandaries, and that’s the only good book.

Time your exits by how the surprise shortening of your availability registers after you’re gone.

     Few catch all the atmospheric shadows, massive and draping their forms downward, superimposed and dimming in ghostly visual echoes, collapsing to Earth like a shared and lonely secret, that take the sky and anything that could be called oversight in the first place.

Still, it requires a special typecast.

     A peculiar but indispensable mold, built in the specific ways every act committed commiserates with memory, holds in its crevices and concave regimenting structures the feeling of having your every question answered. 

It tempts the target to remain in place, and for the entire time they are held in thrall, their forms shift.



Standards of the Industry (Players Included)

     Beaten into them with trembling persistence then cored out and left a husk, training the deviant debutante and functioning ensemble, learning the personable, absent and wandering the ephemeral self, but vision mining out both corners of their eyes, always - so they never see anything coming. 
     Dailies and stock ticker streams are interchangeable if you’re high enough up in the building, as are the screens, just shut your eyes. There is nothing they can’t control.
     Does the sickening travel through the shades of the digital colors in the projections?
     Tune in at 8 to decide?
     They worked hard enough to deliver:

     Cuddle up to heated up dismal sweats in under 22 minutes and it’ll make the cut.



Nightly Broadcast

     Deterring the answer in favor of the warning on the packaging, wrapping up in the freezing that makes stuttering impossible to avoid, but that’s concealed in the studio monitors, and the voice of the broken like lateral icicles eviscerates as cold as the air is piercing…

To put things into a format that is welcoming enough, considerate enough, and after a style that leaves nothing resolved but feels authoritarian, as the standard. It keeps them tuning in.



Once Cornered

     There is no one near but the air becomes crowded with terrible silent wretches pushing into a personal sub-reality, one that perhaps only the pineal can perceive directly, and the impact of sensing ribbons of intricate lifeforms creates its own effect. Standing tall, then dissipating as your person, into the channels their total populations create.

     It is marked by a sudden clenching throughout the body, as if you’re being seized upon within yourself, it is overcoming, but there's no one near.



Principles of Radar

     It was in their dreams to never see that target write again.

     Silent and anxious twitches in their faces, their minds racing, guessing words, huddled in the closet of a room, for insulation and to concentrate a pseudonym for character out of the lot of them; something they can take turns using for disguise as they move through shadows to commit all the acts light fails to complete.

     It’s matter and exposure - not “a” then of - it’s critical mass fast dissolve simply because enough time was given. Thus, their interest to never hear from those types again, from the patients and those lost in the crevices of a scratched surface, and all those articulating their numbers into homogeneity then disappearing into the quiet signal-fed masses.

     Grey skies are clouds that seem matted if you’re living under the same storm front long enough, maybe in the span of a week, then the sky may as well become floor for the spectacle you’ve just created - looking at the world that way.

Or, was that the silent removed orchestration coopting a lived perspective - aching not to haunt? Built of death just the same, with decay the result of its approach.

Or is it the living who fuel it, those versed in everything light fails to complete?



Building Systems - The Importance of Leaving Things Out

     Rattling its self together or piecemeal degrading apart at the edges, in mists acquiring thickness selectively, as interest, as if by amortization with physical repercussions, a thing built - ethereal, or as on paper - from the latter grew servants, their bodies like scales, their spirits housed in each drying out, waiting to be shed reptile fleck of the different skin they all share, while something more literal about that is known by the former.

     -One statement can make hierarchical mysteries, make you feel like you’re acknowledged by the encoded definition only they found in the reading; from their passages these pages will acquire nuance, learning new ways to encourage yield and no one will be the wiser…



A Discontinued Anthropological Study

     To build within what was only figments of structure without letting their brains solidify the perpetration (the artificial edifice is as invisible as vapor before cloud - like a mist one can sense but not see), because from there the cages can take shape, they are internal, and as they close in their interior dimensions shift, accommodating whatever walls peculiar to each victim are already in place:

“The underlying motive, the cohesion we enliven works as spirit only gaining body, only levelling potential to affect changes in the lesser deserving by the actions of our fellows.”

     Actions in potentia are defined by the sanguine caliber of victims, in the specific ways how each one missed the mark flows from their fading corpses - their eyes betraying the shine of hope as they go, vacating their purpose white-grey cloudy and it’s a shame.

     This outlook grows from the relatively fertile ground in their psyches that exists between forgotten streams of conversations with their elders; while they transpired they couched the corridors of the recipient’s thoughts with obvious conclusions everyone else will have to pay for, and that sounds like an obtuse entry to understanding, but this culture are the fully sighted, leading one another, generation after generation down pitch-black corridors.



Time You Came ‘Round

     Felt closer and less, the warmth drenched the air in summers and falls, in evenings when the bitterness of the rinds only came out if you chewed down to the white parts, because it was quiet and even then, only when the days lasted into nights, for that time of year when day-end heat makes its own physical echoes to take over the spine, in secret with difference, then the moisture of dim light built as the sun set earlier, day by day matriculating to dark particle oceans afloat in pitch black by six - it was all remembrance in clouds of soot when we met.



Notes for the Conversationalist

     Danger lies in collapsible, languid and profane propositions, and in corridors of communication trafficked by the treacherous but determined, by the lacking but sinister; people shake inwardly at an empty prospect, at the potential spirit of an embrace too constricting to utter a sound - at the hypothetical horror of an earnest offering that falls short, and they choose the posturing over the presentation - the glimmer playing across a span of broken glass over the drink they may as well have enjoyed.

     There was a presence near, from it a fury was occasionally betrayed by a swell of indifference, it grew covertly tempestuous in its vision and spectacle then by mere proximity it threatened to engulf me, until I was alone.  



Accounts of the Academic Transaction Whose Receipt is the Destroyed World

No one ever decided to simply make the math up, but the equations were ignored enough for interpretations to win out over end-quotients.

-If that’s even an applicable term, because the founders of the school would not approve the lexicon to be used until they had been granted sole approval rights.

     Then everything was said to be shifting but nothing was adrift, no changes on the horizon, so we checked, all of it was still as anchored to nothing as it ever was - a storm swell that doesn’t start by mimicking the ocean, a scream from an open mouth whose air was stolen - and the whole process was only designed to build consensus?

     An apparent strategy we learned we have all been stuck in since the most apparent big bang, and this, again, did not match the equations that the founders made clear we would never be sanctioned to correct, so we went silent.

There is no opposition.
Hell or heaven is building.
(And not the lie their kind believes makes them one in the same.)

No one’s checking on your personal choice and if they’re smart, they haven’t even given your life or where you’ll end up a single thought. That’s how bad it got.



Air Conditioning

If you missed the ending someone close by will claim to have seen it, and this keeps everything safe, things go subtle in distinctions over a duration that peddles your thoughts to your brain, but you feel it like a block of melting ice is filling the hold where your brain should be -

Like chilled frozen dripping insides and content are your makeup.

While faces seem to work in concert, keeping it all still.



What is following?

Nothing warmed like the invisible panels we’ve maintained, the hauntingly thin partitions directing onlookers without notice.

With casual glances an unspoken language we pretend we’re fluent in carries the evening (everywhere all the time) while the words, their roots and source constructs were designed by another hand people can’t seem to let go of, that threatens to strengthen or crumble the hidden walls we keep at its whim.

Preceding was some of the newest work from the upcoming collection, The Eyes Shut: Starlight Pages. Here is an Eyes Shut: Starlight poem: http://anewgnosis.com/2021/10/25/names-eyes-shut-starlight/