Poetry
PYRAMIDS
PYRAMIDS
Jacques Rancière writes ‘we
cannot identify ourselves with
their feelings’ a thought
that expands into this apologetic
for the evening’s seeming
disorder the reach of it stunted
laughably impressionistic as Forest
Whitaker’s empath role
in SPECIES it’s the first real snow
of the year & I’m laying on my bed
stoned listening to Blood Orange
wrapped in the white batting that’s
escaped thru holes in my comforter
the contrast of warmth & color
suggestive I’m thinking about
the commercial failure of yr work
laid against the often predatory
ideals of art critique their foundation
in a lowkey quest for tension
that glitch between
experience & its warped reflection
how it squares with our actual
connectivity & the bare
comfort it affords so it got
to the point where staging
yr death became
the most efficacious way
to touch something warm teasing
out a space between celebration
& solemn ritual asleep in that dip
in the graph of our comfort levels
a certain light disconnected
from cause & then how the muscle
memory takes over comedy
& religion in trompe-l'œil
a sacred mystery profaned
in IRRATIONAL LANDLORDISM
OF BAGHDAD Jack
Smith asks “Could art be useful
…thousands of artists have NOT
pondered & dreamed of
such a thing, yet art must not be
used as another elaborate means
of fleeing from thinking’ & just now
on Pitchfork I read that Dev Hynes lost
his dog & apartment to a massive fire
in Brooklyn last night & shamed
my thoughts immediately fall back
to this struggle in belief the efficacy
of creative work positioned
as if it’s really an elusive cipher
for something physical & lasting
we expect to find within it something
beyond the immediate concerns
of material life the work I mean
the things we read
that the music & drugs can be
so illuminating for the moment
we choose to extend outward
a platform securely fixed high above
us but partially obscured R. Kelly
performing BUMP N’ GRIND
in front of a curtain
hiding Daft Punk’s stage set
a pink beam ascending
from Karnac or like a ubiquitous
little zine that fades completely
away as this poem where all
sensory impressions cast off
on separate trajectories collide
into a year end list aimed at totality
capped by the title
ARE WE LIVING IN
A HOLOGRAM? a ghost of
something to triangulate
our positions on earth
one that seems almost real
PYRAMIDS
when high enough
everything joins
the continuum
the Paris
Commune becomes
Antony's Alexandria
LA plays New York
in Erika Beckman's
WE IMITATE; WE
BREAK UP
the workweek begins
we become more erratic
unbalanced
the dance falls apart
into some preemptive
dotage once
we were
inside each other
like one wild
heretic star
earthbound
then
in the crash
broken up
into dominance
& passivity
according to taste
legs guiding eyes
hands guiding the legs
& waists their
names symbolic tho
interchangeable
each retaining a germ
of its origin
growing inside
worshipful
of the difference
& want
continuation
stuck in a moment of
initiation to wage work
Tom Ripley
in the addiction
yet the memory remains
resilient
a viral arabesque
rotating Intro
it seems familiar today
even late-
pop capital
crush
like COUNTDOWN
Phoenix building
arpeggiated steps of synth
to a penthouse
mesmerizing
as a ziggurat
of Cool Whip
and we ascend
fantasy beyond the check
Oh fuck!
a job can break your heart
PYRAMIDS
been rollin’ for a little bit blissed out in the Integratron or airglow caught in the street where the subtle depth of NO ORDINARY LOVE polarizes the looks we exchange above the crowd strings of tiny Christmas lights form snowflakes wreathed down the boulevard their near obsolescence briefly shaken from the flint of a nondescript winter evening a shot of cognac thru the air nothing’s lost in the warm intoxication that grows with dreams of bathwater jasmine oil torch songs an aural extension of firm bare skin arched over porcelain a tightness in the musculature of thought the earnestly mouthed singalongs trailing lines of condensed breath like something to erase the vague property between to scrape all the vitals clean away & place them in storage so we can freely ascend tethered to a line of experiences that’s passed through the bass of a turquoise Civic our now abstracted remainders sintered to a line of powder across the woodgrain tableau primed to reenter the bloodstream a coronation presided over by the spirit of her voice’s assurance lifted into film & bearing witness beneath it our gaze triangulates on a prize & the heat rises & caught staring we’re implicated with a sort of possession of desire or livelihood inextricably linked to another body in focus our timeless connections hardened by necessity in the moment indicating the false value we cloth them with as if a mandate from a higher love some silver lining that deigns to part & release bent channels of color that we open our mouths to take inside then the part where Frank breaks history down in ten minutes the sky rolls back and I’m driving north on I-84 with Sarah & Nick & Joseph & Rachel & the light’s dimming at the horizon timed as if to perfectly match the almost indiscernible pulse of drums & her voice fading out as if to suggest the universal promise of forever’s natural half-life & Frank is coming out online with a memorial to the first love he shared with a man one summer in New Orleans now unrequited lost like a model for how we think about permanence & what we leave behind to help us remember & Paul is painting the face of God on watches & soft impressionistic blizzards as his very cells begin to turn against him & Kathy is drawing new maps on the blank pages at the end of the book as a legacy for those who might follow & the building is getting higher now & we can feel the first words coming & we look to myth like Dan Savage for the intimate mechanics of the day to day & Rooney is being erased by the maudlin existential romances of Spike Jonze & his speculative social media platforms breed a phalanx of found mirror pix perfect little squares for decoding body language that overrun my server & Patrick loses the Oscar & Tom is offering up the breadth of his love as a sacrifice to luxury & Keith is out with the breakers chasing transcendence the sands piling it upward to form a 3D blueprint for body work & choreography approaches its limit & then the market catches on & the potence is drained by ubiquity & Forest escapes the purgatory of BATTLEFIELD EARTH under the guise of Idi Amin & Louise pulls the Event Horizon back from the brink of an extradimensional abyss to prevent the spread of a voracious shadow oneism tho even in her victory we can still see it everywhere dressed in uniforms too expensive to afford & tho casting increasingly complementary hues it remains no less divisive & Amillion is written out of YOU, ME, HIM AND HER during the live performance on FADE TO BLACK but still insists no love lost tho even a cursory search of her name more immediately yields Wanye’s A MILLI & while Phoenix plays backup to R. Kelly’s triumphant climax at Coachella the prescription drugs kick in & their TRYING TO BE COOL mashup holds on to its number one position at the solar disco to be trumped only by the nocturnal bacchanal of Daft Punk & Pharrell & exactly one month ago Dev lost everything in a fire & his latest message from L.A. reads ‘ignant is bliss’ & he immediately retracts his ill-conceived profile from the Guardian because there is no real sense of where this is all going only the most tenuous hold onto the feeling of how others take these parts of us inside & assimilate & carry on in something we cannot even hope to mean maybe something that can only be seen by the naked eye from like outer space
