Back inside the ring-shaped tunnel, fluorescents trace a pale, lavender tint,
flashes spark the place like lightning:
a series of configurations of reflective acts
without reflection
gathered in the walls themselves,
not in the mind, along the floorboards and hallways,
hovering upright in the lower quadrants of our visual field, developing density,
exhibiting mass.
A baseline unreality dances with the real from the confinement of the naming self.
Confinement has a long memory, like prayer,
two plates in a printing press that drifted a hair apart,
trapped inside a sequence of enclosures,
two rooms shaped like diaphragms contracting,
perceived with that smoky fidelity peculiar to sleep, returned altered,
its dimensions suspect, corners warped slightly away from the truth,
although prayer isn’t so much seeking as it is just being still.
In the stillness, the sound of the city waking up to life
matched to the waking city’s
unique sound print
reveals
a voice signal
unaccounted for.
The signal is a wave flowing through our bodies.
When sounded clear it streams right through, lifesize, sonorant howl
hardened into everyday acoustics, the guards cashing in each time it runs across
free to continue plaiting
fresh data strands unimpeded, ununiform with the near-
daylight sweep
so that we should access information
at a higher speed, then become it.
Our thoughts are slow-navigating afterthoughts
tethered to events dissolving behind them.
Everything takes place before us as if on a screen we watch,
memories pin us back every .4 seconds generating miles and miles of industrious erosion.
Nothing that we choose sits still.
An investigation has been launched, is now ongoing,
persists in the mirage configured/
reconfigured in the eyes of statues
we can’t escape around the room,
a kind of watching that predates the watcher,
each figure engaged in a meditation whose object has been forgotten
but whose form remains intact.
Saying, how’s the thing felt
when there’s no getting through in order to begin to feel at all?
Insofar as the nervous mind supplies the system’s orchestra,
life awaits the big homecoming
cheering on
nothing but survival training
with a deathwish: the music crumbles the alveoli on either side of the recruit’s heart--
Having come across the late familiar missing of the soul, his own private micro-
machinist, all that commands him does not exist.
First published in Amsterdam Review