This Is Quiet

Punch In

Punch it in it up up above your weight punching punching down

Third year options and asks and wants and needs

Like hopes needs dreams

Like hype and  hype man man oh man

This would be summer

Bass from beds and trunks

Sunscreen but usually not

Strings braided ‘round wrists

Rather drinks rather french fries rather much

The sun keeps going down later and later

Trying

Try try try try try

Teee-rye try try tee try try

Trying I’m try try when tee

Tetherest whether weather weatherest try

Try no try not try try try

Day try try tee tee tee tee tee tee

Teeeeeeeeee try tee try trying I’m

Wednesday try try almost what which try

Terrible trying

Terraform trying

Triad trying, a second language trying, second skin trying, second after minute after hour trying

Epochs trying as myriad moments try

They try they try they try

Every size, everywhere trying

Together with Celery

Yeah, darkness would be sexier

Dress it all up in black

The end of the world would at least offer some tension

You think

And then you’re living through this

Climate disasters daily paired with

Mass shootings daily paired with

Lurching toward government and societal and cultural shitshow upon shitshow

And I’m just skimming off the top of the roiling stew of injustice, unfairness, absent kindness, bureaucratic inhumanity and human inhumanity

With all these convections cycling violence, closing minds, and bring the horizon way way way down low.

I hang onto stories of little kindnesses and little triumphs but at some point I feel the ratios all around me — but maybe I’m not gonna pretend I should trust one of my brains anymore than the other.

Today I feel like a big aging chassis with a little wounded woodland creature piloting it all from the inside.

That’s a little trick I play on myself to pretend this me-scaled me is somehow able to protect anything.

I do like the rain.

I do like turning leftovers from the week into a pile of breakfast tacos.

I do like coffee.

The thing about the path to enlightenment is that it sucks.

That’s another trick I play on myself. Damn it.

Thinking about the universe is some comfort.

Thinking about life after all of us. That’s some comfort. And probably just one of those ways I let myself approach life after me.

Dinosaurs became birds. People will become something strange and interesting, maybe something to do with all these robots.

Don’t forget you have a drum machine at the center of your being and that that drum machine has a soul.

Don’t forget we all depend on each other all the time, even when it doesn’t seem like it.

Don’t forget to feed your pets and be kind.

You Can Dance 2

Roman vs. Arabic all the way down, but it’s the 80s and we’re so young

The space between numbers and/or ranges that are inclusive

I don’t like to think about the limits of intuition

I like to think about spiders

I like to think about the relationship of mass and time

I don’t like to think of the plight of light

I like to think like spreadsheets

I like to think about relationships of people and numbers and things and sounds

I don’t like to think about everything’s local, but everything is still local

What is red? What is green? What is indigo and how did it gets its place at the table?

I know and you know.

Open

Sometimes a song’s just gonna let you down

And the sun will keep doing its thing

Some guy walking along thinking

Seriously no lightning and crashes?

And other times untold repetitions will pave a path from nothing to wow

Folding napkins, snapping your fingers, eating breakfast

Because life’s gonna do what life’s gonna do

So everything else moves outside.

But one foot in front of the other takes me forward

And/or it can take me up

And it can still be tromping and trampling

These are the times you just have to believe in something anything.

That’s how breathing air happened, too.

That’s how we’re going to get to the end.

Where to Begin vs. Where We Begin

If you have this guy and he’s brandishing a folded metal chair

If you have time despite the World’s worst intentions

If the sun is rising like it always does, but this time you catch it sitting on top of the neighbor’s fenceline 

If you’re still expecting that phonecall and still hoping it never comes

Or you have the votes but lost the will

Reproach, resonance, recapitulation, reticular

That is that is that is that which

Walking the side of the road on the side of a forgotten town and wondering

Then every force will be met with its opposite

Then the wheel will do its best to keep turning

Then heat will arise and cast down all suffering

Then time will be on your side, but also everyone else’s

Zero has been a number since it was created and not one day longer

Like white horses or arrows bent on targets and a couple other things I won’t have time to share

What Means

In this story

You know where you are going

Or how fast your are getting there

But never both

Because these are greedy times

And we weren’t built to make it

Tell me about those days

Tell me about all the colors and the sunsets

The flashbulbs, the lazy rivers 

Tell me about coats on layaway

And the price of cigarettes at the PX

Where I’m from

By what means

And how I’m letting us all down again 

What You Do

 I mean I when I say these things

Granted we are in this together

A collection of useless thoughts

Another distraction

This neurosis, that news event

We carry on

What Words

 What words

Travel you

Travel time

What distances

Curve

Slope and rise 

Selvedge spearate

Tear whatever

Lead whatever

Read whatever

Picture points picture on

The second leftover

Signals the apocalypse

The candy-coated afterthought of our barreling age

The one you wanted and what they wanted

And just enough fuzzy logic for everyone to win this time

Listen for the laugh track

Every Scientist Somewhere