Pixels & Poetry

From Inside The Meat

“Lost is a lovely place to find yourself.” Michael Faudet

For No Clear Reason I dreamt last night the fright was over, that the dust came, and then water, and women and men, together again, and all was quiet in the dim moon’s light. A paean of such patience— laughing, laughing at me, and the days extend over the earth’s great cover, grass, trees, and flower- ing season, for no clear reason. -Robert Creeley

From Below There’s a kind of shadow, easily missed, that depth of field and depth of character sometimes share between them. Suffering, there, can seem especially far away, though it’s never far. It was one of those days when just to have spoken at all aloud feels like honesty or maybe more like wanting to be honest, as if one had forgotten, almost—not to want to, but how. A lost art, like predicting the future by listening to the sounds leaves make, each to the other, touching, not touching ... And yet so much, still, to wish for. To have loved differently, less deeply, more reliably. I call that hope, not regret. Bellflowers, sand flowers; there at the field’s far edge. -Carl Phillips

The pharmacist has my favorite handwriting. A looping blue permission slip that says: yes, this citizen may disappear responsibly. Just not too much. Not on company time or while operating heavy machinery. This little orange bottle rattles like a baby snake speaking it's first words: Capitalism. Insurance covered, government-approved, barcode where a priest used to stand, Capitalism. The commercials say Ask your doctor if this is right for you. Which is rich. It's like asking a landlord if you should continue having dreams. I sit in the parking lot of the nearest CVS watching a crow pull apart a burrito wrapper with more autonomy than I currently possess. Inside my pocket: thirty small eclipses. One X for each day of the month. I can picture the calendar crossed out already. But these aren't drugs, no sir. This is my medication. Drugs happen under bridges, in alleyways, inside songs with acoustic guitars. My medication comes with a pamphlet printed in a font usually reserved for tax information and hidden banking fees. May cause dizziness. May cause rash. May cause gambling. May cause the sudden belief that your childhood was a manageable experience. This is adulthood: finding a chemically acceptable way to leave your body without making your mother cry. The state doesn't hate oblivion. It only wants it serialized, taxed, and childproof capped. A little bottle with your full legal name, so if they find you face down on the carpet everything still looks professional. You can imagine the Founding Fathers absolutely ripped on modern pharmaceuticals. George Washington staring at the ceiling fan for fourteen consecutive hours, grinding his wooden teeth. The bald eagle itself on 40 milligrams of something spoken only in Latin, watching fireworks through one giant pupil. Liberty. Order. And prior authorization for all. I want my soul to sound like a refrigerator. I want to feel the way waiting rooms look. And tomorrow morning I will wake again in this magnificent republic of managed despair, where a man in a white coat can legally hand me the nearest thing to death that still counts as self-care. ፕᏒı‌ᎮᎮყ

FLOW Flow requires a particular set of conditions. I wake to the same sound at 5:15 every morning. I make a cup of coffee. I try not to lose focus: cigarettes, snug clothes, long drives, real smiles It was never about correction. It was never about rehabilitation. It was about deprivation: orange jumpsuits, watch towers, radio chatter [ I told myself I would never lose my soul. ] [ I told myself I would make it out in one piece. ] Some days I still feel a phone vibrating in my pocket & illogically I hope it's you: Video chats on Christmas, getting to hold your hand. Flow requires a mutual balance between goals & effort. It requires properly investing psychic energy. The important part is to stay challenged. The important part is to refine the self. I keep many notebooks. I steal lines from all things: "A lifesaving piece of luck." "Suffering is the way we test our love." I walk laps & daydream. I contemplate my mortality. I have wasted my life: cinderblock, handcuffs, chain-link, razor wire [ I learned it was more than survival. ] [ It was more than compartmentalization. ] [ It was about redemption. ] Some days I still feel a phone vibrating in my pocket & illogically I wish it could be you: shy smile, late night confessions Flow requires positive feedback. It requires a sense of accomplishment. Friendship isn't a lower form of intimacy. It can transform unpleasant interactions into tolerable, sometimes exciting ones. I remind myself I have more to give. I can give more than I take. I can fly across the world. I can stay away from toxic subculture. I can make a difference in someone's life. I tend to sit away from others. They tend to avoid me automatically. I participate in watching TV just to fit in. I tuck in my tender edges. I pretend they don't exist. "Loss is the universal emotion of incarceration." "The cracks where no plant has the heart to sprout." interrogation room, disciplinary hearing procedures segregation, loss of good time, visitation restriction 24-hour watch, controlled movement, 2-hour check-in [ I found the importance of the shared human experience. ] [ I found redemption to be complex. ] Some days I still feel a phone vibrating in my pocket & illogically I hope you do too. ፕᏒı‌ᎮᎮყ

Oh Lonely nights..

Fear is the main thing that stops us from being who we are. The trick is to combine your waking rational abilities with the infinite possibilities of your dreams. Because, if you can do that, you can do anything. Who are you? Are you a person? Or are you a collection of cells? Or are you a collection of thoughts? Or are you a collection of memories? A thousand years is but an instant. Every moment is a new beginning. Every moment is a new ending. There is no such thing as 'before' or 'after.' There is only now. The 'Ongoing Wow' is that as you live, you find that there's a reason for everything. And that reason is always beautiful. If you don't see the beauty, then you're not looking at it from the right perspective. We are all co-authors of this reality. We are all dreaming the same dream, and we are all responsible for what happens in it. So, what are you going to dream tonight?

It is foolish to let a young redwood grow next to a house. Even in this one lifetime, you will have to choose. That great calm being, this clutter of soup pots and books— Already the first branch-tips brush at the window. Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life. Jane Hirshfield

love your kids while they are young. Build sandcastles with them, teach them kindly. buy them gifts, sing along with them, read them bedtime stories, and kiss them tenderly to sleep. love your kids while they are still yours. assist them to nurture their growing wings, and teach them to love themselves before they step into the world and they are told what they are not, before they start questioning everything, before they become a dump house because they came up empty, and there wasn't a force within them. love your kids if they're but two or ten. treat them the same and teach them to love themselves, so they would not someday cross paths like familiar strangers, so at your departure they wouldn't be scattered sheep with no shepherd. love your kids the way you would have wanted; and if you were loved as much, give them twice the love. Love them as a duty, as a human to another, as a kin, as a lover, as parents ought, and never make them feel as little as they are. love them while you can still hold them and carry them with so much affection, before it is your turn to be carried and their only reason was that they came through you. love them not for your latter benefits. love them, for it is right. Love them because they carry generations within them, and you'll be doing the world so much good. Love them. love your kids while you still can, before the only act of love becomes tolerating them. because kids grow up to be adults, and adults become many things— that includes the bads. they become bitter, they sit to plot wars and put a gun to the next kin. they hurt themselves and hurt the world. and worst, they become bad parents. love your kids, and love them loudly, so if everything goes wrong in the world, they would remember that they've been loved, and they'll have a home to return to. — Myra

The inner child knows best

key & deadbolt it always required careful negotiation: lift slightly, lean your weight against the wood, turn. but today the cylinder jams. the zero-sum gain of the doorway. you feel the warning bend in the metal. back down, and you're outside in the cold. force it, and the tumbler gives. so you force it. the metal shears to the stump. a useless, jagged root. and you have to wonder if the flaw was in the mold. if every time it was turned, we were just counting down to this. regardless, the door is sealed. the mechanism is plugged. all the rooms inside are instantly unreachable. you feel the indentation on your thumb. the proof you pushed too hard. the stupid gravity of it. the realization that it makes you want to walk down the concrete steps and pretend you never lived here at all. ፕᏒı͛ᎮᎮყ

Even If It Kills Me Better to gag the inevitable with one clean slice, than to let the slow thud of a rusted claw hammer work the mind down to sawdust and wet lint. No syllabus charts the hazard of becoming the perfect hinge, forever trained to panic at the sudden drop, while quietly funneling our marrow. Forfeiting the pulse of your name is a fifty-year rigor mortis encased in shallow breath. The machinery demands a carcass, But I will not wait to be slowly milled into compliance and dust. ፕᏒı͛ᎮᎮყ

The Tool That Does Not Exist I carried the premonition behind my teeth for several days, a gnawing instinct telling me to reach out to you. I failed, of course. Then you stepped off the fourth-tallest bridge in the country—the exact steel construct where…

The Tool That Does Not Exist I carried the premonition behind my teeth for several days, a gnawing instinct telling me to reach out to you. I failed, of course. Then you stepped off the fourth-tallest bridge in the country—the exact steel construct where Vin Diesel jumped a Corvette into the void in the movie XXX. You left us behind in the sudden quiet, and we swallowed those distinct, hollow maybe if I had only done this echoes that people are said to get after a traumatic incident. Later that night, in the immediate aftermath, you slipped into the theater of my sleep. It was a perfectly nonsensical dream: your hands dark with grease, teaching me how to take tires off a car. You handed me a tool that does not exist, insisting we had to use it because it was important. They can be recycled, you told me, which is also important. But the lucid reality of your disappearance snapped the illusion in half. I realized I was dreaming, and panic set in. I knew you had left us. I knew I had failed you. I knew we weren’t recycling car tires, using this magical tool that doesn't exist, because that’s crazy. I woke up crying so violently into the dark that my girlfriend at the time had to wrap her arms around my shoulders just to hold me together. I remember forcing myself out to that bridge for the first time afterwards. Me and heights don't mix well, and I was entirely incapacitated by the dizzying altitude, the sheer drop freezing the blood in my legs so badly I couldn't cross much farther than fifteen feet from the dirt. But, out of the thin air, a flicker of ridiculous grace: a butterfly, fluttering a staggering seven hundred feet above the gorge. It hovered, improbable and fragile, and gently guided my wobbling feet across the span. In that space, a relief washed over me – one of those unexplainable introspections where some form of God, spirit, or a unified tissue of existence was real. I knew in the most ancient part of my soul that all I had to do was make contact, and I would find my answer. To this day, whenever a random butterfly stutters its way over to me just so, I feel that exact calling. I am instantly reminded of you and that moment suspended on the bridge. Even today, trapped in my own head and stressed out by the static of living, I was visited by a butterfly. I watched its lofty flight patterns, thought of you, and knew that everything is going to be okay. ፕᏒı‌ᎮᎮყ

Hello friends. I'm still writing. I'm just having a hard time finishing these two poems 😞

The river is famous to the fish. The loud voice is famous to silence, which knew it would inherit the earth before anybody said so. The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds watching him from the birdhouse. The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek. The idea you carry close to your bosom is famous to your bosom. The boot is famous to the earth, more famous than the dress shoe, which is famous only to floors. The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it and not at all famous to the one who is pictured. I want to be famous to shuffling men who smile while crossing streets, sticky children in grocery lines, famous as the one who smiled back. I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous, or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular, but because it never forgot what it could do. Naomi Shihab Nye

You can't not feel this song Listen bredren you’re not a little bread crumb Lift your head son cause you’re a fucking living legend You’re not a zombie hun don’t nod when they numb ya You’re not a statistic not an anonymous number… You are knowledge, wonder, mind, body and soul Flip Big Brother the bird, cause he’s not in control, Strike the power time to be sour Pile up the cowards’ cadavres after dragging ’em out they ivory tower I don’t want you to protest I don’t want you to riot I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write I don’t know what to do about the depression and The inflation and the crime in the streets All I know is that first, you’ve got to get mad You’ve got to say : I’m a Human being God damn it! MY LIFE HAS VALUE!