OPAQUE OR "DURATIONAL #11"

(NEW POEM)

nostalgia: from the greek word nostos, meaning return home, and algia, meaning longing. the word itself is a chimera; nostalgic pseudo-greek, the invention of a swiss medical student, johannes hofer, from his dissertation of 1688. it arrived with us through medicine. symptomatology, pathology.

/ hope’s ache, pinkly.
/ in the mind’s ill-mannered museum.
/ something is stirring.
/ claustrophobic and soft.
/ the bad idea. with its octopus of arms and gossip.
/ distress dries black in the sun. hiccup. reflux
/ a deluxe unease.
/ fragrant cruelty. garnished laughter lifting from a plate.
/ make it stop.
/ repulsion, morbid awe. persistent doom-think.
/ the egg-crack of gendered epiphany.
/ stagnant horror. the heart. ugh. its customary chamber music.
/ paint it black and frantic joy.
/ make it stop.
/ incision is a vigil. sad grl, spreading her incision.
/ in envy’s restroom, spreading.
/ the light pours out of me. found out of me.
/ both invisible and exposed.
/ mutable, markedly ugly. thinly prisoned.
/ with ice in my veins.
/ i too have been begging and levelled.
/ crawling over the broken ground, dreary with fever.
/ my dress, an appalling membrane, thawed.
/ i could lie very still.
/ spectralised, objectified. a corpse
/ with no drawbacks.
/ could be rid of this tight, arterial pain.
/ diffuse into vapour trail, vaporwave, shoegaze, chemtrail.
/ transient hexagram. zeitgeist. listless figment, scrolling.
/ could be.
/ if not for the curdled brain-ache.
/ life, like an organ in sawdust. an organ on ice.
/ stasis. its cloudy plastic lid.
/ in the theatre of this sleepwalk.
/ time moves in tableaux. slo-mo.
/ stop-motion voguing.
/ flattened, flatlined, flat-landed. my body deduced from an edge.
/ derived from an edge.
/ perspiring into my pillow.
/ the daymare of it all is tupperware. mac n’ cheese.
/ there were corridors and corridors. as if –
/ at the crossroads of longing, noclipped.
/ into corridors and corridors. corners.
/ pale lemon yellow. corridors.
/ cubicles. cardboard partitions.
/ life, feigned and stable. corners.
/ had stories, flowers. corners.
/ had monologues of dry-mouthed content.
/ figured for shit.
/ geschichte’s wishes wasted.
/ had –
/ yr name as an obsolete search term.
/ the golden locus of redundancy.
/ shrivelled up under interrogation’s gaze.
/ in the morning. dirtying the light like a bad martini.
/ my body.
/ how the front end of nectar is death.
/ it was always too late.
/ a future we anticipate and stifle.
/ assigned. resigned to.
/ closed up inside of myself. petals of tender resentment. tendrils.
/ persuaded and assumed. assuaged.
/ waged out of wonder.
/ the day’s double, the days repeat. a job.
/ moonglow, advancing its aura.
/ its gilded prescription, silver-blue.
/ half-life of grist and insult. dead gist.
/ tuning a tin ear to infinite jest.
/ my syncopated cringe-core is pure high school.
/ make it stop.
/ how i want to believe is buried alive inside of –
/ i want to believe.
/ displaced, frustrated. utopia’s ersatz.
/ utopia’s synth-pop with all the trimmings.
/ and hope aches, pinkly.
/ am recruited or transformed. interpolated, gently.
/ interred.
/ the mind moves through extraordinary rotations.
/ circles its successor form.
/ orbits the compulsory body.
/ there is no real me. there is no authentic self.
/ days. of commission and control. we were busloads.
/ we were embassies of weak narration.
/ we are ideology. small-winged, fabled.
/ cautionary cowards.
/ who stayed.