Agency

Like a dynamo

It charges and charges

Forward

Faster

Everything, all at once

Build, create, make,

Sit, write

,

(comma)

Like a kiln

Hardening objects of utility

In a hellish flame

That takes weeks to subside.

As if plotting for the future is a kind of internally contained firestorm

Forged in utility

I am beginning to feel its drawbacks acutely

As the machinery seems to wear out

From the brattle of repetition

Gears slip in fatigue

Muscles fail from exhaustion

Time grinds in slow and measured pieces

As if evaporating

To the forest

Lost in the steel and machines

Windborne hallucinations

And it subsides as suddenly as it happens

Though those around me can see I have lensed

Elsewhere.

Elsewhere.

It comes like sizzling static

The whisper of writhing chains

scraping leaves in the wind

elsewhere.

I hear them

 Purring of a friends voice.

Clear,

with a certain rawness I appreciate

in a wholeness that seems familiar

I look to the stars in yearning

I am bigger than my body

Familiar to more than myself

With an agency over this and other realms

As if being all and nothing

Whole and fractured

the nuances of restlessness grow like weeds

blocking out paths

That used to lead me

home.

She.

 

There is a gravity to the negativity

As she is caught in the pull

A victim to the energy of others

That I know like the bitter taste of manipulation.

There is a relentlessness to it

As she tears them apart in the gravity of herself

And they fall like trees before a pyroclastic flow

She is caught in her own dimension

A victim to herself that preys upon others.

There is a quaintness to it,

He listens to misogynistic music on repeat

Where other young men spit their limited understanding like gospel

And without having seen the beast unleashed

He cannot fathom a life beyond the moment-to-moment

There is an idleness to it

As if waiting for a train on some distant platform

And I know this train, as I see its lights down the tunnel

It will take me to some kind of home

But it doesn’t ever seem to arrive.

And somehow I know that it can.   

There is a hatefulness to it

As pound after pound of flesh surrenders under my knife

My fingers coated in hot grease

As the sinews peel and snap

In the furnace of central market downtown

There is a soul in it—

Somewhere, in all the metal and glass

She breathes in

life and death, debauchery and order

in a persistence beyond the veil.