sometimes we send messages to those we didn't mean

to receive such words, emotions, threads of meaning in our little, carefully plotted knots.

like living in a house where most of the mail comes addressed to people you assume lived there before yourself.

like living with roommates and trying to guess from the dried crusty colors on bowls and knives which one ate what.

(eventually all of our furniture becomes extensions of our selves.)

the messages we compose to the ones living in graves are perhaps the most easy to deliver, and the most difficult to compose. of course there's the knowledge of the decomposition of the meaning between thought and send, and then there's the obvious --- i am only talking to myself if the person i love is no longer physically able to hear these thoughts?

but if they were alive, would they really hear? would they take the time laid into the pauses between vowels and punctuation to get the sense our little language is tooled to deliver? that's why dead words -- songs, poems, emails never sent --- are perhaps the best words. they can be called up at any time, quoted, referenced, by the individual attempting to re-compose, to re-connect. but these words too, like the people to whom they are referents, also live in a time and place of introductory experience that has already passed. ... what i write here is never meant to be sent to anyone. that is why it lives in a world of strangers with back buttons and search capabilities. a wide world of access means that those meant to hear are rendered silent by the cacophony of software traveling pairs of eyes to a one-way conversation with a mirror image that can't see the black beyond the glass.

too many and too few. that is all i could ever give to you.

if the bare bones begin to break

like damp toothpicks between frustrated fingers
and the wickedness of the wind
begins to match
the color of your mis-matched socks,
the anger between your intestines and your spleen

let nothing but the cold fill your gut
and reach the top of your head
slowly through your toes,
xylem to your phloem,
wood to your whisper
conducting all the memories that have turned to mud
and laid themselves into the graves of cracks
between poured concrete

step on a crack
step again

leap, look, laugh, lunge

your lungs are nothing but
tracheids you'll never use
vestigial only because
you still live for regret.

when will the old me

when will the old me
meet the new me
that's already having
the tea you hate to drink
with the me from the past
the one that used to agree
with everything you said
until the new me
had that, and a lot more
to say
to you, and me
whatever versions they may be

did you read this month's edition
did you catch that post?
me neither.

let's leave
before that last train.

someone said something

someone said something
about art
and the making of something good
if it's not perfect
(there is a perfect)
there must be something
in a reaction, a gut-spoken response
maybe a rage
maybe a silent silent long look
to communicate to another
"yes we both know."

in the knowing do we find
what we think we are looking for?
no.
absolutely not.
it's just the closing arguments
to the always already stated
"this confirms the self.
through others we define ourselves."

give me that conversation
that word
give that look that says

..."we are for each other:
then laugh...
for life is not a paragraph
and death
i think
is no parathesis."

I am my own moving target

i am my own moving target
in a shooting gallery
made of glass

clay pigeons beat me
to the finish
and i'm running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running
running

running
running
running
running
running


out of time

in the

in the hazy shade of memory
you were covered in white light
a finger raised
as if to say
"all of our dirty laundry comes clean."

pointing at the sky
white and white blended into blue
your raised head was a signal to
do the same

"we all make our lives into this shade
stop wanting
and the light will come."

stop wanting.

i brushed it aside
licked the skin of my arm
(the part before the shoulder)
and tasted the last of you
before falling
into the sleep of day
(the last shade of night)

the curtains close
and a shoulder to bear
marks our remains

our december has come and gone

our december has come and gone
and baby, it's cold outside
it's cold outside and
i won't mind

these veins of mine
won't leave my body
i don't mind
i don't mind

just leave me here to become the moss
that covers the floor
of the forest i've lived in
for years
let me lay me down now
i won't mind
it's cold outside

let me cover it
cover myself
in the cool cool moss
of the last long summer
i won't mind
if fall is what you had

had in mind

weakness bends at the knees

and i'm stuck here forcing
a backwards walk
to a forward march

side front
side back
elbow to elbow
back again and
side side side side
to the knees

hanging around
always hanging around
an email clawed itself into my mind
again
(your lack of punctuation: always the cliff-hanger to a tragic ending.)

and what little time have we really spent
on anything beyond
the Anyway. Nevermind.
about us, about
us? (false positive equals definite negative.)

sleep watches itself lie
and breath sings its own volumes to sleep

tell me when this is over
you
quiet operator.

tell me when night falls

tell me when night falls
so when the shades are drawn
i will know what to look for
through half-closed, blinded eyes

tell me when night falls
so when the dirt is shoveled over the day
i can prepare my skin to receive
the messages of the day passed

dust to dust
dust to dust

so when the shades are drawn
and night falls
i can close my eyes
not knowing what to look for
blinded by messages
yet able to see

elsewhere

The night is still old

The night is still old
So let’s begin the suture now.

I will take this thread
The one made from
the skin of the
intestines
of the dead man
you talk about
So frequently.
the one who sits inside
the iris of your right eye

I have taken his veins
Extracted their color
Made it into a paste
Like the color those Renaissance painters
Used for their draperies

Diving in
Which skin shall be punctured first?
The forearm?
The bicep?
That equilateral triangle
formed between freckles?

We are forming a word.
I go inside
You pull out a vowel
Then I start the consonant.

Know.

What a word,
You laugh.

And then, Cheers.
To another night’s mystery solved.
As the distance between us
The paragraphs that separate
Remain spoken
Only in ink.
Only in chapters
that remain to be seen

Breathless
Another stitch
begins

The heaviest burden

from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra...

"What if a demon crept after you one day or night in your lonelinest solitude and said to you: 'This life, as you live it now and have lived it, you will have to live again and again, times without number; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and all the unspeakably small and great in your life must return to you, and everything in the same series and sequence - and in the same way this spider and this moonlight among the trees, and in the same way this moment and I myself. The eternal hour-glass of existence will be turned again and again - and you with it, you dust of dust!' - Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who thus spoke? Or have you experienced a tremendous moment in which you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never did I hear anything more divine!' If this thought gained power over you it would, as you are now, transform and perhaps crush you; the question in all and everything: 'do you want this again and again, times without number?' would lie as the heaviest burden upon all your actions. Or how well disposed towards yourself and towards life would you have to become to have no greater desire than for this ultimate eternal sanction and seal?"


Resonate, 2005
Kathryn Cornelius
T610 mobile phone digital photograph

when was the last time

you felt like this was the last time?

...that the final vowels had been laid into place, ordered like dominos, set and ready for the verbal take-off, launch pad, breaking point?

when was the last time you heard the words loud and clear?

...the words for the pit of anger that sits deep in your gut and makes a nest there,
the words that screech out in stark pink venom, the consonants barely holding together the energy tearing open the seems?

when was the last time you got the message
heard the call
answered the door
turned around
and gained two inches to your height because that was the right thing to do. the right thing to say.
retreat::silence
silence::solitude
solitude::heal
heal::to wrap your arms around it, feeling the kern of each letter and loving it as the last.

other people's words seem much more interesting 'cause they ain't mine

feeling a quiet escape in the post-thesis state of decompression, i have been happy to read the wisdom of others -- this quote is from the wisdom of the heart, by henry miller:

(talking about Erich Gutkind's The Absolute Collective: A Philosophical Attempt to overcome our broken state)

"The man of today, the man of the transition period, split and straddled as he is between two worlds, pregnant with the germ of the future, is veritably crucified by his duality...The climate of this opus is a sort of spiritual equinox in which life and death are seen to be at balance. Is it necessary to add that it is precisely at such moments that the miraculous nature of life reveals itself, at just such moments that the whole order of life can be reversed, or transcended?

...We stand at the threshold of a new way of life, one in which MAN is about to be realized. The disturbances which characterize this age of transition indicate clearly the beginnings of a new climate, a spiritual climate in which the body will no longer be denied, in which, on the contrary, the body of man will find its proper pace in the world...

Thus, the complete destruction of our cultural world...The old grooves of race, religion and nationality are destined to go, and in their place we shall see, for the first time in the history of man, a community of interest based not on the animal in him but on the human being which he has so long denied. The fight is between the death instinct and the life instinct. It has nothing to do with culture, or bread, or ideology, or peace or security. The schism has grown so wide that it is either self-destruction or a totality never before imagined. With each new conflict one is made increasingly aware of the real battle, which is inner, and which is nothing but a warfare between the real and the ideal man."

Though this was published in 1941 (and Gutkind's essay in 1932), Miller's approach to the binary of inner versus outer, real versus ideal, is akin to the negoitations of polarities that, to me, are becoming much more pressing in importance. Increasingly, self-definition mirrors a list of categories one ascribes to and feels membership with, both constructed by and for systems of organization such as demographic groups for marketing purposes, inner office politics, and online systems of identity management using metadata. As the outside informs more and more of what the inside feels, the inner conflict will seep out of the pores and manifest in verbal violence, frantic gestures, and worse, large-scale community deterioration, civil warfare, and inter-continental apathy. With so many mechanisms for distraction in everyday life (personal technology, adrenline-addicted dramas, the cacophony of over-abundant communication), little space and time is carved out for quiet, for reflection, for thoughtfully mediated exchange between individuals, and for true renderings of the aftermath of experience (digestion).

So, it's a little blank here these days. Deliberately so. Pages are sometimes best left unmarked, empty terrian.

A single note can affect a multitude of sounds if given the chance to ring long enough, and alone.

consider this part of an extended collage

...the writing here has been sparse, found more than forged, but still fresh, for me (at least). so, hence, the collage.


and another piece, recovered from a book i thought i threw out years ago. this writing was on the tube in london as a part of their art in the tube series circa 1998.

25th April 1974

This is the dawn I was waiting for
The first day whole and pure
When we emerge from night and silence
Alive into the substance of time



---I like some of the use of the structures of time, the things about nature we've picked up on in order to aid our construction of various durations and their social meanings. however, anything that tends to be so bounded to words or phrases that typically are used in large-scale philosophical applications (such as "dawn," "alive," "substance of time") can turn me off a bit...Well, hey, I wasn't even twenty when I noted observing this writing, but now I realize the importance to my own work, my own interests, to have some sort of "in my personal radius" item - word, metaphor, etc. - to secure a filament flung out to, in order to communicate the emotion of meaning...


well, and with that given, another shall follow - eventually -


(hey, it's hot outside.)

caught in the branches

hanging like a dead limb
a boot caught
in between
the good apples
the low-hanging fruit

easy options
gravity always falls
and then

what is left
for us?

some of you may have noticed

how quiet the still of rain can be
how the soft pages between the sheets
can remind you of warm thighs
light weight clothing
on sweat wet damp skin

basking in the moment of almost
but just not quite yet

what rays reach your hairs
the tip of your head
the top of your

well, nevermind.




(i graduate tomorrow.
i breathe again the next day.
be still, my fleeting start. enjoy. the silence.)

so quiet, lately

the lights have gone silent
small buzzing rings in memory, not in actual
hum........


hum.
hmmmmm


well
then
what do we have here.

very little, when relaxing.

if sitting outside during the sun shine hours,
we note one small thing, that was different before, but now,
apparently the same

there is a freckle on my eyelid. i see it move
as my closed eyes change direction.

a constant.
amongst.
the forgiving,
yet balant
storm.

out here in the perimeter there are no stars

we see the sun through eyes shaded by the perspective of our own perception, filtered rays confirming individual existence within the network of our dreams.

one more week

and the thesis will be over.


"i'm taking back the knowledge...i'm taking back the gentleness...i'm taking back the ritual...i'm givining in to sweetness." - david byrne.

my body hates me

it has been destroyed in the service of my mind that is attempting to finish this thesis. blah. and yuck.