i blink big blankness, blue and brightly bent

omnidimensional yet as flat as everything else

no shadows only that spot that’s always sneaking, the smear you say you see but know, sentiently, isn’t something

isn’t anything at all

that spot is the sense of all that isn’t sinister

to me, all of my adroitness is formed shapelessly 

is blinded by only my own laziness, droops or drops or doesn’t mind

my right limbs are strong but when i am exhausted their strength is a menace and i wish they were as feeble and slow to act as the limbs which i have left. i disassociated and let my strong foot slip down and a car roared into life, leaving me screaming and then scrambling to lie, while my right eye saw nothing and my left hand flapped in the air, distressed but useless. an entire half of the world is left out by my body, by some process seemingly intended, which i can drive, can override but usually am a passenger to anyway. instead the blankness sometimes asserts itself to me, a spot which either smears out the center or makes a cyclops of my field, a view of blue blue sky, laying the grass with half your face smashed forever into the dirt. 

“you little fool” she hissed “don’t you know, you’re supposed to just agree, and say it back sometimes so they hear it too. ooo! now it looks like i agree with you, and why do you want trouble for everyone!”

“but i don’t agree. saying it would make it true, in some ways, and my saying the contrary doesn’t mean...what you said...i don’t want trouble for you”

“none of do,” tiana interrupted “not really anyway, but if one of us says that they think we’re talking about it being a lie”

but we are aren’t we?

not me! not me. i need to agree, else they punish me too. i’d rather eat than be right, girl, and what you do with your belly is only your business. 

my feet elbows knees toes eyeballs hurt, indistinct exhaustion that tastes like dehydration, and all those things but yet i don’t want to sleep, too cozy in my delight, drifting in the sparkling sea and effortless.


we none of us grow up really, we just are ourselves for longer and longer, the surprise is found in the cycle instead of the self, the love is never lost if perhaps just shown to make missteps now and again: the mistake is not the step but the logic of causal relationships—the stone which awakens and thus demands it flies.


and yet



i’ve been insulated from the worst damages of life, partly from privilege, partly from wit, partly from the lifelong type of luck which turns me away at the moment of the blow. but can more than one thing go right at once please, or perhaps i mean that the grinding effects of multiple vectors of failures and mishaps and generationally maladaptive self reliance are culminating into a general stance of stroking my joys gently, from the distance of belief that i must protect others from the foundational erosion, swanning through the halls of a sandcastle on a pacific shore, lifting skirts to dance over the sinkholes, brocade growing heavier every step from salt and braken and the infinity of the encroaching sea.


“what do you want from me” it whispers, but i curl my toes against its chill and light another cigarette.

“why did you build your home so close to the deep” it sighs, and i shuff my heel against the rug rolling over the uneven ground.




“i see you see me” it murmurs, but my vision is already blurred from a single drop of boiling water.

the table is always a metaphor

was talking with a student today about institutional accommodations and gatekeeping of access to said inst, and we developed an interesting analogy which I expanded on and will now share with y’all:

Imagine society is a table. it’s That Table, where all the cruft and keys and lighters and deodorant and todo lists and daily pocket lint ends up, piled on each other and everywhere, to the point where it’s hard to see what’s table (the load bearing concept of society itself) and what’s incense ash (side effects of the society functioning). So you decide to pick up the place a bit and you look at the table and it’s time to make some decisions. Some things you want to keep are balanced on top of weird garbage that you realize you only kept in case you needed it later, and you’d like to use the table top itself. It’s sturdier than precarious cruft, and you probably want to leave a corner for when you make a cup of tea and immediately forget about it after setting it down.

 So you have some decisions to make! 

You might find that the things you want to keep have somehow become defined by what they’re sitting upon, even if that itself is something that really should have been binned originally. It’s taking up space, but you really want the stuff atop it and they’re not really seperable any more. 

Mostly this isn’t true, and you figure out ways to move the things you want onto the more stable surface, or stack them with intention to beauty or function rather than as need arose. You’ll find that the more begrudging pieces seem more out of place than before and you try to minimize the aesthetic damage or gain a desperate bravery and bin them anyway, not wanting your table layout to be defined by the garbage, always routing around it or crowding away. To not do this part isn’t really cleaning up, after all. It’s just shuffling the trash around. 

How does one determine the difference between what’s wanted and unwanted? Through the process of using the table, of cleaning it a few times? Of recognizing and evaluating the origins of one’s desires (why do you desire? is a big question my goodness)? 

But lacking a desire to clean the table is to say that you don’t care to distinguish between the wanted and unwanted, and you’ll either chew yourself to anxiety trying to use it or be reduced to no longer seeing it all.