burial with rain

[13 dancers]

.this morning, the song sparrow’s missing head..

.a delicacy for the coyote’s mouth..

.faded teal feathers hidden by dusty brown crinoline—taken, too..

.you said, let’s drive diagonally through crisscrossed streets..

.toward colors painting the sky-fall twilight—

a necessary thrill..

.the ghost of the house stole your newest watch..

.time isn’t helpful, she said..

.g minor is the saddest key because we’re digging a hole in the ribbon of woods’ dirt floor..

.the other birds watch the velour-blanket-shroud..

.it’s teal, one of us said..

.to match the feathers underneath..

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from FLESH: performance art for 13 dancers |unfinished burial

[13 dancers]

.the singing sparrow, pregnant belly down, done for singing..

.the husband watching the nest he built out of habit..

.she wasn’t an omen, we wanted to convince ourselves..

.one of us said, we should bury her..

.another said, which one of us?.

.antigone longed to volunteer..

.the coyote mouth didn’t want her fluffed blue feathers underneath brown..

.keep the children next door away from what might be an omen; another of us posed the imperative..

.this narrative jettisoned for drinks on the House..

.weary of itself..

.fatigued for fatigue’s dark couch..

.distractions proved useful..

.art knocking on proliferating doors..

.one could say more..

.the Chorus commiserated..

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from FLESH: april solambulism

.you shouldn’t read the process notes..

.that was before this doorway..

.pain knew itself but couldn’t abscond affirmations.

.no one genuflected properly..

.the singing didn’t have particles..

.the house peeling while we slept staggering..

.the violins moved [things—maybe us] horizontally..

.some feelings weren’t pliable..

.midnight might reset..

.don’t confess..

.you moved everything into the wrong places..

.your thoughts can’t fit in car rides..

.you shouldn’t ask questions that reside somewhere else..

.the wind took our kites to a different city..

.we sleep for days..

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.persian square dancing..

[4 dancers, antigone, dora, pluto, wind]

.let’s blow this place open..

.let’s sharpen all our charcoal pencils..

.love isn’t your tattoo..

.one of us said, the alphabet soup is getting cold..

.no one here speaks persian..

.the day has gone lazy while finding itself..

.were you able to memorize all your medical notes?.

.a motif fell out while you were coughing..

the kamancheh won’t share the constricting stage built for broken-hearted musicians..

.percussion has walked out..

.tell the children the lunch money absconded with dollhouses..

.explain to the media that an occupation is a war..

.yes, we’ve been here before—licking incisions with dollhouse sandpaper..

.our tragic hero completes the requisite paperwork in triplicate—

a triptych of despair’s paintbrushes..

.let’s call it, still life aliens..

.let’s call it, ancient abstract expressionism..

.why do you keep smelling when you know it all smells bad?.

.we’ll send a letter to your last known address if anything changes..

.in the meantime, reprogram the remote for your new kidney..

.in the meantime, ask the ghosts of the house to come back.

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.ii. | .persian duet. [from FLESH: performance art for 13 dancers]

[2 dancers: dora & pluto]

.tell the blue birds and catbird that food assistance won’t compensate a new apple tree..

(.it wasn’t your fault..)

.the white and pink butterfly bushes and heliotrope—

for the swallowtails and monarchs..

.maybe: leave your wallet in the dirty public bathroom..

.someone will identity-theft you—

and your credit might resurrect..

(.who knows?.)

.no one asks anything of me, she said.

.either love—or don’t love., he instructed.

.it’s easier that way?, she asked..

.he twirled her like a classical ballerina on her bare toes..

.you should learn to ask for something worthwhile,

for the ash to be cleared from your lung,

the spinal fluid to cleanse itself and the brain—

the garbage to pay for itself..

.let’s play HATCH..

.not catch..

.let’s blow this place wide open..

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FLESH: performance art for 13 dancers | prolegomenon

[13 dancers: antigone, dora, elizabeth, hafiz, henry, jackson, lily, pluto, question, sam, thom, wind, zebra]

prolegomenon

*

.no more a tradesman of suitcases, you’re tracking pages with bone chips in velvet emerald satchels over your shoulder (dislocated by moonlight)..

*

.august found you trading your tickets to a broken opera for a stamp of disproportionate magic..

*

.(as if..)

*

.broken things are dangerous: the crystal wine glass under your bare foot,

the perfume-tray mirror thrown down cellar stairs..

*

.we watched you spinning all those chipped plates of glass and china (all at once),

toying with quantifying chaos stuck between streets of itinerants and fools..

*

.one of us: high-speed kaleidoscopic with a personality on crack—

or something such..

*

(.you know..)

*

.there’s really no reason to study for the astrological test..

.this is no prolegomenon for a misplaced cartography..

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SEMICOLONS

The garden, a micro-wasteland: cracked ceramic and glass; peat moss gone amok with ice, tangle, and quandary. Mourning doves thread dirges into blackbird noise; the blue jay cry, a semicolon.

Let’s pretend to be yellow, he said—the yellow of daffodils; we can somersault through crocus, primrose—without any definitions for sorrow.

I bought tickets for the monorail, she answered—so we can live inside a different city where pristine snow glitters under quaint streetlights, where passer-bys dream in poems without any answers.

I’m disappearing, he said—studying the palm and thin fingers of his left hand. When the ice shifts the sun, I can’t form human sentences, remember the passcode to myself.

Blackbirds are stuck in my throat, she answered—mourning doves nest in my unwashed hair. The blue jay is a semicolon between cities where I could have loved my breath on the mirror, your hand on proliferating, turquoise doors.

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confessions of a con-ARTist

It’s true. I’m a con-Artist. I can’t pinpoint on the calendar the day–or on the wind-up clock, the hour this new identity coalesced, grew into its genetic paws. Strangely, I’m not one iota ashamed. I daresay I might be off-the-chart titillated by getting away with items at the bottom of the shopping cart I didn’t see when I checked out at the register with an AI-robot half-cloned from Mykie. I think but can’t remember; the driving away with my takeout food after presenting a dead debit card for payment; dining and dashing because of a make-believe emergency phone call about an ongoing, quite boring family crisis. And then there’s the overestimation of money needed for a sudden ridiculous, requisite expense for which my rich mother begrudgingly writes a check. Hey, I’m not a corporation. Well, at least not yet. Why does the sun cost so much? Isn’t rain free? Nope, nothing is free in America—no free lunch without strings attached.

Every story has a beginning, so I’m searching for point A. What was the first sign or premonition of this new fun game, one lacking conventional rules? I guess I was creating my moving red ethical line in the sand. There are those who follow rules and those who invent them, and I’m one of the latter, so I am being true to myself, and living a life well-examined. Even now, I’m gazing into my reflection in the picture window, searching for clues. Those new lines at my jawline, my sinking eyes—there are signs.

Perhaps I had been acting out beneath the surface of the days, turning my inner pain inside out away from my skin—or perhaps this is an attempt, ongoing, with proliferating layers and iterations leading toward an invented justification. For too long I was playing chess with existential demise, checkers with corporeality, chess with death. Yes, I’ve borrowed that dangerous game against The Angel of Death from Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. My dreams are A Glass Darkly, also a Bergman film—but for me in black and white while my brain travels in color to stamp its passport: Iceland to see the Northern Lights, Cabo San Lucas, Florence, Nice, Tunisia, Morocco, Lebanon, ancient Persia, Greece, Egypt. No one should blame my brain for my new existence as a con artist. It’s all on me, I can assure you. It was merely ART.

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DIRGE VI, what was lost [13 dancers]

Unhinged from the ceiling, the gray moth was wind-scatter by Tuesday—then nothing left.

Not even a frame for a sentence-shed.

Last winter’s bicycle spokes catch a hand.

Everyone in a hurry to take the remote—until then.

Orphic chords scrambled us through artery-streets in need of better armor.

Behind the TV, I’m growing pieces of music—shaken in a paper bag.

We could live on the same channels during commercials, eat the same cereal.

Now that we’ve grown new considerations for purple, for melody—for the play.

The theatre: misplaced and fuzzy.

One adjusts and can lurk be at the bottom of the issue—the fairy tale lesson of the castle and boat.

Don’t be afraid to go alone, sorry for your tragic becoming.

Whom have you told?

Bruised humans are playing shipwreck-bumper cars to feel something, hurt someone.

One is razoring shins with trousers rolled by the carousel’s sad-brown-eyed ponies.

The scent of iron can satisfy like a fact.

Lying on a bed of raven hair, Eurydice drowns images of a hand that didn’t pull her to the surface.

Look at what we’ve done to each other while no one else was looking.

Spear fishermen risk slicing their backs on barnacle-laden rock that claims the disappearing shoreline.

It’s all prehistoric—the need for slowing everything down.

Cacophony unfurls the sea’s lapis lazuli, collects declarations that might or might not be expunged.

The cardinal husband and wife may have gone missing.

They only live two or three years, one of us said.

It’s not your fault the winding bitterroot choked out their apple tree.

Next year the old man will chainsaw the branches and trunk in perfect increments.

It’s recommended that you stay behind the dilapidated barn with the nervous horses that might get thinned out.

Until you hide the rental car, devour the elixir that could sequester you in scriptures, temporarily.

You’ll regenerate completely, eventually.

Like the four-arm pink starfish Eurydice stole from the sea.

It’s not a four-leaf clover, the ex-lover said. 

There’s no aquarium here.

The bath where I read Plato should suffice.

Where will you bathe?

The sea, of course.

Indigo nights with opaque moonlight.  

The gelatinous sea animal’s house detaches, but there is always a new friend.

The Book of Elucidation abandoned because there were too many pages.

Press this number to become curious again, enamored with nothing but stage—

not your obsessions, possessions, aggressions—those meticulously-ingrained habits.

Press this number when you trampoline uncontrollably out of your skin.

This number if you’re feeling particularly psychotic.

The sky is untangling its grammar.

Intricate sentences will be diagrammed before erased.

We must go quickly.

Pack essentials in your torn knapsack of copious notes, your fanciful observations.

That manuscript you may never finish.

No promises.

Hurry!

It’s dangerous—and stunning.

Whom have you told?

Night moves the clouds; swallows the stars we’ll name for the dead while drinking cheap whisky. 

None of us owns a flashlight, wood for a fire, categorical convictions.

The hours before sunrise stretch infinity, spin us sublime—

no longer overwhelmed by how limitless we’ve become.

Eurydice falls asleep in E Minor.

Unlike the alchemist, we wouldn’t give up our families—sell food for magic.

There were many worlds within the world and outside of us, dimensions of sorrow.

To measure all of them might take eternity’s windfall, truculent knowledge.

Thirteen Egyptian bulls carried the fallen troops—transformed almost everyone.

The stories became us, pages we’d sell for more bee nectar, more Himalayan blue poppies.

My mother looked in the mirror and became rain.

The house grew wings last night.

In his sleep, the beloved spoke the talk of strangers.  

A boy traded his trove of baseball cards for clarity.

The pillars of some worlds would crumble.

Some days drew forever into themselves.

The papyrus folded into an origami starling that couldn’t fly.

The lies professed were to maintain a semblance of normalcy while those around us schemed to sell the country.

Orpheus barters his glass lyre for an acoustic guitar; electric didn’t suit him—so he can woo Eurydice back for eternity.

He strums his tapestry of poetry while silver birches drape frayed ribbons of moonlight.

Eurydice never wakes up.

Every tragic hero has the epiphany that no one can save him but himself.  

Orpheus sat and wept—primal sounds under temple stones.

It’s better to ignore displays of inner lives turned inside out.

No one ever knows what to say.

The spotlight tightens around Orpheus’ neck when his guitar-playing arm is shorn.

Note: those who visit from the underworld can’t bleed.

Some say the gods were jealous of Orpheus’ heart wrenching songs.

The writers look worried.

Most of the Chorus remain calm.

Picture-window memories can be cleansed from mud and bloodshed while we wait for our subject to settle down.

Filthy blackboards thrown out definitively when the new story boards arrive.

A hero from a different tragedy carries Eurydice without waking her,

back to the afterlife before the deadline.

Redemption has its costs.

Consciousness can reset over new chasms we’ll learn to navigate.

Someone should reassemble the assemblage of melodies, sequenced shards—

attach frenetic syllable-phrases to decrescendo.

Remind us what we lost, what was carelessly forgotten:

all that longing for something more.

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the spine is now a backwards S:

sinuous, serpentine, spongy,

soggy, drowning under water,

not serendipitous,

not a sinecure with a quick fix,

not erect at my unstrung cello,

not perpendicular at the untuned piano’s yellowing keys

the cat walks across at night

emboldened with the power of creating noise, not melody.

through the neck, the incision to scour decay’s long-fingered clutch.

cadaver bone from a bank somewhere and its own bone shards

beseeched to regrow,

re-bequeath composure

when the second foot lands on the stained carpet

from the dreamworld.

in time for the masquerade, only half tragedy.

look at me, I’m not dropping the martinis

I’ll pretend to like.

decompressed, letting its recalcitrant grasp of nerves go.

now I’m outside the body,

hovering above myself in the sky’s bold cloud-whispering.

the planes fly right through me.

the Arctic winds don’t cause any shivering.

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