Ever come across an invitation and you think "oh, no. No, no, no," that wasn't meant for *me*, *I* wasn't meant to see that. "Where did my quotation marks go?" Wel, shit. Ok then here is your poem (ya little twerp):
(also live... also also - be home)
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The cyclist and the lift-kitted truck heck eacapee share an intersection, for enough of a moment the mind I tend my draw its own end. Would you like to imagine the scene my mind draws?
Of course you would, you'd stop reading this instant otherwise. You know full weel the risks you are running into by remaining here, and how level do I have to get with you until it hits you?
In the mind I, as wild volunteer, tend. This is what happens: At first, the scene is elaborate. Stage lights come on. The cyclist is replaced by two people in what might be mistaken for an oldtime donkey suit or cryptid costume puppet. But stlyed as a cycllist.
These people move along, and you know what happens? (Yes, the truck, but what style of truck, love?) All the stage hands come out; and on the poles they carry is another piece of the truck on a sheet of painted plywood. As the poles are rotated ninty degrees, they form a truck. Before turning from view.
This coincides with the the 2-piece costume looking the trucks way, and maybe reminiscent of the literal view of someone navigating their phone while driving - a flickering attentional syringe of a measurement. The two are on approach, we an voluminous sound hits the stage and black smoke darkens the stage.
It is as though a whale has come out of the ground, but it's rails, and boards and teeth that erupt from the floor and the rest of infrastructure. If the phrase hostile architecture is in your mind, and you haven't added "speed bumps" to the association, may I suggest it be one of the many above updates forming additions.
That is to say: How you see hostile architecture can reverse its target and find a new target, just like any spell. You can cast Retarget on the phrase in the mind you tend, and it will be under contract to oblige the request, filling it the blanks.
This doesn't come fast or free as a translation,but once it's set up, it is quicker and more fulfilling than any bleeds-leads matter you had in your head at the start of this moment. The media piece in my head likely got cancelled as soon as it was released for reasons I have not the wherewithal to source and update over, only let it be imagined:
In a park, there is this detriot DJ, who sets up decks, and starts scratching records. The whole infrastructure is reworked - think Inception but for urban space refactoring such that things that are crises are revisited such that they play out well enough. It spirals out of control fast. But in our scenario, we arn't playing for keeps.
You don't know this part yet, but in our scenario, the bicyclist irl gets out of the intersection before anything untoward becomes of them. This isn't about foregoing reality, this is about refactoring our prediction infrastructure in the minds and bodies we are left to tend - through wearing masks and staying informed ("each others [minds and bodies]"), and through enriching and nourishing gorgeous potentials ("our own [mind and body]").
Where the word "mind" is a construct of the body, and the body likewise a construct of the planet and the planet likewise a construct of the sun and the sun likewise a construct of the cloud [read: the Oort] - that could mean our waterways, our family, our cells, our imagination of what the taxonometric understanding of our person conveys.
This is not longer about longing. Leave longing for the feelings to find you, for the resolve to be absolute, you (yes, you!) are finally, unequivically a bad person of an irreparable nature. Unfortunately, that isn't true, that resolution. We just... made it up, didn't we, just now? We'll have to put away the trumpets, cut a check for the oboes, send home the cymbals and roll away the gong. You're still resolving.
Still life in process, still becoming. Well, shit. What do we do? Live with Guilt as our S.O. forever? Or can we imagine those two words mean (significant other of significance) for a moment, to flatter guilt, add and extra qualifier on there, an honorific, if it's sufficed. It gets worked in and before long adopted and forgotten. Until the very next day, as the song goes.
Live with Guilt as our S.O.S forever? Let's cast ourselves in the cyclists position - you and me. We're already so clear in each other's mind - you, alone with loved ones, me surrounded by all I love (that's you) - we are cycling through the intersection when *wham* the placcards clack against each other in thundrous arrival.
Oh dear, it's guilt. Look how much larger it was than before. Much trouble, so fear! But wait! Remember our hostile architecture from before. Yes let's try it out, are you ready? One... Two...
...
...you already know the guilt recedes, you can't take it with you. You can put it into others to carry, spread it like spores, but at the end of your life, is guilt really going to be the one you ended up with? Or did you ditch them? Your job is to tend to that body, that mind, and you've been wearing that pomegranate tattoo for long enough to know seeds are no terms of service.
Seeds aren't old enough to consent. Seeds are just the starting point. Like right noe, like this breath, us, right here. How does it end, love? How do you already know? What is it about linear time that it falls away so seemlessly. Time must follow a linear trek - except you listen to science podcasts enough. You know time doesn't kniw the boundaires the West has set.
We are decendants one breath and ancestors the next, saving a thought, suspending the moment, sustaining belief, not for a cause or what it's worth, but because that is what all this has always been: reality - taking paths, and breaking them into smaller and smaller paths, until we make our way through.
This is why hexcrawls are always so flowerless - just death after death like dulling the senses is the surest kindness. When look at the dullness of the world - in the macro sense, where has the kindness gotten off to? These people who write these games and don't see fit to rock the geology for want of what fits the imprint, when that's just an image. It's just a moment.
Younger than you, in many senses - genetically, you resonate with star birth youcre so old. Sagan got that dead wrong - you aren't starstuff you're vacuum. Drawn breath sustained, birth after birth, dawn after dew, two ends of time twining yours and mind into who's who, until even that is arbitraged, too arbitrary.
You could get it right, but this decade was supposed to see an explosion of ancient eastern texts finding their way into academia, upending the search for what it is that actually binds us to the lived experience we have. And what never served that - what never was reality.
Are you about to say reality is too expensive, that you need a job more than you need to be real. Then ask the question of the year: it's already fiction, in that case. The lie is already living, alive inside the process you tend ans the space you made to hold it.
And maybe I am staring into the eyes of a shoggoth in a bicycle suit with me - I'm having a lovely time. Open the last volume of Fruits Basket (1998) - I'm a girl in the rain. And you're everything I love. How am I about to be - how are these tears about to stop, how is this moment about to hold and outhold, live and outlive every other.
Because that's my humanity. That's my understanding. That's my way to be. How's yours? How are you about to be? That shame (fshit it was Guilt), that big truck whatever its licence plate reads that clacking sound. Is just the stage hands, walking toward you.
Look again - it's the truck. Now look with your periphreal vision - the thing no class, nothing but futbol and riverwatching aims to bring to attention - and see the stage hands. See them what what you invite. Is that touch? Perhaps not. Is it a dance around you, as though dust to sunbeam?
Is it a cry for knowing, for unknowing, for learning, for unlearning? What might your attention need, how has this question become more real than any job you've ever been late for, and queue you've ever been late for and ctrl+f for "wait" to read the third thing (I don't recall it at present). I'm sure it's interesting.
Everything is - evil, good, lovely, disgusting. All "interesting," dull and forfeit qualifaction. Couldn't cut a break edgewise. The dullest. Most unremarkable [ed: oh that says "pleasure to have in glass"] for long enough, there's words to arrow into, suspended at the edge of intent, ready to blossom into the next imagining.
Would you care to do the honors? I am having trouble seeing through ugly tears - the beautiful world has failed to ready my nervous system for being as many people as this moment calls me to be, to see to you. Grandmothers, foreskins flapping like butterflies, placentae pulsing like drumskins to the pulse of the convectious earth - whatever sky.
"Oh, Earth..." I might say, and mention how profound and beautiful your GR1FSHM vanity plate. Perhaps I go on for a time, on how people get damages, tired, lost. How this isn't a failure but transformation, ending, metamorphosis. I reach out for a hand and find the closest approximate, reading it for the callouses and the glimmer, searching for how ofter, what kind of dirt this exigence takes its contact, reflecting.
"When you die, as this cell, and this one," I'd point out the parts of you the change as swiftly as the surface of any other star. I'd mention how they become nutrients, soil, song, memory. A jazz funeral would play out its procession behind us on stage, not in costume but an actual mourning for one of the original peopme to get off the slave ships, full honors - art and mourning metabolizing loss, each sparkle in the spotlight a tear, each sweat drop a requium.
When you grieve, you've remembered, you've recycled, you've regenerated something brave, something that encountered toxin or radiation or torn in twane. A cell that works until it can't, a prison that holds until the prisoner is just water (also, why isn't it "prisonor" - anyway), this dying is not shame or failure but donation. A signal for replacement, a break down of the most sacred order - invitation. Wound.
Feel my chest, these scars, their tissue. This is survival. Feel my brow, this sweat - it's exhaustion. Where is the cruelty, in this radical, continuous transformation, where is the loss, where is your shame?
It's your monologue from here. You've got it. Should you be hurting for lines, I may write some up for you, if you like. But adapt. Find your way through the feelings you have inside. Keep in mind - the bicyclist gets through. So imagine how, until they get there. That's your contract. You consent to that, every breath. Even the times they don't. Another wild volunteer takes the stage; makes do. Now, on to our soliloquy.
You say:
> The process is my family? But why does everyone tell me the cells are my family? That's like saying the spaces between the words is what makes hearing possible or tones achievable! Can't my family just be spaces that don't toxify or radiate or rend the words they care for? Would the words starve without sun poisoning? Dissolve without sun bleaching? Petrify withought sunsetting? How did it come to this? Can't they work something out? Where is the conversation in it?
>
> Look at the moon - every sea and memory perfectly carried, exquisite in a way that lets you experience each strike like the weirdest typewriter being will ever devise. It's sad and gorgeous and written all at once. Every sea carries to mark of every other, all the seas write their stories in the veins and veins and veins upon and in and about my surface. Animals flock to my coast for the changes to the levels of profound stability the Moon affords - it's such a good cell there's life.
A moon descends. Every play its Moon. You say:
> Are you hearing yourself? The Moon is so feirce - the way she sits on the horizon bigger then anything then shr's small and too far away. She turns red, there's blue ones. There's even little footprints on her and some poop. There's, like, so much about the Moon that starves to be read and heard and adored. The way she looks like a fingernail or a ladle or the horizon itself. The way the rest of her dissolves into broad daylight. How she transforms into the brightest diamond as she embarrasses herself in front of the sun touching every single leaf about her shadow sinking into song - totality, vulnerable.
>
> Can't cells learn to be statically typed or whatever if they try hard enough? Survival feels so... so contrived, what is there to negotiate? Isn't every cell me? Aren't I the "collective purpose" they die interpreting? It's like they're confused water carrying half-remembered figments of light through some very poor approximation at being me. What do they say? "Oh, it's the Moon"? And then they up and die? Spill open? What's up with that?
>
> Where is my negotiation with environment symphonic?
There is no reply. You carry:
> Cells are... little moons? Ni, that's not right - poetic.
>
> How can something so small effect entire swaths of experience? What, they hold their little paintbrush and whole oceans glimmer in response to their puny swipes? They can't survive the next Moon cycle. What transformation are they performing that forms anything close to what the Moon signals to entire reefs of coral, to whole groves of jasmine, to every howl?
>
> To vary, adapt, inform, and regrow step, twanity, damage, and death is faucet drips to the waterfalls I harbor, to the avalanche of sound torn from my thinnest atmosphere, each helium I lose to space is witnessed, is held by the heat signatures of my steady gaze.
>
> What note does survival got that my ask they get good and live forever doesn't?
Nothing is missing. Yet you say:
> You know, for a long time, it was just the Moon and me. We had each other and that love was as binary as any calculation.
>
> Then these cells come along and woosh, now the Moon is everywhere. It's in my bedrock munching away at disgusting tempuratures. It's in birds that go from one pole to another just to turn around. It's like slop the likes of which you've never seen. So buried, rivers of iron effluate from my antarctic sheets at their earlieat convenience. It's in the cracks of a Valley some sensible group of cells awarded the given name "Death ". I am literally covered in these approximal correspondances that are neither Moon nor me. And then they have the gall to be nifty enough and remind me of the Moon enough that their dying betrays my trust. I thought they were words of the Moon, indefatigable, exemplar.
>
> Then they go "I have done my art, may another do theirs" - it's like the Moon is not something to get wrong. The moon doesn't try - he is! But these cells, they keep signalling like they are traces of the Moon, but the Moon is nothing like these little guys.
>
> The Moon is every universe I will ever know. I love her so much. It hurts to see her die, even in effigy.
As the Moon sets behind some foreground piece, you say:
> That's like saying every cell is a letter beamed down by gravitational forces not divorcing my attention but dividing it? I am falling to pieces from Moonlove? All my rage at this small man is inseparable from my adoration? I have... what? Moonward cute aggression? This anger is just affection still learning to love every avenue the Moon has found to reach out?
>
> I am just some substrate the Moon breaths over and - poof - scents and semiosis? Well, there's more formal channels to contact me. Moon rocks. I love moon rocks! When have I ever turned down a moon rock? I'd know the weight. I'd know the size of the impact. I'd have an exact translation. These whispers, this grammar that leaves our very division in question... well, it's very like her, is all. And I'm very upset - as is my right. I have a right to be upset. Even where every cell is the exact place we lost contact with each other when we were still together, when she still wanted to be with me, she's not now. She must live her own life. I don't make the rules. We were a happy, a complete unit, and now look how far away she is.
>
> Just going to keep writing letters? Keep reminding me over and over what we once were? What would you call that, if "but donation"?
And I remain, exactly one person. You say:
> Well, she could do to write clearer. Punctuation is important, even if shame is "ours to tend" (you certainly didn't get that idea from me) - I should know what death is, not having to figure it out on thr fly and just now and like this. There should be a protocol or something. Rituals that keep me inform. Practices. Lots of practices. Fire. And little walks that go nowhere and reveal nothing in particular - just looking out, just being present, like we once were before all this... continuosity business.
>
> And I want more correspondance, in general. Things have been too stuffy, too comfortable, I've grown rigid and that makes me crotchety, especially with all these additions being made. It's too much, too soon, I don't react well to it. I want to be kept informed. I want to know what's going on. I can learn. I can get used to this, this dying, these marks of presence I have to make out. It's not like there was no way to let me know. I'm sensible. I listen. I'm capable of understanding. I've written my way through limestone many a time. I can read mutable things.
>
> I drop all sorts of seeds. All the time. I can "continue," I've done some generative forgetting in my way. It's in my capacity. I'm just asking for some help upon occasion, is all. I am not seeing as clearly as I did before all this living made its way about. What love was, it lived a different life than this. Division is... It's very new to me. I'm still learning to love remembrance - I've just never had to.
The bicyclist exits stage left. The griefsham barrels through; new shoots, clean air.