Astral Rejection
Sounds fun I’ll be there.
Yet what the odds won’t tell you is it’s an action-comedy
truism how so many kisses… emulsify, diminish …these words for world-
famous secrets
that sit on our hands.
My friends, it’s airborne.
You will know the true test plate when it leaves your microscope:
and it was good then to be that searchlight trained on the bare floor
uncontested.
In the bottom-right corner of all things
my inner mindfulness cop,
vigorously opposed and protected,
isn’t even looking!
Foam hugs the tripwire to sleep.
Joyous ground-rules drag us onstage.
A languid, blasted desert blues hums along with the microwave
in its realism, quantum-heap desiderata, the frosting closing in on humankind.
**
Roomful of Equipment
Teeming plainclothes, the infinitesimal can take awhile.
Two dead ends make a straight line.
Is it a sign?
Is what a sign?
Does fate summon us,
or do we just steal its ideas?
Tongue to its glass drops
everything and describes a circle,
II.
the sun is hidden in me.
It seems pretty committed.
The power-mad are always trying to convince everyone their prison is within.
The obvious eats up years of misrecognition.
Fear of loss, fear of gain, fear of too much or not enough of either, fear of no
change,
in figurine death free-associated myself into some kind of foresight…Total
intermittence!
Should we enjoy history? And you and I in the sleep-
walk of wellness
slackly daubed, yet backed by neuroscience—
well I was almost not someone enough once
to see a show of hands when I know one… (A moral best mumbled through a
torn-up storm screen,
what only dust in sunlight can explain.)
No one sees the past coming. III. The dream closes its wrists.
Along a crumpled river, passage of burning tires and garbage;
pulleys and planes for the emblem, force, crime, of motivated hearsay…
I watch reruns backwards on mute.
Paradise of honest mistake.
Everything is someone’s twin.
Only one word in the manual and it’s “switch.”
**
Peace
for thinner ruins
ran its voice out
whole cloth to
the new past
its outstretched
innards sound
say everything’s
ahead of its time
lumen naturae
reason in its mouth
an ill-fittedness
deliriously green
summer light like
caution tape
licked in sand the
strange unstated
and getting by
on birth alone
as shadows cast us
louder than
a new moon
everywhere and once
who loved government
in its new look
a heartbeat too
far for bodywork
not to wonder in
its secret language
honest-rumored
absolution burning
down the door
took viscera and walked
then I wasn’t
now I’m not
along the circle it
took to get here
a world made
for disbelief
trickle-down dualism
in another half-
wrecked culture
crying with greed
under the sun’s
infected eye
innovation-weary
aching to be fucked
new flesh
in ritual backlash
difficulty swallowing
a vacuum to what it
thinks clean
religious insides
keep the aspect
ratio stretched taut
in the defacing
thirst of its froth
fedback haptic
clickbait looking
backwards both
ways for time
in anger and
togetherness
and music that
seems only to recede
●
hey great spirit
smiling through
my lab skin
backlit into a-
tonal grayout
fire that makes its
own weather
where a voiceover
in power
fed the air I
knew I needed
to be wrong or
nothing happens
my marrow
my chrome
had long been
different since
the big move
and hungered
from the depths
of a blood-clot
as the selective
evil of attention
trembles off
as pops and skips
people laughing into view
and a peace fell
upon the media
asleep at the top
of its lungs
sucking its loopholes
thinking there’s time
in the world
wherein I’d spin
back apart if we
weren’t already walking
through the bright side
of what none know
breeze of fixative
anciently pixelated
(continuity error)
how to live
what to do
if I couldn’t
maybe I would
in wrought narrows of
where’s this going
where are you
the sky a blue
wall of silence
high-concept
minutiae
in the shape of
what I told
the truth
bleed it back
written such that
you could hear the
world around me
praying through its teeth
lust wincing in
a window’s defense
the mirror in knots
same difference
too much to remember
too much to forget
not to work like that
not to fit in the trap
heat lamp in
broad daylight
soul taped to the
back of his head
spinning threshold
erasure’s guest
in a chaos of worth
light of day of
in fear of enough
and form and color and
the more you dig
the less there is
“that told no tale
and let no witness in”
(cf dark union
tao te ching 56)
hugged awake
we were faithful
we gave each
other birth
psych-rock circle
of light around
how a person
even manages
in little police state
teething its niche it
couldn’t have
happened any other
way because it
didn’t O my pain-
killer missing the
point the right the
wrong gnarl the
wind goes the
way it came
not waving
not drowning
REJECT
ENTERTAINMENT
NO DEATH
NO ANALYSIS
TEXTURES IT
encroaches with project
poetics NO PALLIATIVE
VERSUS THE PERFECT
though killings
are limitless
and pain
without distances
it is possible to concentrate
and still
be useless
wrong in one’s symmetry
breath presets
in the casual
cruelty of personal
space
(neverending
semicircle)
worn to brightness
by the strobe-
lights of home
wet hands
set me down
and feel the sun on
someone’s face
from practice back
to habit back
to accident to under-
brush personals
heard down
its throat
saying you’re not
lost that only images
are lost you are
the wrath and solace of
moonlight on
an open wound
world music within
be why I’m here
until supposedly
final touches collapse
in delirium
middle begin again
homespun dying
for some singsong
in my body art
bit into the cusp
follow the blindspot
regalia loyal haters
follow dusk burst
like noise into law
dry to the touch
in an eon
touch-starved and
still I hesitated
oh today won’t be
yesterday for long
and between deaths
the permanence
of life led me
and when I lived
what was the difference
foundation crept in
repeating sideways
we never turn around
back to the bandage
chest to the skin
stiffen and wane
in the dead of spring
time doesn’t tell
time does nothing
until the accident
peace is coming
—for Brian Ang
**
PAUL EBENKAMP is author of The Louder the Room the Darker the Screen (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2015), Late Hiss (Desert Pavilion, 2021) and Regular Acid Consciousness (Despite Editions, 2022) and also makes music as Position. He co-curates the Woolsey Heights reading series in Berkeley, CA.
