how you occupy a darkening room

torn paper scattered to the wind: seeks shifting to establish sense

terminal pale light coming to ground scattered: stained glass, time. shatter wanting's theology. regarding: dilating silence, occluded morning light. ways it breaks down (as water, glass, time): spills across dirt and moves against it, beading. dry cobalt branches. reflection: pushed through mercury; surfaces. her fingers curl together, held near her bare feet. torn sneakers

[a stream, itself]:

an actual conk on the head. reminded of batik, her ankles again. wing's pendulum: offered as visions. precede an angular position: commotion's status: rest. where cairns break down. steps: sand: lesson in plate tectonics: continental drift. surrender to laughter. ice shavings against skin: moves against its warmth, shiftings in body temperatures. this seeking

cool scent of water

versicle turn of her head. hair brushes across cheek, against skin. after rain's broken cairn: opened: ransacked: inhale. her hands work chopsticks. startle. touch her finger. sensation disintegrates, talmudic. tongue taps lightly against teeth. mint leaf stuck against wood. tilted disquietude's rigor. torment of wakefullness: rupture of solace

she takes the mint leaf stuck to the wood on her tongue: after rain

go where you may. seek over ground: stones

blue. green: brilliant white veins. cracked, opened: rendered? what weight they have in your hands, gravity. and the attraction of bodies to each other: skin to skin: magnets: cleave. her breath soft in [my] ear. taste of mint. this force of breath: [as if]: bodies, breath, magnitudes: variations of hearing

fingers intertwine

derange. slips away: dousing. velocipede's fingers trembling. aversion's gradient: turn away. akin to leaning, spin. unbalanced attachment to ground.

hissing of a sodium lamp. night, a highway. romance pushed to escaping stand: telegrammed. the rich musk of her skin. a day and a night driving. ears full of the buzzing of mosquitoes. pot smoke. failing blur of trucks

enters her, he steps through as through a veil: backs one spine: tree. cleave: palms full of blood. stillness: rattling chaos. began crying. sinks in metaphor: sand. at best a shifting balance. lips cracked and dry from this vast white sun: not allow turning away. renders mute: sunders reduction: stand at the edge of a terrible hollowness

turn away: this body of salt

in visions. curving lines of pressure. light erupts through fissures. their cobalt branches: rain; fish, falling upwards. sour, dry taste on his tongue in nostrils full taste of cold fish and against its grain brush rigid scales. futile gills press: as against air: how oxygen is extracted from water: as sentences derange meaning from language

is water: gives up unto itself

their flutterings: murmurs. wind. updraft: escalating variations: shifting sonance: sea of tongues. we are living in provisional tents. resting on wooden benches. cover our mouths with our hands: blocking voice: which, empty: dispels. voice [as if]: blood: orphan. falls to sand

is resisted:

baptism's lament

torn paper scattered to the wind. this speech: seeks shifting to establish sense: seeks over rough blue stones. lost: scatters sand across a wide plain

flattened by this heavy marl: dark gulf of paper's evasive gravity: rupture: scream torn from a mute opened mouth: vanish in gravity's vertex: beneath sand's black wavering: atilt: horizon

this weight of light: evasive collapse: equivilant darkness

approach to bridge silence. collapsing: fall to water's tacit leveling: through mercury. surface tension

renders muteness: impossibility. where it begins: no speech is possible. this language writing itself: seeks shape. not tending to meaning. in rendering a yawning dark gulf: silence. muteness: absence

turns on itself: bird's wing. full of presences. torn from itself: engulfed: impossible

sunders silence into unreasoning ciphers. escapes into light as it falls: into mo(u)rning

erupts into leaves: cacaphony of birds: bursting sonance: rain of glass: clatter of stones upon earth: drought's paleness. torn sound of rushing water's ghost

mark of its presence: in empty stone rooms: what is framed in its window through broken glass: coolness: dust in slats of falling light: moist smell of rain. horology's retrograde prick: clocks like birds fly backwards. evasive versive transits: loam's warm atavism: smell of dark blood: hands, fingers. oxidize zero: cipher: this unplumbed sitting: proceed recklessly: abandon sense: reek of malice: of words spoken like curses: torn, scattered to the wind on yellowed newsprint

canceling over words: banish. meaning: distorts sonance

[memory's captive density. image: word: torn: hesitant: speech: sunders muteness: renders unbended totalities of suffering. does not expect consonant revelation: a word]:

puzzled tree's caveat: grow sideways away from light. lysergic acid's durum wheat: threadbare cadence's hearing. delerium's overture: suffused with silence: listening. does not will speech, emptied: surrender to unbridled yielding

[unbend light]:

annihilate horizon's reflexive cursive will. touched, whether flawed or perfect. work lysergic continium: nonchalant embryos of gravity's dark magnitudes: fingertips wander across her back. across dark line of her tattooed skin: seek over blueish stones: sand. aureole's perfect quadruplicate circle: adumbrate light's falling magnitude: urgency: feel

meaning's silence: lack. words that construct order from their derangement: which coheres logical sunsets: elements: broken. shatter this clay, red: and in sunlight [successions of wooden tabletop]: images: letters torn: arise from their own emptinesses: from their sounds. in presences: sound

how you occupy a darkening room: days, her pale nakedness

memory. composed of sound. parts of light: which break up into this wavering horizon: arid darknesses. slight pressure of air against skin: heat: condense against the glass of a tequila bottle: against skin: night's collapse: this wandering sense of pinon

Your comments are always welcomed and encouraged. I’d love to hear from you.

One more thing.

As a zen priest I’m a student of Tenshin Fletcher Roshi at Yokoji Zen Mountain Center. For more info on Yokoji, please visit www.zmc.org.

I’m also the caretaker of Warwick Zendo, a small in-person and online sangha based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York. if you’d like to check out our practice community, we’re at www.warwickzen.org.

How this works.

I plan to post at least once a week, at minimum. The Freeside offers those weekly posts, which will always be accessible. Payside will (eventually) offer access to some longer writing and ongoing investigations into my practice: literary, baking, road. All of it fundamentally zen.

Payside also helps to sustain this project, and this practice. Like any creative project, keep sweeping is a kind of labor, and as such, your support to sustain that labor is much appreciated.

If Payside is not for you, that’s all good. The posts will keep coming on Freeside. The support of your reading and attention is a deeply appreciated gift, and I thank you for being here.

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