nomadic language expressing sand

still not bothering with logic in favor of more crows. more light. feeling my way through.

what remains: this white echo, footsteps

this falling a twist of uncertain assemblage: [he] turns in torrents of unassailed sleep: torn letters thrown into light

this falling: watery: chromatic: pitched against tar, a beetle: its shiny back a telephone pole: crows above, lined up. as expected: dissolve. lost in the light. there are angles of seeing not expected: hearing trucks furious progress across the desert: these highways stretching infinitely: networks of asphalt, tar, paint.

Hissing halide lights flicker: acrid smell of gasoline, he looks off at a retreating horizon: at edging light

fingers bridge an unimaginable gulf: grasp longing as a defensible position: turn against light: transfixed by her blonde hair across the pillow: her breathing: sleeping: ghost light through the opened door

landscape marked by absence: [trace]: days composed of wind. loss. struggle to complete a circle: riot of voices. doors opened and closed off a long corridor. night falls. They’re running from room-to-room wearing long-nosed masks stolen from commedia dell’arte, sit in the dark alone. their breathing: movement of chaotic silence. this dark: trembling interiority

hands of a clock moving backwards: glow of a cigarette being lit

images break down

skirt a pool of mercury. navigable ellipse: reflection. [mercury's dissolution]: blacken remains.

irrigable eclipse: shifting perception: epileptic uncertainty. speech's rapture: space. whiteness of grief: of riotous tongues. cloister seizure's arroyo: sand's migratory shifting. descending light: remains of its phosphorous cascade: this blue desert: silent as cold. a long way across its white landscape

the night faces of clocks

light's hegira. a long way across a desert: clatter of illuminated rock: water poured over hands. sense of air: glycerine depth. [smoked a joint]: field of broken stones before a river: traces drift in muddy water: image's broken construction: escapement. drained of sand. incense of perception's loss: fall off the edge of the world: blind: sought equilibriums

parts of light: narrow equation's breakdown: quantities of physics. bitter taste of salt: washed away: sediment

this wandering seeks a refuge: darkness

[stand by a river. in a shallow sea to their ankles: night falling away: water]:

horizon wavering: washed by failing light, burnt edge of reason: know the somatic atavism of loss, cast aside tongues: agonies of speech: retreat into this mescaline sea of description: this tearing. breath panics in the wind: abandons bodies lost among immense piles of bone: the cracked ribs of submerged boats. [we] ate the mussels she found there at dinner

[we walked through the rain]:

meaning pushed to its breakdown: calcine experience of language: seeks adumbrate silences washed by light's failing: description's abandonment. falls through letters: assonant light: this nomadic language

what seeking is damaged by meaning

where this language leads time drops: slate. falls upon itself: left restless. this sifting through shards of pottery left awake

sand's dissident crisis of faith, bathed in rivers: light falls away: old clothes

stone shattered by water

burden of curvature: single point of sound: collapse: bend neutralism's escape: thing of viol sensitivity: willing porous mantle of violate sedimentary geometry. fingerboard's rapid clingstone pulse: flesh pulled back: away

black body cabal: light's vanished interiority: consumes itself

sunflower's yellowed gravity: rapid fading: washed. petal's watery light, collapse: into a single point: radiation escapes: sound: white noise

sunflower's fulcrum eventual invertase: the way elements organize themselves: smoke: geometry's tolerance: brown rice, punitive reason: this body wills abandonment: wills a tentative structure: crystalline wooden sunflower's graduate helix: beneath wire's aquable rending: teeth: skulls. reason: itself to vanishing

this burden: willing collapse: submerged: this restlessness: tentative subordinate wishing: let loose: surrender to mange: this willing homelessness: forgetting

curvature

fulcrum's insistence. gravity's weight: antiphony's wild structuring. pylons, sticks, wire: skeletal embrasure: turn away

rapid vision of gravity's spherical collapse: surface tension's inverse force: psychotic delerium's rank suspicion: debris of visionary structures: sand's helix: glassine: [avatar of realism]: light shot through, vanishing: collapse feathers. at the edge of consciousness: point of sonance: this gravity

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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