No rights: homage to the coolest mafahcking front man that I have seen.
Seriously, he dances with his mic stand better than professional ballroom dancers move with their partner/s.
I love a man’s hip bone and I like to play:
The hipbone is connected to the….
/tell me that you gotta show me/
Forgive the pronouns if you can and dig the essence.
The beat tricks me. It seems a half count slower than my ears expect.
Tension of time.
Intension.
The obelisk is well-balanced.
Soujurn is a relative term.
The smell of salt rolls off the Sound into my mouth and nostrils.
The slight humidity makes the smell reminiscent of a locker room.
The water is sweaty like hot skin.
Addled.
I dreamt I was not quite a teenager.
I fed ducks in a park on a bench, with a Holocaust survivor. He was a mean man, and we got along well.
We did two things:
1. Feed ducks bread crumbs
2. Play a game.
Starting with A, we would name diseases/ailments in alphabetical order all the way to Z(ed).
Alzheimer’s
Bunyons.
Canker sores.
But, repeating was unacceptable.
Ex. Next round:
Acne
Boss eyes
Cataracts.
He always won. I did not care.
He taught me what floaters were but could not tell me why sometimes I saw white ones, like the sprinkles of 4th of July sparklers, and sometimes I saw indigo ones.
He only saw the white ones.
⊙
But, before that,
in the same dream,
I dreamt that
the crest of your wave foams white in its churning.
My c-heeks go red.
Eyebrows arch up high as your brow furrows.
You slide softly and I run nails over your rib cage.
I kiss your nape.
⊙
But, before that,
in the same dream,
I dreamt that
I went on a walk.
My arm swung by my side like the pendulum of a grandfather clock.
Wafting leaf smoke like incense in some ceremony.
I heard two staccato strikes against strings of an amplified guitar,
in time with my heels’ clicks.
A day I play like Cool Hand Luke.
If you labo(u)r, you probably do not have Labor Day off.
You are probably extra busy with your labor, in fact,
because of all those non-physical labourers who do have the day off.
No judgement, just observation derived from experience as someone who has been on both sides.
This is pure assumption: I can tell if you have ever worked on your feet, by how you interact with me when I am running a waiting list for the restaurant.
Open secret x: I am the hostess. I want you happy.
Open secret x’: you will not piss me off nor will I say anything unkind.
You know why?
Because, nothing pisses cranky people off more than someone who will not take your anger bait.
Killing you with kindness quite literally, you silly folks.
This is where the Tao of Cool Hand Luke comes into play.
You trying to put me down on the ground?
I just keeping getting back up with a giggle and a smile.
I have been through far worse.
I can do it until you are uncomfortable.
Every now and then, I can even make you smile.
Score.
I appear daft. Too stupid to realize I am being insulted.
I appear sugary sweet, but I speak in a calm, deep, resonant voice.
Just so you get a grip on the power of my gravity.
Unkindly kind.
I decide I need a tab, as they say.
American Spirit: ingredients: water and tobacco.
And some kind of paper, right?: I wonder.
The point is moot as I have already inhaled the combustion of fire to leaf.
Why are you smoking when all you really want is to be walking, Little Wing?: the No-One man asks me.
Because I need to clear my mind and grease the wheel. So, I can count to ten.
Prove it: he says.
⊙
One is zero and unity. All and everything. I learned this lesson in the woods, whilst listening too hard and asking too many questions.
Two is a perfect number. Mathematically speaking.
Three is a trinity manifested in a pyramide.
Four is a group that trains themselves in martial arts, as advertised.
Five refers to commercial success. Why?
Six makes me recall you, beast. And what it is to rotate this figure about the x-axis.
Seven reminds me of a trinity of 7’s, of Parzival.
Eight is hate not so far past.
Nine is three, six, and itself. This was the universe to Tesla.
And, ten? Ten is an order of magnitude. Ten makes sense for orientation.
Ten let’s me catch my breath: I concede to him.
I near the entrato the condo and a Vietnamese couple pulls aside me in their SUV.
How do we get to the coast?: the driver asks me through his cracked, automatic window.
Take a right at the stop sign, then, at the fountain on Main Street, take a right.
It is a roundabout.
Thank you. How lucky you are to live here: they say, after we struggle through language barriers and we repeat the same sentences between ourselves six times in total.
Yes, I am lucky to stay here: I reply.
I wave as they speed to the stop sign.
I told you that I needed to walk the block: I tell the No-One man.
He rolls his eyes.
Have you ever stared, for a long time, at a large body of water?
More than an hour, or
until you can’t remember if the water is actually the sky and perhaps it is you that has been submerged in water the whole time?
Like maybe the horizon is a surfacing point where you and I breathe like whales?
Spouting our exhalations and thrilling the star ships above our surfaces.
It feels like when you sit in a room alone and repeat your own name aloud, for a minimum of three minutes.
Incepting yourself as you dialate time through your subjectI’ve experience.
Like purposefully esoteric, alternative spellings.
“I don’t get cold,” says the cool cat, “I just catch a chill.”
“Don’t steal my lines and then try to impress me with them,” I tease.
I point the left foot, of my crossed leg, from my seated position.
The bones structuring the top, flat part of my foot crackle themselves loose.
I make a strange, welp noise as I feel a tendon overstretch and then reassert itself back into place.
“You are so loud,” the cat moans, stepping over, circling and pawing my grounded, left foot. S/he finally lies down atop my foot.
A robust, white-tailed rabbit plods along in little plopping hops.
It has the legs of a frog.
The cat pounces at it. Claws pushing off me.
Sinking in. I do not yelp this time.
The rabbit reveals sparrow like wings and flies away.
A flying frog that mimics hares.
Reading my dreaming mind, the cat nods at me.
“This would make a a good illustrated children’s book.”
⊙
“Hey! Will you do that thing I like?” asks the cool cat.
I flip off the light switch and light a candle.
I make shadow puppets play and flit on the wall.
The cat tries to catch the intangible phantoms.
No rights: homage to a favorite in the house KC.
/I am barely on the ground/
/train/train/release the fire out of me/
/I don’t wanna burn/
/from the inside/
/n’ I dunno my name and I dunno my purpose/
/I just know my place on the slow train./
⊙
I’ll be ’round the bend, this backwoods gal, from Alabama.
Boy, without a doubt…
There’s a slow, slow train coming round the bend.
⊙
I nice dreamy song for those of you with a long weekend.
Or a burning heart.
I still remember
/Standin’ on the platform waiting for that train/
/Son, you are too late now/
/Train already came/
/waitin’ on a train that’s already come/
/come/
The flicker of a whisper appears in my ears.
I hiss a response, in kind.
Sssssss.
Only one international phonetic alphabetic difference between:
Sssssss.
[and]
Zzzzzz.
In the English language.
Fricatives
voiced and voiceless.
Aspirated or otherwise.
⊙
My eyes narrow.
Simply evidence of closer observation and inspection,
no signal of disbelief.
Curiosity is the momentary suspension of belief.
Investigative.
Mettle of metal
being testing
in the seriousness of this series of silence.
Your name is Ruin?: I ask.
No. RueAnne: she replies.
Why did you bring me back here?: I wonder.
I didn’t mean to: I hear her say.
She does not realize that she said this.
I nod anyway.
Certain geographies don’t agree with dream me.
This place rubs me wrong.
Edgy.
RueAnne is staring into nothing.
Her energy has been summoned.
She just lost herself again: I think.
A goat ambles by.
What do you see?: his mind asks mine silently.
My mind races.
Let my cycle through my four breaths, three times each: I say..
[Time passes in our empathic silence]
My eyes hold the other’s,
Strange music plays with præter-natural lyrics.
Goosebumps envelop me.
I see energy: I say.
What does that mean?: he asks
Nothing that makes much sense when put into conscious explanations: I shrug, smiling.
Tao: he says.
Tao adjacent: I respond.
I dreamt I was under siege last night.
Like Bell Rock.
But ages before.
The rocks were boulders of dingy khaki and earl gray.
Choppy and round, not leveled and smoothed.
But, they too, like the current iteration, remain cool to the touch,
despite constant exposure to the pressure of the sun.
I do no know why I am here, nor why I am being fired upon.
I wear a sleeveless red, knee length dress which renders me a sitting duck visually, per se.
I have on my “clown shoes” as I call them in this reality.
The pair of red, canvas slip ons are not conducive to scaling mountain goat terrain quickly.
Rocks, boulders, are being launched at me by wooden catapults operated by an unseen foe.
I hear them screaming through the air before my eyes can see them.
This is the best advantage I have.
I can look where I am going while feeling assured I will hear the threat.
No need to look for the threat.
I drop to the fetal position under the precipice of a nearby boulder, if available.
I think. If I had an umbrella in the colors of the rocks around me, that might be handy.
Such umbrella appears in my hand.
This is a dream: I think.
I try the umbrella method during the next assault.
They lose me in their scope.
I believe they are hopeful they struck me down and thus can no longer see me.
I leap to feet
too soon,
spoiling the very advantage I just created.
I hear the next rock scream.
Howl. Bad bit of terrain beneath my feet.
This umbrella could deflect the projectile: I imagine.
I open it, crouch down.
My braced arms withstand the pressure of the incoming’s rock momentum.
It bounces off the imagined shield.
I feel like I have won the battle.
No rights: homage to a song I cannot get enough of.
/it’s not quite right [?] / you must be a cynic/
Do you hear that jingle early in the track, too?
Like a pair of keys in hand, jangling with each step.
Here is an excellent visual tale told to a different cut of this track.
[Howl her laughin’ howls give me goosebumps everytime.]
Massive indeed.
/voodoo in my blood/
You and I went to an afterparty for a band called The Passé Posse.
It was in a place named Electri-City by an ocean.
But, there was only candlelighting.
There were water slides being used as public transportation.
Part of the city’s infrastructure.
I visited here previously.
As I took you by the hand to take you to my bed,
You said: You maybe too physical. Too physical for me.
Like the song?: I ask.
I do no know if you were kidding
because i immediately awoke.
When I am all these fathoms afar,
breath is rest.
I sleep with my eyes open.
My eyes close upon waking.
A nap is a blink.
A micro-sleep.
A relative delusion.
The pull of fo/u/rces enlivening me.
I am force moving through time and space.
Or, maybe, that is you.
Perhaps, I am your optimal conditions.
Your ideal ether enabling materialization.
I see from the vacuum of the abyss.
It is lonely but I am not alone.
Tactile not tactical.
Marco Polo is not a game but a call and response song.
Electricity and light.
Lidar and blackholes
howling in algorithmic keens.
Your mind is a cheshire, Schrödinger’s cat.
I watch white butterflies flutter by.
The local feral cat dozes under a nearby bush.
As with the boisterous Stellar’s jays who I feed peanuts, the cat accepts my presence now.
S/he gives me a lazy, sidelong glance.
I focus into those two eyes and blink my own very slowly.
The cat returns my slow blink.
This means we are still cool. I speak cat, see.
I am poor but I am elitely wealthy in simple luxury.
So, I suppose that I am rich at the moment,
to my mind’s eye.
In scenery. In being able to walk to work.
In being down with the local flora and fauna.
I smell bursts of flowers’ blooms from proficient gardeners.
Blasts of fragrances from local shops with open, front doors.
The day invites me.
No rights: homage.
/I really wonder how Venus would feel if she was raised to be such heel/
Howlarious.
I am a girl…
/They way they scratch and the things that they dream/
…but a little gender bend for the toughest of guys seems only kind at this time.
A sawtooth comb for newly brittle hair.
Almost raking the wet curls.
A mind sulking over some lost piece of life, perhaps?
Everything is easier under the cover of my clouds and stars, dear,
including your lucid waking and dreaming.
⊙
I take the long way home.
I pause.
From outside the pub, I listen to the band play.
I consider going inside.
I see someone eyeball me and motion to an empty seat.
I smile and shake my head.
He cannot take the place of the one on my mind tonight.
I do not seek distraction.
I will enjoy my own smouldering.
A game of patience.
A study in control.
A tyre pyre burning.
⊙
I pass a man followed by a woman.
He has his hand extended behind him.
Fingers shifting in an effort to convince her to hold his hand.
I wonder why she didn’t take it into hers.
I see a man atop a mesa at sunrise.
I laugh as I have the thought: I know him.
Everything is bathed in ruddy red and sunlit pink.
I can see for miles despite being at a low elevation.
Looking back at the man, I see him hold up two configurations of stick bundles.
They form the two letters that sound like my first name.
I think: I shall climb up.
Having the thought, I immediately arrive at his side, atop the mesa.
This is a dream: I say.
The last time you met me here, you slapped me hard and kissed me harder: he said.
I feel embarrassed. I do not remember this.
Do you remember my name?: he asks.
I remember your first and middle name. I remember you refusing to tell me your last name: I say.
Guess it: he says smiling.
Keyes: I conjecture.
Closer. Keynes.: he said.
Almost like the mathematician. Like keening me up: I think.
They sucked us into the parallel decades ago.
Don’t you see the change in the quality of the sunlight?
It is a thin space here.
Closer to the Other.
Go through it.
Come right and clear on the other side of my arch.
WrittenCasey 