digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work)
Here is the newest piece from my work-in-progress:
(comments are always appreciated)
Fig. 13: waking the dead. [Playlist: Bassnectar, Timestretch (West Coast Lo Fi Remix)]
dear magician take a lesson from the raven:
you bear the dead with you everywhere
you needn't plant a stone
you needn't carve up your arms
the scent of her lost cologne is trapped in your coils
his good sweat whuffs up from inside the jacket of form
the longer you travel the more backseat drivers the more
histories take a lesson from the raven:
who wrests blood feathers from the meat of memory
and from dead weight soars on hollow bones
transforming the dead into the neutral buoyancy of everywhen
and getting totally high off the overlapping particulars:
raven street view is a see-through into each and every room
in your haunted mansion:
here a girl who wore thigh-high docs
she nicknamed bum kickers came to
live in a railroad flat above a dim set
of stairs above the lucky horseshoe
coffee shop: her room was 5 X 12
but the 12 was vertical
one of many hidden pockets beneath
the skirts of the painted lady, a space
at once a fainting room, a walk-in closet
knicknack storage, the last hitching post
for a boy who rode his horse dead to rights
right through the ceiling, leaving his body
(which could not sneak between the lattice
of matter) rucked amongst the dirty sheets
a source of much distress to the landlord
who dead reckons his 400 crusts a month
from the holey pockets of dreamers who've
stumbled or washed up or clawed their way
back from the dead toward phoenix city out
of the head-scramble of the fog, to find
a non-euclidean punk-rock wardrobe to
a dimension where whole teams of mules
along with their carts, whole brigs and barques can disappear beneath the mud and still go on sailing beneath the feet of bankers the layers of concrete no tomb but super conductor of a vessel that flickers from
form to form between frames
now a seagoing vessel
now a cable car
now a wave organ built of
grave markers (because
this place has no room
[no room!] for what is
not able or willing to
be caught dead yet
keep up jump in hold on
the light rail doors are
closing the destroyer must
navigate precisely on
the right tide to eke
its massy bulk beneath
the bridge [a gate])
into and out of a narnia that smells to some
like an odorless cala lily and to others like
dead men's shoes but to most
like a dry-erase marker, a neuromantic sting
at the back of the throat like mourning
smokes on a piss-splashed stoop
[our painted lady's boots] where
a 24-year-old perfectly willing to
be caught dead will moniker himself
bucky or goon or emperor and languishes
[behind blackout curtains] [in the saloon]
while supplying snow/liquor/gold dust/
lattes/codexes to his kingdom of the dead
you can pay later but sit on his lap for awhile because
playing dead is a full-time occupation and brutal beauty
reigns forever in this garret: bread from dumpsters
peanut butter on plastic knives duct-taped shoes
stump-footed pigeons sharpie hearts and daggers
inked in permanent marker on the thirsty skin
the inhabitants of the rooms forget
they are inside its rooms peering into
little rectangles of other buildings to
other rooms into lcd boxes of
varying sizes all day which give the
illusion that they are not inside a room
which is the soul of mistaking dead time
for something dead for being
dead wrong about what's always going to be
dead ahead
wait now where's the raven our conductress
it's so easy to get lost
when one thing slides so neatly into the nest when
years elapse while we're in the air
just navigating the jamb from one
room to the next and meanwhile
the lucky horseshoe has burned and
all those walls where the dead were
letter ringer certain
doornail dodo
neck up and waist down
in the water spit of and cut
broke and buried
easy drunk gorgeous
rolling over
well it's a dead giveaway:
they've knocked 'em dead and
reopened as a wine bar
raven where's the chicken exit?
the lamp post in the snowy wood
get me out of these chambers or at least
meet me halfway with a psychic map
I'm dead serious
dear magician this is not a beanstalk
it's a metallic breath bitter aspirin under the tongue it's a room so small
you can stand in the middle
and touch five of its six futures
it's an open window the blind soul can't find
hovering, transparent, on updrafts
as it bumps the ceiling and ricochets the walls
it's your work ahead of you
which starts at what everybody takes to be the dead end
and is really
a nimble climb up a pilfered ladder
straight up and out of sight
