digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 4)
How to read the pieces from this book:
1. Click on the embedded link to the [music] in the title of the poem.
2. Listen on repeat while reading.
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Fig. 11. Bone. [Playlist: Akira Kiteshi, Ulysses]
don't trip on dying in your dream:
first stop the grave, then travel!
staved on tree roots marionetted through eye sockets
you're a prize carried on cypress knees a relay baton
handed from root system to root system
no eyelids now so no looking away! what you did who you were
how you spent your time
slough into a gloriously rotten skin sail
luffing with soil until you unfurl
into beam reach
let the grubs get fat
let the beetles strip those bones
let rains lick with gravelly tongues
until stubborn scab loose tooth
(what you once called life)
is scratched shivered yanked
loose from the final stringy thread:
bump and grind with boulders
shake those processes and condyles
rub epiphyses with other posthumous tourists
sand yourself glassy
with shale and pumice and schist
unhinge your mandible and stuff that skull
with bone clatter and pebble storms
the stony language of former civilizations
each with their form of permanence
each with their unslakeable thirst
now that the head is not the headspace
now that the visions are not delimited on axes
nor navigable by cardinal directions
and you've self-effaced to a cloud-like probability
locked into standing wave
a danse macabre
a memento mori
it's time to flex your phantom limbs
your plum pudding probability
your atmosphere of decay
let the juice spray out of your nose holes
and spoke out along the continuum
of smaller and smaller and larger and larger
til the memory is clean and squeaky
the pieces primed for reassembly
you have worlds to end worlds to mend
the now the then the soon to be
