digital gothic: a spellbook for the new sorcerer (new work 5)
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 3: a candle: [Playlist: Virtual Boy: Mass]
you’ve seen where dreams end up:
in the foyer on a polished credenza in a jar marked kosher
for everyone to admire at parties the contents naked, shriveled,
obscenely meaty
late at night after the card games
you hear the adults sneak into the hall
the scrape of the lid unscrewing
the muffled sounds of hunched gorging
you barricade yourself behind your bedroom door
light several devotional candles from the dollar store
and conjure the real thing:
he steps out of the wall poster
and makes himself at home taking the form of a rock angel or
that boy you met at the busstop or the school friend who can’t put two words together
tonight he’s nick cave
you discuss a way to address the problem:
he says the cleaners are coming, one by one
you don’t even want to let them start
and you say I believe in some kind of path
that we can walk down, me and you
so with tiny slits on the meat of the thumb
fleshed out with lyrics and candle flames
sugar water collected under the tongue
deals written in nail polish folded in tight triangles
on college ruled paper
the same song on repeat 11, 12, 2am
you call the live dreams down from the scrim
ghost riding it in you’re not sure it’s going to work
then
the walls shift, the stairwell creaks
the roof shakes shingles free of its eaves
you grab for nick’s hand but you palm right through his wave
he shrugs back into the paneling just as the jambs vault the lintels
above your head in the crawlspace
you hear the mice panic
from the window you watch beams snap free of rafters the house stretches first one long wing
and then the other
nails squeal mortar crumbles
pipes pop loose like tuning forks
the attic belches bats and owls
the floors groans the house crouches
and launches
you’re airborne
your window screen blows out
followed by the window
you rise, rise clinging to the sill through the first awkward flaps
there’ll be bruises on your elbows from the g force
streetlights shrink
cold air flattens and whips your hair
your block your street your town
shrink to toys to blurs the house glides soars
dipping to one side and then the other
floorboards casting a hatched shadow through the moonpath
there are other houses here and there other conjurers
transfixed at their bedroom windows
faces transformed
your house flocks with the other houses
together they swing west
far below, the oil refinery a black dragon with long nostrils capped by venting flames
is chewing its rear leg free of a retaining wall:
several freeway overpasses and a section of tunnel
kite past the wind howling over their lips and mouths
out over the water now
you see the lighthouses dive and submerge
playing in the surf around the feet of the bridge
and that’s when you hear the music
feel it first, really, vibrating your lungs:
it is the houses sailing the length of the bridge
dragging their wingtips along the suspension cables
you catch the gaze of a girl in a basement window
dear friend her eyes say welcome
