"phosphene" poems
Either this town is without character, or my own lack thereof blinds
me to what style hums it into history. The brook's rapids are drowned
by the highway roar, central song that never passes through, spilling
over walls and roofs. A railroad collects rust between weeds, silent
authenticity. Impassive clouds remind me of other ways to witness.
And this is real, too; sadness accrues over store counters, fatigue
glowing in the pavement connecting all, cracked and rubble
facing skies a simulacrum grey. Inebriation, par for course,
a hidden semblance of a self-chosen haze within a haze.
Gravity, acoustic footfalls question my arrival here.
phosphene breath--
dark, dark mining town solstice
unearths inner rainbows
Dec 21, 2012
Dec 21, 2012 at 8:38 PM UTC
*creating something in silence (save for keyboard clacks) is a practice in subliminal listening. Thought is like air and you can hear it whispering through the trees of your foresty dendrites.
Misery mixes with ecstasy and love mixes with confused dislike-- for 11 days straight, I've been losing myself in the phosphene glare of love for a girl named Sasha.
She insists she's not a Xanax ****** but by my standards I'm still not sure if I'm convinced altho this seems like an unfair snap-judgement that still hurts her feelings. Perhaps she needs it, and I'm just blanked as the next heretic to go on trial in the pharmacratic inquisition.
For the first time the other night I experimented (incorrectly) with DMT. Sprinkling it over a packed bowl of tea (marijuana), I drew back a breath and felt nothing more than life as a conceited dream with a strange alchemical hangover-fear of psychosis.*
Jan 5, 2014
Jan 5, 2014 at 4:49 PM UTC
Dwelling is a razor
regret, drip-fed poison
guilt, a creaking chain as it tightens around my neck.
Stockholm syndrome has me
in that
lovelifedeath
grip.
And as my own jailer
I rail against myself
Caught in a purgatory-
safe
drawing blood
then consoling.
I can't see........
My corneas tear in the wind
there's some metaphysical connection, I know it
I don't want to look at my life as it is
The guilt twists my guts
I'm pathetic in my failures
and grasping at a fading light.
Ah perfectionism, my abusive lover;
you endow me such power, then beat me senseless
I'm goddess, then mortal-
panicking
frail
with nowhere but elusive horizons to go.
Phosphenes
those bright spots of colour
as I rub my eyes-
Once again I wake too early
and that too-familiar cyanide starts to leak through my veins
and anxiety grips me
How'll I ever get it right
make it out
fix it all
come out from under
breathesucceedrelaxenjoybeworthsomething
in short
has my bright patch of colour had its day?
I can't
face it.
Jan 31, 2013
Jan 31, 2013 at 3:57 AM UTC
like some jealous future self,
my writer's clock balks at this moment with you,
i can't explain, so i give up listening. (i have an app for that)
the writing only stops as degustation ends ~
thank you, though ~ i'd like you to hear
regardless of the meanings lent ~
the gymnolexical fear
appearing ornamental far and near.
google files us away, omniscient
acumen of o's and ones ~
words sing to me their luring promise of a lasting hold,
but less and less
as plastic griming fingers sync
with what it seems to be,
a new world search-
-engine culling info freely
do i still believe in order?
striving for the fitted words,
a love imprinted input thus on crystal pixel page,
your effect on me distilled--
refracted throng associational
fantastic server metacomfort
for an audience
swimming past into this,
now always
ever-new you appear, bursting
at the seams my vision churning
...effluent sourcing, blurry self of others ~
heart-charming river-nymphs!
bolt-hurling sky-satyrs! reeling nations are subtended by your words
that walk, trod, swim across what poetry,
dance with this ever-blooming techne-earth
as i mark your plasmic eyes
we flow and let flow,
we dance our farmer's mud
into the beryl-winding paths
of othernets and cyberplay,
the restful ends reborn bright white
lacing lattice-scopic fibrous
scatters of another wi-fi interlife ~
we stream and let stream,
river-tress girl, your eyes summon
a great coalescence in me,
we dance into the channeled
delta of spring beauty here across the keyboard;
it cascades a slow attentive phosphene
striking pointed notes of color,
ring beneath and through the
green, sylvan silicon throw of mossy html
so that even rocks and sprawling
tree-trunks sing within the disembodied
vortexes of arrowed imagery to browse
my virtual belongings to you,
alone in your sorrow-joy fighting
free love in an all-world-breath
before the screen
Aug 1, 2012
Aug 1, 2012 at 11:40 PM UTC
Despise the way absence become routine,
Ritualized thoughts.
The aroma of a meal,
One I have had before,
One I had before with you.
Stopped drinking.
Your songs are much softer when sung in sobriety.
I can look at other men.
I can flirt again.
I can be silly.
Best with you.
Here has been ten rounds of four weeks and all of those nights
Not one where you have not become phosphene,
A hallucination.
The kisses on the foreheads were the worst.
Dreamt of most.
Means something.
And!
I'm trying to find the key,
And I'm trying to unwind these binds
And I'm trying to release your chain
And I'm trying to fight the same fight.
And you aren't here to help me,
But you are also so present.
And I know you do not want me anymore,
Foolish poor tainted heart o' mine still cheers on time.
A ****** shame.
Aug 11, 2012
Aug 11, 2012 at 3:41 AM UTC
Cleopatra's Boom, as worn as earth as economy, salivating stone-head medusas turning Hercules to stone mending torn shirt-sleeves as it's posterity's sign of decay when nostalgia melts like an old bucket of icecream, not empty—but gooey sticky sugar-salt in mist of phosphene glare from a quarter of the deserts heat. You can see 64% of the picture. The other 36% is forever lost in the splattered blindspot dots of your diamond optical nerves, an eternal mismatch eternity—the parts you won't notice when your stomach aches after three consecutive cigarettes for breakfast. Cleopatra's Boom, belittled like oceans, always so alien tho it makes up 71% of our global entirety—thoughts find external storage on disc drives, in water—there's a mouth out there with a saltier kiss than the Pacific, one that caws like seagulls in exodus, announcing to the Peace Arch: “I American. I need a greater space to spread my legs.”
Jul 3, 2015
Jul 3, 2015 at 12:23 AM UTC
Sometimes when you look at something hard
enough you can see its pixels,
when you spend to long focused and color starts to fade
and light becomes a blending tool.
Looking but not seeing.
When shape defines what you see,
and color is a first thought,
... and you've seen everything, or nothing.
May 13, 2015
May 13, 2015 at 6:00 PM UTC
I was made to be milk glass—
Lately, I've been more of
a scattering of light,
a technicolor oil spill,
effervescent kerosene,
a phosphene
in a running eye,
fluorescent aerosol
going cumulonimbus
in a green sky;
a variegated skin rash
caused by shining neon bile
all festering and iridescent;
a tattered road map
on the wall of a food court,
bearing incandescent roads
twisting like snakes
eating their own tails;
a human being in the form of a
kaleidoscopic feedback loop
passed back and forth
between the mouth and the ear
and the mouth and the ear forevermore,
burning the tongue, the finger tips
and teetering on the edge
of glittering, glorious incendium—
After the smoke has cleared,
I can go back
to sleeping on the shelf.
Jul 11, 2016
Jul 11, 2016 at 3:27 AM UTC
I stepped outside and all I see is the air you left behind
The candy bars we used to eat
I close my eyes and all I see are phosphene colors
The feelings broken down in a kaleidoscope
Apr 26, 2017
Apr 26, 2017 at 6:51 PM UTC
fierce and infinite
cracked fractals
color by avidity
Beauty
lost in pyroxenes
and phosphene dreams.
Half-life glows
and the quark forgets to spin.
Nov 14, 2011
Nov 14, 2011 at 8:31 AM UTC
our time in this universe
is ridden with a luminous oddity
for light is a rarity
in the biorhythm of the macrocosm
the normality is jet
nothing
inky, obsidian slate
such liquid void drips laboriously
completely free from ejecting effort
like beads of pine sap among evergreen needles
seeping in a slowed, oozing, endless rush
at gravity's inevitable, gentle tug
eventually it will consume the cosmos
like maple syrup poured atop a whole-grain waffle
primarily, the charcoal sweetness fills
the quite purposeful lack of solidified batter
but then greedily begins to swallow the flaky bread
it bleeds
spurting with immense weight and impossible magnitude
until each limb dissolves
drifting away in the acidic salt of onyx crimson
what would I see at this inevitable state?
I am in a cave
open to the same air as the peaks of mountains
and it is so dark
I see more color with my eyes closed
my vision feigns my mind
I almost believe the expected:
the twirling endless cluster of shining cream
spiraling above my head
Jul 19, 2014
Jul 19, 2014 at 3:55 PM UTC
There’s too little time.
To think that
by halving and halving and
halving again
this can be drawn out.
Somehow be avoided.
Death is no holographic dream.
It’s as real as circuitous
firing triggers of phosphene.
I see light suspended
in this final moment.
The tugging burin
etches away at the
last things it can shape.
Nov 14, 2011
Nov 14, 2011 at 8:32 AM UTC
Let the teeth rot from my skull,
And drop like culls
From a rack that's too old,
The house is cold
So failing, full
Of mold,
Let me go
Please,
It's just one request,
Only one
Chance to
Emulsify my best
Efforts
And fill your glass
With inadequate
Drops
Of a hard rain
That's difficult
To swallow,
Follow me outside,
Let's walk among
The silhouetted
Sunset trees,
The storms
Of gnats
And mosquitoes
That hover
Over gravel
Paths,
And remark,
As if we don't know,
"Unmarked graves
Where flowers grow."
And watch
As ghosts of
Shuffled feet
Fill the air
With clouds of dust,
Still glistening
With the heat of the day,
Please,
Just please stay,
Stay with me, marionette,
Till the wolves come and play,
They'll hide as we seek
And whisper
While we speak
Of whiskey dreams
And the reasons
We have to keep
Digging in sand,
Scooping handfulls
Of teeth,
Filling the gaps
In between
With phosphene
Screams.
Sep 3, 2012
Sep 3, 2012 at 11:01 PM UTC
she reaches deep inside me
with her whisperings
sometimes when I feel her presence
I close my eyes to watch her phosphene light show
an electric ultramarine grid against a black field
capturing glowing molecules floating in the sea inside my eyelids
like a cast out fishnet catching tiny bright blue fire flies
perhaps blue is the color of her music
change overcomes me
calmness and clarity
free from fear and pain
I arrive at joy and creativity
moved to play flute, write poems
or work on paintings or collages
enjoying the stillness of the earth
realizing the oneness of existence
at times I’ve wondered where she was
quaking in abandonment's corner
growing older, I’ve come to understand
she never leaves me
I just need to listen for her subtle voice
and close my eyes and see
Mar 1, 2012
Mar 1, 2012 at 10:37 PM UTC
Last night the thought of you dripped down through the cracks of my brain as I blew out my candle of consciousness.
Like drinking water when your thirsty, like rain after a drought: the memory of you as I slid into dreamland was quenching.
This time the vision of your hand gently sliding across my hip in a gentle yet calming manner made its way to the core of my brain.
Like fire to dynamite, my mind exploded.
Fireworks went off in the parts of me where silver wear normally shatters.
You're the phosphene in my head,
You're the stars that don't leave when I stop looking at them.
I woke up in a sleepy daze searching for you on your side of the bed but was distraught when I realized your pillow hasn't any creases.
Jun 19, 2015
Jun 19, 2015 at 12:10 PM UTC
This is a lie, in that,
it is likened with the first thought -
blindfold for a day and daydream.
Sridala Swami caught a boy
who didn't wake up, odd hour
to let phosphene thoughts flow,
confused, like drunken drive on,
a footpath. This is likened to
a poem written wide awake,
could I ever really not see?
This has happened before -
The grass bristles ricocheting finger strokes,
pampered, like mother seeking refuge,
in the smiles mimicry of forgotten childhood emanates,
eyed closed, given in to the gut stretch fever
after retching and vomiting like a cartoon character.
One can't talk to grass otherwise.
In the purple faint of school assembly
hands reaching out to a thud
a concert crowd ready to catch
but delayed reflexes in play.
I felt the hands of strangers,
finger prints etched with water sprinkles
on my face, singing "Wake Up!"
One can't listen to hands otherwise.
Running on an unknown bridge
eyes blinded by sweat and tears
of shock sadness and watch dogs' stares,
of separation, disgust and anger over words
and intentions behind other's mistakes,
eyes closed under an idol unnoticed
a beggar's hand over the head in prayer
One can't sense an unseen person otherwise.
Inside out folding of your mind
impressions washed out, dried
on the wires of gratitude
unequivocal, irrevocable and unsolicited
in the summer sun,
feeling like a toilet flushed after years
I wonder if angels long for it too.
One can't hear silence within, so loudly otherwise.
Jan 11, 2018
Jan 11, 2018 at 4:11 PM UTC
the cloth is cut
and you’ve been absent
from my dreams of late
phosphene, ever-burning
like a wretched mask
moth-eaten in the night
dearest, am i just the fount
of unsettled dust?
there is something in your eyes
that i cannot place
all this golden blood in me
is a harvest giving way
to the sickle and the blade
rich with rust
Dec 9, 2019
Dec 9, 2019 at 1:58 PM UTC
When did you become
A somnambulist, my dear?
Where the disconnect?
About the time your ache
For outlying places began to moon-wake?
I get the sense
You knew long before me
Our days of limerance had culminated.
As if something remote
Had stolen you away.
Do you remember the twinkle
Of twilight in each other's arms
Or was this phosphene?
What then was love? Cafuné?
It's no matter.
The sweet smell of rain
In the air now tells me
Something's brewing, and
You won't be happy
Until what was "us" has been
Washed away.
Oct 23, 2019
Oct 23, 2019 at 12:47 PM UTC
the lava-blended departure of the sun is not metaphysics,
but a pinpoint target into human hearts,
both empirical and whimsical,
both light out of my ultraviolet perspective and the asphalt hurricanes of my cortex
~
bursting to the window,
it BUCKLED.
she battled the nimbostratus with 7.4 billion souls on her solar-flaring side;
I sat idly by, desperately attempting to cool my tea and fight the demons on my shoulder.
The battle was a chainsaw pitted against a watermelon,
a senseless,
lopsided conflict.
(is the deck stacked or
are my shoulders only temporarily
disfigured?)
despite cinder block extremities,
my skin is still more mesh than concrete;
these summer nights were meant for picket signs
and bare feet.
as to perceive image without light,
I swam against a salty, magnificent current.
Jul 25, 2017
Jul 25, 2017 at 10:49 PM UTC
The splendor of magnitude gripped in a moment,
now is bursting at the seams,
the thread of steady logic unravels as
the sheets of sensation unveil the
silky boundlessness of time,
the paradox of infinite finitude, of finite infinity—
We exhale into the liminality between (un)certainties.
We find our rhythm to the music of experience
and we fall into ourselves, finding home between our ribs,
nestling into the cavity of being, we trip into each other,
fall in embrace, and rise in ecstasy of laughter.
Folding loving into aching,
Tasting euphonic resonance—
We are copper rays of light, exuberant !
flitting between the morning maple leaves,
we dance with the frolicsome tails of grass,
we hum in deep synchrony till the moon reflects our lily cheeks,
we taste the immanent stars and dive into
the phosphene galaxies behind our eyes.
The construct of measured days recedes
and there is only this brimming space to inhale
between certainties of light and dark
and we inhabit it with a bold stomp and a wild laugh.
Apr 8, 2019
Apr 8, 2019 at 8:31 PM UTC
Rub your sleepy eyes ---
Hues that pushed their way through gritty snow
Reminding her that spring was coming back again
--- Blinded by sugary light.
Blink away the phosphene ---
That blurred orbs of kelp on the shore
Freckled with splinters of driftwood in a bonfire
--- Until you see her.
Reach out your arms ---
Sore from the bed space you gladly surrendered
Dangle an arm over her draped, silken body
The surface of her pristine white, form-fitting
Nightgown that pooled around her like liquid silk
Caressing her skin like a cool autumn breeze
--- Hold your precious girl.
It's true that she ---
Snored when she was exhausted, especially after dancing
Her parted lips hushed sounds of deep slumber
A noise ever so pure, graceful, and mellifluous
In her dream, she steps into a field
Of beautiful flora that accentuated her azure eyes
Captivating the untouched, dark corners of your heart
And licked them until sparks crackled with adoration
This curious wanderer that chased butterflies and prose
--- Never knew your worth.
Jun 14, 2017
Jun 14, 2017 at 1:39 AM UTC
from up there, that drossless
spray waves down gold.
a gentle blindness kept throwing
the heart up like a baby bird.
coming out of the mouth as stifled
bursts of joy.
bridged breaths which beaded
pilgrims clung to sight as.
looking down and seeing valleys
between the ruffles of grasses.
blade to blade...phosphene smatterings.
through the passes of stewing whorls.
Feb 8, 2019
Feb 8, 2019 at 11:48 PM UTC