Time to Remix Myself

Hi all-

So that first poem was blah. And it continues to be blah. But in the spirit of Rod, I'm going to take the base elements of that poem and continue to change it, every night this week, and remix it (or revise, but yeah whatever it's a remix) for five days. I will actively agree with you that it's a naff poem and pretty undercooked and poorly sentimental. Let's see how I do, and if I can find something of worth. What I'm going to do is just edit this post with new versions of it, so that by Thursday there'll be original, remix 1, remix 2, remix 3, remix 4. I might remix the remixes. We'll see. So it'll appear in that order in the post. Once again, the genesis for this is this installation.

If you're interested, please check back!

***

Crumble

It starts how all things start –
sweet, structured, and stable.

As time went on, more grease,
more coagulant in your castle.

I tried to stop the crackling,
the popping, the humid dissolution.

I told you I’d keep it together,
that not every cube was important.

But soon, bereft of bonds, you toppled,
floated away, black with the tar,

hardened on the hot concrete,
rock candy for gulls. Fuck this

metaphor, this dark room,
these sticky-fingered kids –

I miss you. Call me.

***

Sweet-structured crumble,

you start how all things start –
stable, stabled, situational.

As you grease, the coagulant
of your castle breaks bonds

in humid dissolution.

Fuck your sticky-fingered cubes,
the primacy of commitment was

only important to the spaces left vacant
between tarring blocks. All bonds break;

all things topple and float away.

Slap a flaming sword before your rook –
it won’t stop us from dripping through bedrock

forming malignant candy altars
in the underground.

***

Replication

Bedrock? Fuck it.
The flaming swords.
The divine electricity.

The tar pits.
Chronotopic coagulant,
keeping us trapped,
stabled numbers not sufficing.

Fuck the biological clocks,
the flesh pistons,
the replicating machinery of matrimony.

Make my matter an amalgamation
of desire: the corpses,
the remainders of life, the residue
of activity. The petroleum ice-cream
floating stuck in humidity.

Call out to breaking bonds,
then reach out, smaller and smaller,
to your only god: dissolution.

***

These Places, I Cannot Go Again

Your voice crack is
not dissimilar

to light rip
of a sugar packet.

It happens
when you called to me,

said “this is groooss,”
stood around a cube

made out of pins.
In the dark room,

oil slithered into tar cubes.
You still smelled

of bacon grease, the brunch
lingering in the vacant space

of an installation, Tuesday
afternoon. One hallway away,

a giant curved arm rotates,
slowly carving, around

a giant sticky ball
of red pigment. You reshape

me, demanding ellipse,
then square, then rook,

then castle. These things
always end in different places

than they start. I was meant
to grease pistons. Dissolution, interrupted,

when a sticky-fingered kid pulls
the final pin. We watch geometry crumble.

***

Emancipation Fractals

We talked about secession last night
while I was thinking about Stevia

and Karo Syrup. A little castle
of chalky, dense bricks in

corn suspension. Each cube
a bid for independence, each

molecule self-directed. Sufficiency
granted by God. They crack apart,

strike out on their own, glorifying
in the dissolution. An infinite regression,

from structure, to rectangle, to cluster,
to grain, to molecule, to particle. At last

left with a unified, unitary installation,
a mass of sticky grease. This is about

Libertarianism. It’s about depression.
It’s about the desperation of 1:30 AM,

sleepless, stealing music to get by.
It’s about empathy, but fuck this,

poems, sugar, representationalism.

I missed you so much. Then you called.

***

I think this project is all set. I don't know that I arrived anywhere close to perfection, but I was pushed, and i went to places I wouldn't normally go.