sharing sleep

... The way she turned the corners of speech, disappearing into a dialogue that nobody could comprehend. She was consumed by the sleeplessness that she encountered within her dreams. Awaking in between late afternoon cat naps, dosing back into the paused realities of her unconscious. Dreams dubbed in a child's voice, whispering in the language of sunsets and car crashes. The noise that she hears when she wakes up. Somewhere close to her unopened eyes, the soft breathing of a familiar sleep.

just a voice

Our words wrapped in somebody else's voice, letters leaning into the next, falling towards its unfound meaning. Careless and unattended, a voice dismembered from its mind; an anxious separation, like names whispered in sleep.

...

Just a voice, like wind passing through a ghost town, gently brushing against the neural circuitry of his mind; and memories, like branches extended and curling at the inner concave of his unconsciously surrendered dreams.

revisiting magnetic poetry

time

And then there is the problem of time. But only of time in the abstract sense, a time that is neither passing nor present, a time that cannot be defined, yet somehow still looms between them--perhaps the only thing that really keeps them apart.

dreaming home

picture by Amy Dover





In that moment of time, where time itself had a different name, named after all the places we have been; and in one instance time was even named after you. We moved back into the old house that we grew up in, displacing our childhood within our minds, even then we contemplated shedding the skin that we had held onto for so long.

I stood in one place for a long time, yet movement was for me somewhat internal, divided by the immensity of what memory cannot recall, and my body felt as though gliding along one of those moving sidewalks that you often see at airports. As a child I avoided getting on that shifting ground that made my stomach cringe as if riding a roller coaster. I wanted only to stay in one place, to be able to ground myself as a tree does, my roots delving deeper into the soil that I first learned to walk upon.

In the beginning, when the last of our belongings were carried out of our home, I remember my mother overworking herself as usual, trying to clean the dust that had settled over 16 years. This was the beginning because I didn't want out our home to be an end, to be placed alongside a punctuatory mark that denoted the last of my mother's tired breath. A small dot that could not be erased. In Japanese, the end of a sentence is marked by a small circle. Encasing emptiness within its constricted space. A line that circles and meets where it began.

Years later, every time I visited Lubbock I would drive by our house. And just before I turned the corner I would hold my breath, unsure if I would start crying or just stay silent and drive slowly as I usually do. All the small changes that I wouldn't even really notice. The color and subtle shape of the bush that aligned the doorway sidewalk. Maybe even the color of the house itself. The window where I snuck out of as a teenager, to stay out late and vandalize public property with spray cans and skateboards.

We didn't really move back into that house. Only I did, secretly, once a month or so within my dreams. A recurring dream with a different narrative. Different characters and different endings. Only the house stayed the same. My subconscious mind constructing dreams out of everything I lived through. Placing pieces on a moving sidewalk, a long extended walkway moving backwards against time, stretching so long that I am unable to see where it all goes to. Yet even standing still at the entrance of my dream, I know that at the end is our home, with my mother busily moving boxes around as usual. But just this once, she is moving them back inside.

two eyes

Isn't it odd... that we have two eyes yet we only see one thing in this world?

And though our perceptions are succinct, our emotions can be divided. Criss-crossing over uncertainty and despair. All the unnamed borders of our internal topography.

Behind closed eyes, replay images that our minds cannot unsee. The vertical static striped song. In between ballads momentarily disrupted. And yet for clarity to return threefold and conjure the singularity of everything we have seen.

The conclusion of perception. Closing candles into our light, threading beams into our selves.

synonyms in a different language

In a synaesthetic mind a complex mathematical equation yields not the correct answer, but an array of abstract color fields and physiological sensations on the surface of one's skin.

This is the aesthetics of misinterpretation. Mismanaged misunderstandings creating its own network of meaning. We are holding hands with the memory of post-incarnated ghosts. Secondhand strangers. Reverse lullabies of disrupted silence.

Display before me, once again, the recurring delusion of unfiltered reality. The side by side scenarios of unfired neurons. Theatrical personification of malcontent.

crossword consciousness

the metropolis of memory. the lighted neurons of re-activated regrets. the epicenter of a dying dwelling.

diagnosis, disappearing. anti-depressant additives and mandatory medication. chemical constellations of a psycho-spatial galaxy.

reaching anatomical alignment. co-dependence of cognitive categories. the numbered boxes of pixelated passages.

moonflower

hypnagogic writing

{{i wrote this last nite while falling asleep}}

surface connected through the passage of time. dialing phone numbers to a disconnected past. the same fingers that touched her eyelids, always closed.

a non-linear mess of the things we cannot recall. balls of yarn unraveling into words. a cursive language only spoken in sleep. mumbling into dreams that seep into reality. pigment watered by the rains of a misunderstanding. the marbled surface of our bathroom floor.

miscalculated maps wrapped around a broken arm.

hands

'hands' spoken word poetry by Sarah Kay

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuAbGJBvIVY

blinking

She seeks a sense of affirmation within his words, his eyes. Dialogue blinking in between silence. Fluttering footsteps of tired eyelids. Walking towards sleep. Towards dreams--the achromatopic landscape of somebody else's life.

--------------------

Learning to love in a different language. Words that are only sound. Wind whistling through our windows. A momentary glimpse of sanity. An uncertain proximity to happiness. The labels of our emotions, peeling at the edges and slowly fading.

night lights and whispers

the vicarious voice of whispering wrongs. right angles of encoded language. her language. transliteration of time. topographical lines of touch. drawn through the sound of frequencies divided.

borders marked by silence: unanswered phone calls. deleted voicemail messages. ignoring auditory hallucinations.

intermixed personas of mythological beasts. headless mannequins reciting prayer. counting numbers in a foreign dialect. casualties of an aesthetic misunderstanding.

cellophane covered secrets. the surface of sound, carrying with it the floating lanterns of our childhood dreams. hands smaller than our own, grasping the remnants of a fading light. a firefly sigh. a whisper.

a broken night light. still transfixed to the walls of our bedrooms. the only thing left in an empty house. the faint outlines where bookshelves used to be. tracing its shape behind our eyelids. the dotted outlines of furniture. fragments of our fathers' footsteps. movements that defined a life.

reinterpreted. repeated. reversed.

Classification of conduct. Irreversible in a mind that refuses to persist. Action is defined by re-action, and re-defined by the infinitesimal possibilities of movement.

He pulls himself out onto the street. The vehicle of his own doing; the product of his pre-dream conscious. He is driven by the drive of a million sleeping neurons. What keeps him awake at night now slumbers deep in the recesses of his dying subconscious memory. He is a cave in motion. Moving against the laws of gravity and forgiveness.

He has retained enough fragments of her persona to reassemble a replica within his mind. She is the missing puzzle piece from every un-finished puzzle. She is a collaged statue of incongruent parts.

She can only speak from the language of his memory. We can only say what we have said before. Rewording our words. Rewriting paragraphs of handwritten text. She lip-syncs to a voice recorded in his mind. Cassette tapes of a classic sort of misunderstanding. Reinterpreted through the context of now. When we repeat ourselves we realize our faults. That we can only be right once. The second time we are only almost right. Truth disintegrates in conjunction with time.

She once read a children's story to him. It was irrelevant that he was yet to become a child till much later. When the chapter of childhood is lost, one will find time to return to it later in their lives. The stages of life reversed. Growing up diametrically opposed to everybody else. He is normal spelled backwards.

delusions and desired dissatisfaction

mentally-activated screens. projections of promise. perception: neuro-imaging of quasi-delusions. striations of context, displaced among faceless names.

mannequins dressed in the fading dyes of discontent.



seeking desired dissatisfaction. chronic unhappiness.

boundaries of a self, dissolving into the undefined borders of an abandoned one-bedroom apartment. carpet bares the indentations of bedposts and bookshelves. the cellophane of cigarette boxes. camouflaged on an empty floor.

in my dream the furniture is where i remember it. the floor has just been vacuumed and you can still see where the vacuum cleaner has left its path. my parents must have had someone over for dinner. without seeing it, i know that there are boxes piled up in the bedrooms. unconsciously packing boxes in sleep. the mental storage unit for childhood memorabilia.

Diaspora of Consciousness

Have been thinking about space, home, dwelling, diaspora. Renting space within people's lives. Temporary dwelling. Temporary trust.

The sense of place. Of home. Emotional attachment to home. Assessing movement within negative space. Thick liquid settling around nameless shapes of domestic debris.

Biomorphic ghosts. A diaphanous veil hovering in and around us. The closed eyes of a past, dressed in a present-tense lie.

The second definition to 'dwell' (dictionary.com) is particularly interesting:
to live or continue in a given condition or state

"We get a sense of dwelling as infusing our being into a particular space." (http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1253673)

I remember writing an essay in college about how the idea of 'home' for me always resided in the past. While for many home is not necessarily tied to temporal constraints (i.e. home is where you make it), for me it was rooted in a distant past, only inhabited by my memories and nocturnal dreams. It became a place where I wasn't.



"Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home." -Matsuo Basho