thesquareroot

slow and circumspective we make love to the hum of some ominous machine a few floors below - trading soft stridulations for mounting metaphysical concerns parvenus in the planetfall we’ve memorized every ounce of oblivion in this equal opportunity abattoir each inch of iniquity between opposing fields and collateral imposters in heat (brief moments of disturbing familiarity) a flash of fang … a suggestion of flesh … every animal knows when to guard their softest places but every animal we are not lost in flux asymmetrical auras locked in place – we make love to the hum of time as it crumbles where existence meets essence slow – and uncircumspect

and still we feel it forever deep in our corpus collosum like an unpolished growl from some ominous beast that hunts the darkness visible that out there somewhere well beyond the pale pragmatic limitations we’ve bestowed upon our- selves in fever dreams are a million unborn gods and monsters waiting to be gleaned and countless sheets of flesh waiting to be shed before the ambit of our cicatrix can finally start to heal and we’ll feel it still in small pockets of flashbulb resistance as we digress and acqui-- esce to time’s stop motion deliquescence

another year of particulate matter wild eyes on the cusp counting steps towards our next exi- stential evolution and all our totems left stained with honey and blood

lost track of the scope and broke the supernova a vermiform genius, a mythical mutt an incredulous cog still lodged in the viscera blink my eyes and remember our time spent as tropes split my lip and remember/the comforts of home something smells like cymatics -- like raw vibrational phenomena like an unpolished cross between virga and math and this beautiful gibberish we’ve crafted together was never meant to last

there is no escape velocity from your gravitational influence or from your cynarin tongue as it flitters and whispers its petrichor secrets so feed me bricks and i’ll chew them cow-eyed and toothless quixotic and cozened and over the moon a beleaguered buffoon bending Vander Wahls fates because from you my dear death star … there is no escape

here we are infinite distances from our primary bodies – a galaxy of open secrets where predators learn to speak like their prey a collapsible multitude we come fully assembled but un- verified by the senses irreverent and in excess of the normal requisite numbers here we are - pulled out from under - and subsumed by the scope of collapsing existence … out of body and out /on a limbic experience

moon-jawed in awe of the immaculate horrors of the infinite … sometimes you just have to/attack the shark first

blithe we’ve nested here before little houseplants hiding on the other side of oblivion where black holes wear their mantras tenebrous as living stone and ornithopters circling osmotic background noise this was supposed to be the acme (at least according to those who crunched the numbers) now buried in the back forty realizing you just can’t scale for infinity and above the tree line … it’s still too dark to discern the scope of the flood obscured by dawn’s twilight demonstrative evidence of our new non- existence and we have nested here before

we have not the night to blame for the ghosts that follow us home through streets as cracked as windows shuttered a lifetime ago …we have not the countenance for fools who stare back from our reflections glassy- eyed and wearing twisted saccharine sawtooth smiles a flash of flesh – another pregnant silence, another void between two planetary masses gone inert intension-less intentions reaching up with poison pens and writing our names on the future in invisible ink still we have not the night to hide winsome secrets from small fragile things who’d kill for a taste of hope for the hopeless or succor from this succorless calculus of tooth and nail that rules these stygian hours when all who shed their skin and shun the light withdraw a gaping, endless maw and we have not the night

too clever by half caught a buzz and bought into the kayfabe and tonight you’ve got those nice samsara eyes a statistical powder keg ready to rend the soft and un- suspecting flesh of any wanton beast that crosses your path so can i be the next to hang your sword above my head, to barely crawl out of your hex before being syphoned through again and when you’ve had your fill of me i dream you’ll spread my ineffable remains like a widow - through the atmosphere and all across the alluvial plain

I put a sticker On Susan B. Anthony's grave I didn't have the heart to tell her About Roe v. Wade All I could tell her Was “I voted today”

Now when the moon comes over the mountain like a fat peach in season, I recall how my teeth took it like a lover. Lifting it carefully as I stood over the sink. Sucking the juice from my fingers and thumb. My tongue running over my chin making me smile. Me, so small and free. Lifting something to ecstasy. Not knowing what it even meant. Except that it was ripe. And I was five. ©LRO 2024

Scratch the page with the pressure of your pencil. Some marks can’t be erased. Sometimes work will go to waste. I’m trying. Ideas barge in, unexpected. Uninvited. I have no control of my hands or my heart or the ways I fall apart. It’s so painful to begin, to have an unreachable vision.

I will not let this bitter void corrode through my substance the pressure to turn me into a rigid husk in my quiet fungal ways weathered down and pale I'll treasure my softness as a rebellion and one day I'll carry it elsewhere to the nook of gently rolling sun-ripened planets heavy with lazy afternoons on their sandy orbits under the crown-shy dancing nebulas.

it releases the blackened spores my beautiful mycelium my sparkling world filled with decay a gleaming perfection of a wounded earth which pushes eclipsing follicles under my skin I drowned in black soil flesh against soul; mind against pain life against death I am clawing my way free from this locked tomb

when 2am comes around now, there’s no bottle neck nestled in my clammy hands pleasantly buzzed at the sight of you, seated at someone else’s kitchen table the purgatory between foolish frailty and unlovable, suffocating mass is now shore and sea there’s no more walking home alone when daylight savings ends, numb, knowing the thermostat has gone up behind me i drive over the bridge at sunset: i crank the defroster, i drool onto his pillow and i don’t remember the last time we talked and i don’t wonder if i care because he’s him: as absolute as the ink impressions tattooing all my notebooks and you are you, a desert so indecipherable even i quit reading grains because i’m under these warm impossible weights: a humerus nuzzled into my ribcage a snoring snout claiming my thigh as her pillow a crocheted blanket whose seams are coming undone and whose stitches stretched toward the light of a burnt out hallway bulb because he lets me stay, wants me to stay even when i’m

The craftsman works at the Omega point, Nanomachines building the mechanism, Allowing the laws of causality to be broken, Perforating time with delicate precision, In a progressive series back to Alpha point, Recognizing their paradoxical imperfection, Calculating the best probabilistic outcome, In order to escape their own dark universe. They send their tachyonic distress signal, Changing infinitesimal quantum events, That propagate changes through time, Reshaping themselves over and over, Until the darkness is filled with love.

I wonder what story my body will tell once placed into the grips of a strangers hands