Poem : Resiliating

Risiliating basically means when something resumes its shape after being deformed. Think of pressing your hand into foam. Or those stress balls.

A week ago my grandfather died. He was 90. His funeral was yesterday.

I hate funerals. They are unnatural. You sit on little chairs or pews, too close to each other, you say a few things about the dead person. You shake a lot of hands and hung a lot of people who barely know. You move on.

The funeral home in my parent's home town has been run by the same family for 125 years. They advertise with a sign that says they are a "Victorian crematory". They have a sign with a little horse drawn hearse on it.

The inside of the funeral home is decorated in shades of emerald and amethyst. Floral wallpaper. It smells of perfume. It is an old house, the rooms are oddly shaped. There are fireplaces.

The flowers around the urn, which was actually a box, were too shiny. Like they had been polished. Peace lilies have unnaturally shiny leaves already and the one by the urn glossed like the uncanny valley.

Funerals are definitely the uncanny valley.

---

Resiliating

At the funeral

lilies were glossy reflection

Light diffusing
around the edges
of the eye of a swan

They were the shape that lilies always form

Pristine loon necks
rising lowering
from a fountain of leaves

A school of boats
lolling on a calm water

—

Rooms breathe

Burn themselves
images on a television
left on too long

—

The old television
in the old room
filled with green

Is where the old man died

Where he breathed long
like a room
his ribcage became solid
then permanent

His heart leaving a imprint
a notch in space

We all burn an echo

—

Press hand to
mushroom soft mat of soil

Leave an imprint

Funerary green
on the retina
the rod and cone of it
a bobbing sound
over a mid-morning lake

The Everything

Months ago a computer was on its last legs. And its hard drive held Everything. And I moved that Everything on to the old external drive that I've used since 2007. A new drive was bought. The plan was made to transfer the Everything from the old drive to the new drive. To have it doubled.

Double the Everything.

Friday a confirmation came. That drive. With the Everything. It no longer held anything. Something about partitions.

Partition.

From the Latin.

Noun or verb.

To divide, subdivide, separate, split.

To screen, hide, a barrier, to wall off.

In computing a partition is essentially creating a room within the drive where something can exist.

The Everything was all of the writing that I has done since I was 18, since 1999, since what feels like forever. 20 years is a long time.

My 20th high school reunion was scheduled for this September. I normally do not care about these kinds of things, reunions. I only lived in central Pennsylvania for the 4 years of high school. I didn't have lifelong ties to the place, the people. I barely remember most of those 4 years. I do not really talk to anyone from that time in any real way.

This isn't because I don't like the people. Or the place.

It just isn't the room where my memories live.

I decided that I would go to the reunion.

I figured that if I were to ever care about what happened to the people there, now would be that time. Before we all got old. Before we started to die and still somewhat looked like ourselves.

While I had a job I was proud to talk about. Had recent published books to talk about.

It was cancelled. Because no one wanted to come. It says something about modern life. The high school reunion was/is/? an important part of American culture. Or at least it seemed that way. The events seem to be dying off. Blame social media. People can connect, keep contact with, the people they want to. Why get together when your current job is listen on your profile?

It makes sense.

The death of the drive. And the sudden vanishing of the Everything is a mixed emotion. Who was the 18 year old that really only still existed in some dust files on a drive that I barely used?

We all partition ourselves daily. The way we interact, the way we dress, the things we engage with. And over time. We become a series of hallways connecting rooms where parts of ourselves are kept.

Today I opened my Facebook. Thought about deleting it for good for the 100th time since I first signed up for it over a decade ago. I logged in to my Livejournal. I reread those things. I began to scour email and Submittable to find files I could salvage.

There are shadows of things everywhere. I still have the handwritten roughs of everything that I actually hand wrote. On various websites, this one included, are versions of myself. Versions of Everything. I spoke to my mother about a work trip. About my 90-year-old grandfather. About how the rooms we build are never really that stable.

In the most recent episode of Prodigal Son -- another TV murder/cop show, but with Lou Diamond Phillips -- the main character, son of a serial killer haunted by his potential knowledge/involvement in the crimes, tears a wall open to answer a long forgotten phone.

The voice on the other end says it's been a long time. Our protagonist doesn't remember the voice, phone, room even.

As I downloaded the fragments of things and did laundry, I also read Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier -- another kind of Everything being lost but felt.

I have a numbness about the loss of Everything. I do not know how to feel that 20 years of final edits, drafts, manuscripts, school papers, my thesis, letters, photos, music, literal history -- is now a shadow in my brain.

Early in Rebecca, du Maurier's unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. M. de Winter, sits at a writing desk in her new home and explores the various surfaces and drawers. She finds things in the unmistakable "scrawling pointed hand" of her predecessor. 

We process things oddly. That Everything, was it even mine? I opened a few of the downloaded files from Submittable. Thankfully, that site saves your files you've uploaded. Did I even write these?

Things always end with a fire in these types of novels. The history, the Everything, must burn off like the alcohol in cooking, leaving only whatever flavor you were searching for.

What does it look like to imagine yourself back into 20 years. To think about the fragments that can be found there and reconstruct the sound of the rain against those windows. Some Pompeii made out of the sludge of a brain at 38.9 years.

I imagine the Everything, now an ash of code, 1s and 0s in a gray pile. A locked in body somewhere beneath the surface just waiting to be found. Language is dumb in the face of technology.

A room somewhere attempts to assemble itself. The carpet is threading itself from fibers made out of thin air and the shed scales of a butterfly. The walls will attempt themselves out of paper or reeds or the breath of trees. In the house that forms, will live the Everything. And it will stay there, as the building, the room, the carpet itself, forgot to even imagine the idea of a door that could open into it all.

Poem-A-Day #28 : T. M. I.

T. M. I.

Airplanes bank & whorl over the cooling towers
                    four of them          two spreading their foaming mists
          The other two -

                                                  What happens when
two reporters film a meltdown

                                                  Is it viral

          The reporters also melt          into 11 tons of elephant
ashen & wrapped in a sarcophagus of concrete
they puff like mushrooms -

                                        The planes          a line of them
a Muybridge progression          frozen
                                                              with no feet on the ground

                                                  The funnels pull in - hungry mouths lined with eyes

                              They stomp along the island -

Source - EPA

The OTHER Novel About Bellefonte

I have been working on a long-form poetry/essay collection about Tesla for a few years now.

It finally feels like there is momentum behind it.

Not to say it's done, just that it's moving.

I spent the day editing poems and thinking about order. It's weird how there is a natural forming linear narrative happening in the work. It clearly starts with Tesla's birth and moves to a meta-physical place on his work and death.

Along the way Mark Twain talks about patents. And JP Morgan spends money. And Edison kills an elephant in the park.

And there's bottled fire and bugs and light bulbs planted like irises.

Again. It feels like something.

The same cannot be said for the novel. It's stalled in stall town.

Stall-o-rama.

But the first third is done.
Ish.
Very much done-ish.

It's weird writing about my parent's hometown. Where I went to high school.

I recently read Jeff VanderMeer's Annihilation. I was fascinated by the perspective on the 'Sci Fi' novel. So I went and read City of Saints and Madmen. The second book didn't grab me as much, but buried within was a moment that caught me off guard.

A character, who may or may not be VanderMeer is being questioned in a mental institution. He is asked where he is from. He answers Belfont, Pennsylvania.

It jumped off the page. I went to the internet.

Bellefonte is a town of 6000 in central Pennsylvania. It's main claim to fame is that the town has a natural spring with no known source and Jonathan Frakes is from there. Coming across this town in a book, a successful book, is weird.

VanderMeer was born in Bellefonte. But his family spent a lot of time in Fiji. That he claims the town at all is amazing.

I immediately paid more attention to his work, to his persona. For selfish reasons.

Because I hope my book will someday be the 'other novel' that features Bellefonte, PA.

Bellefonte, PA