after FKA Twigs, Stuhmiller, or cold color schemes layered over humid green dreams

FKA Twigs, from her instagram

by Rigel Stuhmiller, from her Abstracted Earth series

by me

what's elusive in your tresses is the cloud source       were you above in a plane

or below in a human sphere                        & since we as the royal we

as the royal me as what I feel is the royal truth       as my cells like to 

google what you do      and be obsessive hoping you can channel

what it is I can't lately                   fly over states become 

home as accidents as purposes of god as avenues of    

sick children become vehicles for         everyone to change

as a field of branches I can't walk through          cause my legs

aren't made of iron              

walking through the sisters' residence & outside

the forest mouth is dark like mirk wood or like every

creepy sepia crime ever      or like a murky romance of the humid 

insect universe we take a trail through stopping along the way 

to trade tongues        & connect with a laughing silence

beyond the marked grass walkway there's oodles of a certain

type of tree I've never seen it's low to the ground 

brimming with oval maroon fruit or poison I suppose depending 

on the     consumer

I depend on me to consume  

I depend on the camera cuddling but going shy once I point

it at a memory I don't want to lose

never could describe a creep scene like Blackwood 

but I can hype up the soil with the best of em 

& still fall victim to willowy madness        huge bunnies out of my eye

corner turning back to rocks when I aim my vision

frere puer aeternus

kid nocturne            a narrated fool winnows through the first page,
through the second, through the next and then into the rejuvenile buzzers
that bing him awake            as if there is no    asleep        whereby there is no rest
whereby he pierces his way into others' lives          folding sniffs of alertness in his pouch
EVERY TIME he overhears those times when people feel still, and well aware of their livelihoods
     the blessings between breaths             the mornings you splurge a little
                   add sugar to your cup of coffee                 


_____
above, picture of a screen shot taken from essajetticks' instagram page

FANGIRL-ING & NEVER REVIEWING #1: Anna Vitale

oh woman of Detroit noise and Drakian tendencies!
how can I ever review your books when they view me reversely
and strike chords I wasn't sure I possessed:
the unspeakable hunger for resisting the existential dredge
that lays its amorphous body across all:
the car dripping with rain outside Roberto's house,
the lucky I counted myself with to speak with you about our
lives in a quiet car, and afterward laughing with Soham
about the strange questions we passed around:
the surreality of giving you my underlined Cioran
in a bustling H&M, and the gift of a turkey wrap
from you knowing I was running around
and probably over-coffeed -
oh woman of premonition and kin,
who wrote dreams years before I thought
to dream them: the pink chap I always return to.
And the gift of reading next to your beautiful bookshelf
and the night emanating before with shit talking
and literary looming and chicken farming and pizza.
oh woman of darkness who heart breaks
but gives life and certainly runs with her woes,
but the running never ceases, oh woman
living to her name, surpassing her name,
that vitality.

Unknown Pleasures - poetry by Anna Vitale

after noon

Devonte Hynes zone out music

I think about a silent cottage where humans have to constantly touch the outside
to keep it so : it's an exercise to exorcise the demons of our guilt,
feeling all types of ways for not calling our families, our sisters,
our fathers, our nieces.
It's a melancholy fielded fire.
To cool down we gaze outside at the twinkling greenery off great
limbs testament to time : the trees that umbrella our feet
when we knead soil to feel we are nature again.

Later, in the city,
I think about running for buses, that loneliness of it being all on you,
and the loneliness too of humans in their cars looking at the next
human in their car. Little metal cubicle. Little feet in an incomprehensible
world.

But I think about pianos mostly. That's a lie:
I think about people like pianos, as in heavy and impossible to ignore,
with endless and strange tunes.

Pianos lurking through underbrush sounding
like ocean when touched.
Detectives silently watching us soothe
the outside, this ghost cottage, where all we do
is "should" ourselves into circles.

Aging like trees with rings of guilt and lonely feet.

april gloom ruminations

when your mother hangs up on you when the house is too quiet when the poets you know become poets who feel words like genital mutilation and take time distracted to recover when empaths become more than an idea and become your literary intimate:: when you fall asleep to thrillers and mysteries because their fact calms you into the normalcy of fear, the approaching terror just around the riverbend, living not a revised laugh track but a river full of grief and apprehension and time hauntings. by which I mean time doing the haunting. the Canal and the Babadook and always a murder hiding behind the walls or a pair of eyes lulling a little boy to suicide. do the films cheapen the idea or show us the money of what they’re worth, how it happens. grizzly state of this quiet bar. Henry’s and the painted woman’s face keeps me enclosed in Nostalgia. no terrestrial sense of time or day: i could be ordered around an L train. I could be a carrier of a new name for you, stranger, and the darker times we are in the more intense the fantasy. more intense the escape or giving up. the other afternoon poets talking about dead dream years and me sitting trying to remember a big goal era: feeling like I've been resigned to working odd jobs and doing love poetry on the side as a fate most people are aligned to. stroking myself into comparisons of Ginsberg or Di Prima. because of all of us at one point sitting in cafes or bars speaking unexpectedly deeply on time and other selves and the nature of a trees consciousness: getting high without a substance besides coffee or sugared pastries or dried mango/dried figs. feelin unable to enjoy any act unless I can tell folks about it: feeling this as a consequence of socially infected media until I’m reading Machen and finding the paragraphs on forest walking and pipe smoking and friend communions the most enjoyable. finding it in myself that the ideas and the images I can create are little nooks for me to live in when shit gets too bad (by which I mean dull) - when the monotonous skepticism and sometimes science and always close minded predators try to remove the colors of a mystery so it’s back to a grey explanation and exploration of circumstance and statistics. also though the greys roll towards me in this bidding for unsettlement and unterresterialdom. letting the house of merciful dissolution soak in its own unanswered inquiry.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

witness of killed excrement. unwise prebirth

there's no need to say something like that twice

going up and down stairs with different moaning monsters behind rickety AA meeting doors

rickety because of obstacles and doors and almond sieves

tyler durden tyler burden the same old college cinema

and three times trying to therefore dream after living and slate spaces where vision should be 

but spiritual babes held harshly near a new flame and above our heads elven ears and cloven feet and rag-wearing Isle of man creations leap about 

and the white mean middle of a  meat we can't eat a-edge a mountain transfixed by love but too stubborn too move  never moving 

clearly spent on money turns fixing bikes inside  millionaires give me credit cards to buy all of addiction I would want

and real life I'm heavy and mismatched to clack on piano ghosts 

miriam eating next to me history can't read cause if a moment happened it's knee-jerk unfascinating

and twice that, like something say: to need no threes, or theres a dream mother who wants your whole blanket and your whole bodysoul, who will take you from buildings treading and destroyed to salt a new foot-bone

irksome you dispatch a mirror to new streets and hit cars who hit sister cars who instigate fugitives to slide inside and give directions

you can't get anyone where they're going you can't have doors meeting. Always Awakened rickety behind monsters moaning differently . with stairs

down and up, going "anyone can give directions, a bodysoul in a moment, mismatched heavy in living"

going : but new flames are meat! 

and me, livid and diagonal.

oh night film and mealy isthmus lakes yes always neighs death too real avalanches veil eery love

the quiet things we could shout across a dead wheat field, and the passenger intercepting those transmissions, wearing a motorised fox head, but still smoking, somehow. I laid underneath it an old picture of my hair across a pillow because I had been feeling it as if it could turn from dust paper into bugs or sand into windy tree leaves. when I leave anywhere I could weep but my interrobangs usually blindside the guts underneath. we are so polite. we only quake in bathrooms or fireplace lounges or spooned against the night with silk blankets falling away and your nails suffering at the anticipation of your cannibalism. if we go clickety-clack then we can't take shit back. so you eat it up. the quiet things you should let out.