systematicexcision

[systematicexcision]

Anthropological study itself could be used to drag a fish by the hook down from the moon.

Once when I was younger I tumbled down the stairs and waited for the wind to catch me, and I felt like starlight, and nothing bright and fast came to save me from hardwood.

Learn the mathematics behind the magician’s hat, the rabbit’s cage, the remnants of the girl that gets sawed in half.

My mom told me that we go to hell for lying, and my dad told me that I shouldn’t be an idiot, and I’ve always taken after my father.

Biological test subjects writhe from needles poked into walls on the other side of the glass, waiting for metamorphosis that never comes.

When I was 16 and softer, I crawled like a bug under the California sun, and I waited for the orange trees to burn me up, and all that happened was a rolling tongue, sweat on my brow, minnows darting in front of me.

I’ve always seen fish instead of stars.

Birdwatcher coughs up blood, burnt for hollowed out bones.

I like watching fish disappear, into sea foam jumping. I like imagining Ariel metamorphosed, salmon herself, the aftermath of love transposed in the body.

I like the fragility of birds, the place where wing meets body, the nook of skin and sinew stretching overtop bone. It pains me to imagine what I can’t look away from, a knife cutting a six inch valley through the meeting point. Detached wing, destroyed bird, crumpled up like paper. Hollowed out bones can’t save you now.

[systematicexcision]

salmon flying

[systematicexcision]

i think we should have a storytelling ethics class

tell me your authority on these words, and ill tell you mine

tell me your most monstrous impulse, and ill tell you mine

tell me your shittiest lyric, and-- well, i won't tell you mine

and so on and so forth. snip snip snip

[systematicexcision]

i know correlation is not causation

but my leg shoots up with pain the same days i put on a binder

i dont mean to say that any of this is related, i just mean to say that it hurts to have a machine of a body like this, one whose gears break at the same time, one where i have to consciously, consistently tell myself that:

no, friend, x didn't cause y

y didn't lead to z

z isn't because of a

and a never leads to b.

a leads to nothing, you know. it's a dead letter. i want to live past what consumes my body. i want to be the vulture, not the corpse. i want to live a life that allows for rationality. for correlation to not equal causation, and for that to be a fact of life,

not a mantra i use to put me to sleep.

[systematicexcision]

"saint peter don't you call me cause I can't go, I owe my soul to the company store"

i.e. death-in-life i.e. the self-exile of the body from the brain from the soul i.e. i never know how to end a sentence that starts with 'when i was ten years old' i.e. i owe my soul to something for sure i.e. sixteen tons is a really good fucking song i.e. sixteen years old, now that's something i have a story about i.e. when i was sixteen it was an age that bled from fifteen to seventeen, it was a blip in the cosmos, it was my stint as a short story writer it was the beginnings of my love affair with knights and the medieval it was the day i realized i could find a way out-- i.e. to linger on that concept for a moment the thing about 'owing your soul' is that an easy way out is not, in fact, something particularly easy to achieve i.e. here i am, the years have rolled on like vineyards, i've got something ahead and something grabbing the back of my hood

[systematicexcision]

i write in hypotheticals-- have never managed to put myself in songs, or poems. academic to a fault, analytical at best and self-flagellating at worst. the 'you' or 'me' or 'she' or 'he' in poems is nobody, odysseus made translucent, the minotaur dead before you reach the center, the myth which packed up its bags and left.

as such, even this is a hypothetical. a retrospective on retrospectives. a consideration of emotions transplanted onto you through others' art.

what is it, if not the whole world?

[systematicexcision]

I want to be known without:

having 2 ask for it

or openly wanting it

or displaying desire