By Patrick La Roque
welcome to the holding pattern
shadow play
of limbs flailing
in endless twists
hour upon hour,
day upon day.
i can’t define who i am anymore
i can’t define the world
i can’t define the news
i can’t decipher monday from sunday from friday from easter or winter or fall.
welcome to the holding cell
where crowds gather when i dream
and i cower in fear.
funhouse baroque theaters
packed
got a show to do
got no script
got no words.
welcome to static
white pink and brown
noise
angry
flooding the airwaves.
drunk and blubbering idiots spitting on
sidewalks
chanting automaton patriots of hellscape.
they don’t define me either
i am amorphous
i am intangible
i am liquid
drying.
i squeeze into gaps
of land
rising above barren skies
listening to the black angels,
ears plugged,
outside cancelled,
deep reverb drips & licks
to coat my tongue.
i blast with fury,
blast the gods
with twisting heart writhing
and blood stained hands;
i'm a horse machine
and horse machines are black and white.
who do we think we are anyway?
the moon is gone and mars is dead
if we won't resist.
this is a culling
a reckoning
shockwave purity dance
texas hold’em
flush
and circle down.
the future is typewritten?
fuck the future;
that’s gone too.
...
When life veered off its normal course I retreated into a fragmentary place. Now, I struggle to see the whole again. It’s all broken up. The focal lengths I use don’t even matter anymore: all I see are shapes draped in shadows. And I’m scared, to tell you the truth. Scared to have lost something, to now shoot the decorative instead of the meaningful. Scared to be unmoored forever, adrift on a sea of mismatched parts. No shoreline, no real horizon to cut through the curvature of time.
My mind is full, exploding in fact, but my body is numb, exhausted from too many early dawns, sunrises and birdsongs. From watching our southern border and reeling. So thank god for movie nights, eleventh birthdays and cake. For tall grass where cicadas hide and moan.
We’ll be ok.
We’ll be different.
We’ll be fine.
Like a raging torrent,
unstoppable.
