Unidentified Feeling Obelisk (a sequel to Unidentified Feeling Observatory)
Š 2015 by Logan Ellis [2]
unidentified feeling: 1. an intangible & unnamed emotional response to a stimulus, inexplicable yet always prodding, often characterized by birds that fall from flight, half-cooked and still charging their wings like cell phones plugged in the sky’s outlet 2. a culmination, a belief, a starfish attached to the underbelly of the world 3. a memory scorched into your left tongue 4. beneath the skin, crawling in a machine’s body, travelling inside
[3]
[4]
Foreword to another Epilogue Footprints are an unnecessary remembrance. A tempting turnabout. You drive away from the point of abduction, making thousands of footprints and leaving the ones you imprinted in the air, in space. Something dust can’t pretend to resurrect. Whenever you take an elevator, you pretend it’s made of glass and that you’re looking out over the footsteps you’ve taken to this point, via airplanes, taxis, piggyback rides. That pad-footed trail. Once, you climbed a cell phone tower, said you believed in ghost music. Once, you climbed a tree and found a house—always a daydream. Inside were all the tools you’ve ever needed to build & a safe full of missing teeth—a dream thing, an ambiguity. When the rain came, everything dissolved—like a bird into night. If you’ve ever felt a gunshot, it was deep in your sleeping tibia. A bone. A name. An overwritten memory. A dream. A bone a name an overwritten memory a dream. aboneanameanoverwrittenmemoryadream
[5]
This feeling is a certain level of chemical instruction, the silent type, extraterrestrials breaking the ice with animals in trees and burned-out buildings outside your room while you, from your cradle of silence, memorize the way their lips move, translate their culture into cobwebs. All those favorited web pages marked by stars brighter than the halo of explosions beestung to floating discs in the sky; all those superstitions you let tell you who's more alive, leaving you dumb and unprepared for the cocooned insects underneath billboards that break forth with questions about life and disaster. Yes, you’ll give them a line, let someone else finish the definition, and then tell them that's all it is, really, a beginning that's handed off like hand prints for millions of others to finish until the final inventor dies with everyone's smiles job-shadowing a conglomerated face. The insects just laugh and go back to sleep.
[6]
This feeling is static-echo in clamped mouth, an inarticulate peace, this fabric whirlwind caught at a standstill in the shallow tracks of your corduroys, a voice flying from a body bag being dragged through the desert, saying: "where is this going? the number 7 is the most popularly ingested form of luck while 4 has tangled our narcissisms independently.�
[7]
This feeling isn’t real, can’t be happening, electrical cords twist tied around your tongue as your grammar is dismembered and placed, twitching, on a funeral pyre in small glass boxes, a contemporary art exhibit in a ghost town for bodiless children to laugh, learn, adapt— to find their lips.
[8]
This feeling got nothing special, got lips loose enough to resurrect the lips of dead machines, got wrists and ankles and every bone that connects how we lift, land, rotate, got a face like your hometown (and who doesn't still live there?), got that torque effect of repeating yourself versus getting over it, the superpower of conjuring fog— all arrows shattering like home, all blood types just sinkholes beneath calm places.
[9]
This feeling is walk-in cardiac bypass, grave-digging, eyes plagiarized & hoping to meet the coma of you, the specter of you, a silent explosion caught in the ground and dozens of fingers approaching the sky while mine stay rapidly still behind my back with a nail file, working at the dead wings of a thousand butterfly knots.
[10]
This feeling is inspiration unearthed from your chest’s ancient Indian burial ground, duly underlined and highlighted beneath the eyes, power lines snipped with shears and the chilled teeth you’ve been saving in the back of the freezer thawing like poverty. It’s the too-many knuckles of a single fist rapping against your nicotine cheek. It’s a finger dragging across the dust on your skull, making a clear path for you to follow.
[11]
This feeling is a school bus with its back hatch swung into the fist-grip of morning, one teenager tumbling out for each bullet-in-bone clunk of gas prices lowering cent by cent— another gunshot whiplash, another girl lost to self-discovery and acupuncture, to a cavern of adulthood.
[12]
This feeling is mermaid dead in the highway, scales peeled to ribbons like burst tire wrapped around limbs from the tree trimmers above who’ve hacked into another universe, one with mercy and a weak stomach for the limelight.
[13]
This feeling is a thousand burned-out stars hanging in an elevator, waiting for a power surge, hungry like a centrifuge w/o the urgency or a cannibalistic moon, one that avoids the questions we buzzcut and broadcast from our heads and instead rolls treetops into tight packages and false teeth.
[14]
This feeling is twin heads blooming from a dry puddle of night, a long rose balanced between their teeth, the utterance and grin of romantics
 half-alive and half-aware like glass-piece secrets: the roach in your ventilation, or money in the pocket, worn in the wash.
 The rest of our perils curtsy into a furnace. I waltz with my hands closed.
[15]
This feeling is marriage with a hair net, an exposed skull-nest of hummingbird wings sutured tight onto your neck by frayed-soft shoelaces. You spoke to me in the all too open sound of sneaker squeaking, &I craved the smell of burned rubber.
[16]
This feeling is a secret baby tooth for the poison as loose and volatile as an ocean stone in your mother's hand, disposed safely by the tooth fairy who moves like a smoke-filled room— a scream in your throat upon waking.
[17]
This feeling is every awakening shaking dust from your nose, a bottle of water bedside flavored in nightmares, the ghost-white of a doctor's glove maneuvering your chest, turning every organ into glass coffins swishing on the inside with tiny pieces of the Dead Sea, tiny girls floating farther out.
[18]
This feeling is sweet fix— another baby born with a tongue as silver as its new car, parental wallets empty like a miniature cardiac arrest.
[19]
This feeling is bilabial click: strict on the cusp / of tongues split / cleanly in half; / construction site misdemeanor: rolling / stop and a cat / call from a wolf's / whiskered mouth; always horny: concrete / split by / jackhammering— keep going kee p go in g
[20]
This feeling is sweet, like a dog's heart open beneath masked fluorescent lights, like candied amusement park sweat, like scissors running with child hands, lifelines sharp enough to stab them blind if they trip.
[21]
This feeling is over 99.99% accurate; sea salt; crooked cranes vomiting above a convention center for forklifts foraying and flaying apart mannequins of last week's lost word, the one not even a Walmart cart of hand mirrors could refract, colorless, from your mouth, the one that took a single hand and pushed itself farther into you.
[22]
This feeling is spikes in the pores catching loose skin and spinning it into sweaty ocean jewels, a seaside secret tooth beaming bright like the picket fence metatarsals reaching from the sand-skull of ivy, all the beach umbrellas crying, “Amen!�
[23]
This feeling is best said by Childish Gambino: “The only dinner for two.�
[24]
Is this feeling balding formaldehyde, speedreading a nail in the wall that has lost its painting until it collapses into rose water? Is this feeling spiderwebs in the clothes rack catching fingers and spinning them into price tags, chilled and throbbing? Is / this / feeling how we revel like prepaid gas pumps, how we spend our college funds on perforated words and hand them to one another in slow motion— dad, mom, home?
[25]
[26]
Intermission (with an exception) Whisper: Wait. Will you tell? I can’t give away the receipt of this burden. Can you tell? The urge to vomit when asleep. The urge to wake up and pull the steeping teabag from your throat. The urge to shut the window when it’s already shut. The urge to turn off your phone during a call. Don’t you know yet? This breeze? I can’t tell. I can’t tell. Shout: IF IT’S NOT THE CYMBAL THEN IT’S THE CRASH. IF IT’S NOT THE FLIGHT THEN IT’S THE HALF- EATEN BIRD HEAD IN YOUR HAND. IF IT’S NOT THE HEXAGON IN YOUR SKULL LIFTING AND FALLING, FLAPPING IN A LEAD BREEZE, THEN IT’S THE ALIENS. IT’S THE NOWHERE NEAR.
[27]
This feeling is condemned houses waiting to burst like a chrysalis without the shine, as colorfully and carefully dead and uplifting as a plank-bridge in a cemetery, underwire popping into flesh becoming the new fashion high—an organ per dress, a smirk of lightning and blood.
[28]
This feeling is ass-end, unconventional, a paradox boiled down to its basic, dusty elements of a spray-paint bottle in the hand & graffiti of a naked woman underneath a country bridge, X's in all the wrong places.
[29]
This feeling is a window into the secret part of tomorrow, loose teeth fondled under the pillow of a sleepyhead who has slipped into a desert coma—a dreamscape painting on fire—and is sinking slowly through the skyline of a buried-alive city. Meanwhile, the popcorn ceiling above his head laughs, lodging a kernel into the fan, choking on the entertainment.
[30]
This feeling is transferring the thorn from hand to foot, from nose to eye, from funny bone to ass cheek, as delicate and obvious as a sonnet’s Volta, the binary volcano split evenly, the block’s new church open for business and their clever billboard psalms preaching to a truck’s tire tread, the worn knuckles of an abrupt sky of wheat rapping on our flayed heads to wake up and realize the names on our bookshelves.
[31]
This feeling is walking towards you on the water, dressed like Jesus wearing water shoes, open palms heavy with chattering removable teeth devouring hungry birds. This isn't a philosophy; eventually all your days will dwindle on ropes in place of puppets and a hair writhing through your food will become a miracle, a road sign of hope.
[32]
This feeling is a cover band of horses mutilating guitar strings for a ripe-tomato-and-latte audience— applause in each hum, neigh, and sip, the background’s final tambourine hiss conjuring a snake's dentures.
[33]
This feeling is the slashed tire of my lips bleeding rainbows on the wet asphalt, our fractured organ of technicolor intermediary, a run-on, like the first announcement of the newest war and that moment when everyone looks at each other's facial muscles and finds mutual words tucked in each cheekbone.
[34]
This feeling is a serving platter of your nerve endings, cooling slightly in the air, wriggling like fish on a hook in the sky, gobbling all the numbers and alliteration we’ve thrown up and didn’t ask to come down until our umbrellas could finally erupt and serve as bouncy houses of the brain.
[35]
This feeling is learning to cartwheel below a line-up of symphonic planets who’re all strumming their teeth and deciding which of your legs kicked them from your delicious dream last night, which leg they can tear into orbit— a victim in every off-beat; a thief in every rhyme.
[36]
This feeling ain’t the smell of fire, ain’t wildlife on exhibit in tame fists, nor gentle love, a rocking chair, floral wallpaper, a smock pocket filled with “in case of a sneeze” napkins. This feeling ain’t underneath the fingernail, ain’t something that can be dug up, too short for the teeth, ain’t the offering of a kitchen knife. This feeling ain’t here to accuse, forgive me, ain’t peppered or waving from a costume on the side of the road. Ain’t recorded—ain’t a soul who’s tried—ain’t innocent at the bottom of all that dust, the weight of water, ain’t fighting back, coming back, it is relaxing into that coma, handful of flowers, a nurse and his poison, respirator quieting into a shot of technicolor; it is how you discover there’s paper beyond the sky.
[37]
[38]
Prologue in Reverse You were always here. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You’re aware of how your own body abducts you. Your belly has brought rocks. Another walk with fog for feet, your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has been left behind. And the work ahead is too dark to see. A medal for “jumping too high.” A metal or a medal. That word like a metal in your mouth. Another threshold. Too many instructions in life, subtracting into a channel of sloppy doorways, hands to memorize. Another entrance.
[39]
This feeling is monarchy’s head split for dissection, a cadaver in a cabinet left in the aftermath of the world’s end, two moons colliding into a Venn diagram, and, in the overlapping shadow's seam, a voice just as dark and drunk, saying, “please, leave.”
[40]
This feeling is diamond catapult in a field of unnamed flowers, our ankles caught tight in the television-static gray back at home, torpedoes of blood in each nostril, the velocity of blast from the past producing sounds of popping knuckles & maybe poetry slam finger snaps, the beret kind.
[41]
This feeling is a fish in the sky, silver lines cast into its gasping, acute mouth, the sharp corner of reeling that takes more forearm than bicep, more skin and sweat than the texture of patience, and, when this miracle has broken down through the skyline, this feeling is spinning your fingers around its intestines in the kitchen sink, crying because no one has taught you how to gut, because your lifelines wore bloody moats.
[42]
This feeling is Christmas trees stitched into a circus tent, protected from winter rain, how we train them to forget their roots, how a bead of sweat reflects our world on fire like a swamp reflects a poltergeist. In which we are grateful for the pipes conversing behind our walls. In which we forget where we dug up the grave.
[43]
This feeling is waiting. (your eyes the weight of a tip jar) waiting. (fork-tuned hallelujah) waiting. (a burned-out house glimmering in the rain and fog trails, atom bombs in every closet corner) & waiting
& waiting
(gravity braided between our toes, hands braided between our heart muscle lattice) &
waiting waiting &
&
(our senses uncorked, bruises like a participation ribbon, sinking sunlight into the basement concrete)
[44]
[45]
Prologue with an Interruption Another entrance. Too many instructions in life, subtracting into a channel of sloppy doorways, hands to memorize. Another threshold. That word like a metal in your mouth. A metal or a medal. A medal for “jumping too high.” And the work ahead is too dark to see.— ((You have a device planted in your brain. I’m telling you this because it’s true. Believe me. Believe me? I’m keeping the man made of other men a secret. No, you do not know. Believe the hocked part of me. Me? Plan for your house to be taken + Plan for your head to be taken = Plan for the house in your head to be taken. We only have so much sky to puncture through; we only have so many floors, so much gravity & grounding. I’m sorry this has happened to you. Let’s make amends: I’ll break the bread, you pour the grape juice.)) —Another walk with fog for feet, your mother in every doorway behind you, advancing from skins of what has been left behind. Your belly has brought rocks. You’re aware of how your own body abducts you. But don’t worry about how much longer you’ve got. You were always here.
[46]
This feeling is an optional sweep of the mansion: the left wing unfolding like televisions, the right wing curled around a leg less child, the attic and basement two halves of quicksand, portals to bone, every opportunity, from the door to the window to the welcome mat, hammered shut or otherwise darkened, kissed to death, every wall fresh arms of a beatnik strumming away, counting chin hairs, and the lonely occupant, broom still in hand, knowing there’s nothing left to clean but the wall of text eating him from the inside.
[47]
This feeling is prodigy on all fours, popular until proven guilty, abstract love like traffic cones around a pothole, one that mirrors the upside-down mushroom cloud bottoming out your gut, making nothing grow but reverse bones, your grandmother’s quilt, a cold place warmed by hands in motion.
[48]
This feeling is house on the tip of a flea’s fingertip where I open the window and shout, Nice view! and no one hears, where I take a picture of the sunset and no one cares, where I lock myself out and there’s no one to call, where I try to climb down and slip and no one catches me, where my body grows its own chalk outline and no one sees it on the news, where wolves eat my head & hands & feet and have children bearing my resemblance for some reason and no one takes a photo, where I leave many faces behind in each beveled window and no one forgets.
[49]
This feeling is
half-assed cartwheel addict, the last known wanderer taught to scream, a well amount of fur patched to the inside of our chests, waving like seaside vegetation to the savage call-breath barreling through our esophagus sarcophagus, lock and key lost to the quicksand balanced at our lips.
[50]
This feeling is sleep crawling up the wall in a sleek, water-black wet suit, stopped by your eyes, reminding you of a pull string, of how you could easily peel away her darkness inch by inch to see the colonial cockroach, see the many prisms in her eyes, kaleidoscopes that empty into reversed thresholds, into the prettiest secret in the whole motherfucking world. But I didn't tell you that. Sometimes we all have imposters.
[51]
[52]
Prologue after the Prologue but before the Epilogue to mean where does something begin? to mean there’s a point in everything, a list of segments waiting inside like a shadow for the right time of day. we want and we want and that feeling we want to wear that feeling like an inside-out skeleton we would like to purchase that feeling for so & so for the cost of one arm bone and one leg bone or maybe the mice that hide inside them but maybe I’ve been thinking about light all wrong, maybe it’s not something you can turn on and off.
[53]
"Don’t walk away from me." “This feeling is the light inside a silhouette.” "You know why I’m upset." “You are repeating and repeating.” "You keep pushing me away." “I’m simply pushing candlelight with my fingers. A thousand shadows with open mouths. Baby birds burned to their nests.” “I’ve been waiting behind for so long.” “Isn’t silhouette is a funny word? Silhouettes in place of windows. Posing through flaming hoops. And my wristwatch is on fire.” "Can’t you just try to try?" “I’m sinking with the weight of how I’ll make this up to you.” "You’re just so stupid." “All I can see are wooden angels, and they’re lighter than the sea.” [54]
Standing alone in your bedroom's dark, the sharp edge of it, this feeling of bending the window blinds with your finger to see a rabbit dressed like a wolf outside on the lawn, still obvious in shape and size, in how it cuts its teeth on every blade of grass and pretends to hurl howls at the moon, but still somehow confident in its disguise. You try to be the same. show me You try to be an adult locked in mother's womb. show me You try searching for something else to jinx. You roam for it. You run for it, far into limousines of night. This way, you learn how to protect yourself; you learn how to blacklight your own mopped-up crime scene. Perfect (show me) in every pixelated (show me) kind of [55]
way. So, if you have it figured out, bring me up to your room, sit me on your bed, and show me how to be the same as you, you as the rabbit.
[56]
This feeling is a light splitting from the scar under your left nostril, rough-skinned whispers of everything you've touched throughout the day erupting from your hands: a movie ticket, a PlayStation controller, a knife, text coldly cut from magazine pages in a waiting room where you listened for a noise, the sound of the door opening or hitting sunlight for the first time in days, a sensation that you always knew was there but couldn't face your window to prove.
[57]
This feeling— Margarita savvy & clutching the knees, tear ducts, aqueducts, duct tape over your mouth in a room cut from outer space, anything that rhymes with the sound of sobbing and clicking fingers, beautiful things rotting in buried treasure chests, proud in their hide and seek holes of earth.
[58]
This feeling is quick-dilating Eurekas, bells grown from the teeth you used to collect as a kid and jingle before the fairy of your adolescence made them rattle like the ocean, and you began crying a lot in a land of honey, a Pangea-comb, a misspelled guttural gun show, billboards forgotten in the air like gods you prayed to with all your silent goddammits.
[59]
This feeling is blank verse conclusions, a conversation between two walls of aluminum foil. I measure you in all grins, I trap your voice in a jar and watch it spot-glow against the glass. I sleep with it folded between my arms like a mother with no children. I wake up and it has grown away from me, the sound of a dream being filled with rainwater.
[60]
This feeling is bee suits worn against every sensation that drools across your fingertips / a window of televisions broadcasting the same melting teeth of a man on fire / running from the cannibals in the woods behind your childhood home, every tree reorganized, every boot-beaten path rearranged, a murder of crows overwhelming fence posts telling you no trespassing on the private property of welcome back.
[61]
This feeling is underlined with sleep, arms linked in bold typeface & rewound through scratchy static, into the opening credits of Heaven, the world as a different kind of story, one that you bark louder to hear.
[62]
this feeling is summer poking its eye through the glen where we slit our tongues for romance. redden -ing. blink, eat, matinee our attention deficits into a new noon sliver sliver sliver (s) r/e/d inandforwhat. today, the ghosts have been busy, comma splices in each wrist as they dismantle the shadow of our house. we open the door and see a stretch of forest, the buzzing silence and stillness of it, r e d [63]
and, like an ouroboro, you eat yourself tail first as I run away with my legs twisted in a tourniquet, a knife in my forehead slowly splitting my body into a door, darkly cut and cropped to reveal me and all of myselves dancing around an effigy, too aflame to extinguish and too charred to distinguish—penultimate.
[64]
This feeling is a headful of jungles, everyone you know as an animal stepping gently from the magenta bush, shaken into black outlines as they press their foreheads to each sincere gun in all of your one-thousand hands, the barrels like dark telescopes to a white constellation of teeth. Somewhere, there is waterfall applause telling you to shoot every one of them dead. Somewhere, another revolution ends, fireworks bottom out the moon onto happy battlefields, arms are kissed with lips crisscrossed, but you are away from it, keeping one heart open and the other tightfisted, singing your mother's hymns and standing still, still, still, trying to look intimidating enough as you look into your animal's frozen eyes, not shooting, and knowing that you never will, you won’t. [65]
Another Epilogue Possibility is a fine-toothed dagger. You reach into a fish bowl filled with strips of shredded documents, always pulling the enviable question: “Who gave you permission?” You put a hand to your side and notice the thousands of confetti’d ribs. Nobody has told you how much the world means crawl. Crawl into, crawl out of, a cage behind your face swung open, bones of your mouth emerging from the sands of a beach faraway. And if we run out of words to use can we still say “Amen?” Stint the graphics. Keep your body dotted and moving moving moving forward into the adjacent angle of a wall’s locked kneecap. Listen to the command. Just. Just. Keep driving and forget how to look back.
[66]
Logan Ellis is the leftover fog at a melancholy punk concert, rolling into your hair and tagging along in your left shoe until you get home. He is the morning hubbub and the afternoon hullabaloo. By harnessing the calm breeze at the Zen temple hidden in his head, he has received his Bachelor’s Degree in English, creative writing, and Linguistics, and is currently enrolled in the MFA Graduate Writing Program at California College of the Arts. He has plans to work as an editor/publisher while also colliding and remixing poetry and fiction. He thanks you for reading this e-book and encourages you to drop by his blog, www.unknowmenclature.tumblr.com with some good vibes.
Š 2015 by Logan Ellis [67]