Daily Dose by Qayyum Johnson

Daily Dose

poetry by Qayyum Johnson

Thursday, April 18, 2019 11:20-12:10pm

No research, no writing for facts, no reportage that exhausts all possibilities for music, no aspiring to timelessness (nor timeliness), no mentioning of enumerated oddities, no vocational odes glorifying a new under-served noun, no mesmerics, no glosses, no hidden trinities, no Reason clock working mechanistic tic-toc, no tropes of hope, no cauterization, no turning away, no touching, no joke.

Invite the body to speak, invite the wind, invite grief, invite rage, invite bewilderment, invite emptiness, invite aversion & attraction, invite huddling & hard masses, invite hunger unending, invite gray turbulence, invite cold heat & sweltering freeze, invite loss of childhood wonder, invite innocence that isn’t nostalgic hermeticism, invite patience, invite unspoken accord, invite flow, flood, fear & famine, invite the body to speak, invite the trees to lift upward weeping, invite end, invite end, invite end.

Scared to let go, scared to pray to hologram, scared to intone flag chant (threatened to not), scared to see spring start up again, scared of the quiet if you’re scared (sacred noise if you’re not) (scared welter if disembodied & seeking womb), scared of failing to pronounce in this time, scared of dying & not having lived, scared of the green-brown river (her depths), scared of upsetting the cart, scared of the marketplace, scared of tearing asunder what perfect chaos wrought, scared of eschatology, scared of materialism, scared of ear hairs growing dreamlike on an old man’s head.

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Sadness is a basket the size of a garden, into which flows a stream of molecules that want to be carrots. At the root tip of each growing orange carrot is a Tower of chemicals that each hunger for nothing beyond the shape of their bondage—deeper into the dark they plunge down, arranging infinitesimal stages & platforms from seeming nothing, karaoke of wet minerals & air. A circular homage to sugar.

To know yourself divine (by way of the ordinary) & looking out, to see—What—all the shapes & spaces between. And the backward step: all un-done again. The inner sense is all Space, all dripping on glass pane & seeming lightlessness—or is it? Because it is circular (like the breath) & can radiate out at any point or micro-point along the way; each ray having infinite points which may branch or circle outward with yet more radium, more rays, more radii, more receptors (like eyes) that are sensitive spaces residing in between, whose job it is to draw in (accumulating) & back-flip (to outwardly spread to the farthest edges of the galaxy (e.g., the skull)), & then—again, What Is It— the shapes dis-cohere into tinier thin pencil tips, dashes where they make jazz runs or color scales. Shapes whose collecting is gratuitous & intentional, both. Shapes who know by doing, and/or, who doingly know—like the unending flag of the skies which signals itself by grand effusion touching all points in cascading moments like glass panes defined momentarily by multiplicative vertical tears. The inward, then, is nothing like a backward, nothing like a forward, it is more intuition of wholeness at the very moment of dissolution’s terror—that Solidity—which stands in for the Other in the blackness defined by a fragile whiteness that assumes a pale margin surrounds & is the home of self. Under the sky (quotation marks surround the spatial locutor) also assumes, Above the earth. From this queer vantage, eyes closed is best perspective: the radiant breath, the circular & linear, the basket shape that holds, the mapways that connect, the end where the path ceases at the high rocky edge overlooking—What? This is it. It. The disorderly flight of sense taking energy from this & giving it (freely) to that; to What is to come when the immensity returns again—gay, rippling, taciturn, epiphanic, matter-of- factly.

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& the immensity returns with Things: a sharp thing, a blunt thing, a cold thing, a sexual thing, an edible thing, an unquenching thing, a cool & smooth thing, a hairy & wet thing with rough smeared borders thing, a leaning & untrustworthy thing, a dominant, cruel & violent thing, a silent thing, a buzzing thing that whispers musically in one’s own voice thing, a hand over your mouth-shaped thing, a transportive beating thing, a pungent thing that startles thing, a thing unbelievable, an unbelievable thing, a thing that doesn’t exist, a thing that cannot express itself thing, a beyond the pale thing, an unspeakable thing that has something to say thing, a thing with a pattern that means something thing, a thing that has something for you thing, a thing attached to a thing, a thing for the season of mud thing, a thing for this stage of What thing, an offensive outlandish absurd foreign thing, a thing sent back by the things that occupy the future who thought it would free us now thing, a thing prayed into being over beginningless time as a gift from the insurrection at the grapefruit juice of the universe’s inception thing.

In other words—a thing meant to be seen—What? The thing cannot be seen, the thing is, only as we are. The thing is a warp & we are the weft. Another spatial locutor directs us to Open. We try as we might (may as well) & we might as well try as we note what happens next to the thing, with our gathered queerness spreading upward & downward, inward & outward: things offer us friendship, point us toward the selflessness of other things, which circles around in straight lines to the linear organism, the Thing we assume to own, to be, to be always looking out for. The immensity is pleased to look without having to find, around the circle of glass, around the seemingness of a surface to the ocean above (the sky) & the quantum porosity of the mountain below (the earth). How well-lit this dark & how queer to un-know & then—again returning—like the rain, like the end, like the light, to know ourselves divine.

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81 Untitled #1, Celeste Corzan