Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tylyn K. Johnson
Acknowledgements This (e)Chapbook was created during my time in Professor Liz Whiteacre’s Poetry Writing Workshop course (ENGL 370) at the University of Indianapolis. I would like to express appreciation to the peers who provided feedback on many of the poems shown here. Much love also to my family, who have waited patiently for me to nally create something of poetry that I felt was of the right quality to share with them. The same also goes for my friends, who have already survived a number of phases and forms in my poetry-writing over the past number of years, with many more undoubtedly to come.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 1 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Table of Contents Foreword
5
______ In this moment
8
______ A Flowering (Source of) Life
10
The Seat of an Old Tree
11
A Million New Stories
12
______ Fable of Two Rivers Meeting
14
______ survival by creation
16
B4 & after 4YRS
17
What they Teachin’ them
18
______ Ordained & Pronounced
20
______ A funny thing about me
22
It’s all cause of you but
23
Time’s Stories
24
______ buried child
26
______ Relishing the Fragments of Space
28
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 2 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Ichor; Magni cence in Circus
29
Lost Ancestral Maternal Being
30
______ Feels like I’ve been here before
32
______
Colophon
36
About the Author
37
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 3 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 4 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Foreword The process of creating this project was one that centered around playing with language and allowing the page to become a playground in the same way that the canvas is the playground of the painter, or the eld is for the athlete. When I approached this project, I didn’t want it to be just a chapbook that you read and maybe reread, but eventually forget how you interacted with it. I wanted my chapbook to be something you can experience beyond what you read, but with what you can possibly create inside and in between the pages I’ve shared with you today. When I was workshopping some of the poems for this project, I was focused on experimenting and playing with my own approach to poetry-writing, seeing how I am already using language and discovering how I may learn to use it. And I think in that process of playing with my own writing style, I found myself exploring di erent aspects of my own perspective, aesthetic, and experience. This is something that I think may ring particularly well with other Black and/or Queer [and/or other marginalized] artists, who often nd themselves shoehorned into very speci c topics and themes, and so I wanted to explicitly explore that multi-faceted sense of artistry within me, and to be able to loosely connect those things together without having to make my poems bleed each other to be in a shared space. The themes I sought to explore in the poetry of the chapbook are best described by the subtitle of this project “The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Deathly.” I wanted to make this space one where I could interact with the many facets of my experience, especially one that is Black and Queer and creative and wall ower and the many other facets of what it means to be human. And in exploring these broad, interweaving themes in this chapbook, I also wanted to make the broader chapbook experience one that allowed my audience to interject themselves onto the page in ways beyond even my own imagining. No art is made in a vacuum, and even if I may never get to experience the art someone creates from atop my own work, I want to know a reality in which such a practice is well-loved and cherished by those who make art from my own.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 5 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
I think the thing I experiment most with here is the collective space of the poems compiled here. Of course, I used caesura and varied line lengths in my poems in ways that have not typically been part of my poetry practice. You’ll see this in the blank space between my words, and even in the alignment of lines or entire poems. Additionally, while I want the people reading this to annotate the poems and make all their own connections or artwork from them, I also wanted there to be space between the poems for folks to engage and create from their own hearts and minds and souls. So if you read one of my poems and you are called to doodle or sketch from it, I wanted there to be page space dedicated speci cally to that. If you want to write your own piece to bridge those gaps between the themes, the space exists for that as well. Even if not to create or add further art, it could be a space for my chapbook to come into the lives of readers, to write down a shopping list or a phone number or message, because poetry and art can be found and made from all these things in our daily lives that we sometimes forget. And in all of this space that was made, it could just be a moment to pause, to breathe, because sometimes, poetry is a lot, and while I hope you experience something new in each of my poems, you must do that on your own pace, regardless of my desires as the creator of these poems. Having completed this poetry project, I see the little corner of the world in which my poetry exists continuing to be lled with color and metaphor and stories as I experience the things life has envisaged for me. This poetic endeavor was part of my last creative writing course in my undergraduate education, so my biggest hope is that the writing I craft from here on is full of breath—joyful and exhausted and furious and all. I cannot truly speak to what my writing and storytelling will look like one year from now, much less ten. But I hope to see my work engage more deeply with all the things that make up my experiences, and that I can connect them to at least one other person and inspire them to movement in ways they had long wanted to or never dreamed of before. In all of the ways I choose to create and place my poetry in the world, I will work to protect my language, so that it remains uninhibited. As I play with themes and techniques and forms, I will endeavor to make my work stand steady in the face of the violent vacuums of the oppressive systems I create under. This is a part of my written heritage, as my predecessors have done before me, as my contemporaries do now, and as the newcomers will eventually do.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 6 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 7 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
In this moment inside our mouths, the air tastes of ice, and shards of mist pierce our skin, no illusory magic in these feelings. Behind us are mountains that once owed with molten aether, though they now rest docile. Above us, the clouds carry the scent of distant evergreens. Will spring ever come? Before us sits a patch of owers and dandelions, left unattended, we near where even butter ies no longer return. Beneath us, charcoaled land is split by a lonely river, the only thing moving, And you, here, right beside me in all this stillness.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 8 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 9 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
A Flowering (Source of) Life Coming from the cracks of an old, dusty wall, is a single ame. At the foot of this small ame is a stem lifting it towards an enclosed sky, though its roots remain stripped from our vision. It glows as if a wind pushes it, gentle baby embers pictured down a barren castle hallway, and here I am. Wondering. What is the name of this little thing? How would it be recorded in our texts? I ask these things knowing such a ame may well burn it all away an unrecorded existence
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 10 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
The Seat of an Old Tree Sitting all alone the remains of a once-grand old tree whose earthly powers rooted deep in the planet’s core could never save it from the dust-made creatures that cut it down. All that bark, a glorious and uneven skin, torn to shreds as grass become a mulch splattered in a honey-sweet sap. Time passes in solitude and the shreds of a generations-old body eventually become burial dirt though the grave still breathes of life from edglings who gather to dance atop a lonesome stump as well as the descendants of the entities who turned the birthplace of a forest into the solitary headstone of a plain graveyard. Still, such an existence is not as dark as the wood of this ancient thing once was for there is much yet for the steward of the memory of the land to bear witness to and perhaps tell the seeds blown in by winds that call for the birth of saplings and blossoms.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 11 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
A Million New Stories The light shifts between waves and dust in the middle of each sentence, like so many things are happening in this moment. A leaf spirals slowly, softly, from its branch and prayer beads trickle all over the earth somewhere with many things happening. The clouds are parted by manmade things and so many things are happening as salt spirals into unseen vortexes within the seas. You can watch a bit of snow be transformed into new waves while grass bends itself to the dew on its crown, feeling like too many things are happening. A slug dries its feet out over sand, meanwhile, wrapped in large arms, a baby human has their rst laugh, the many happenings we know and never perceive and someone else is rede ning themself in their world just as the sun spills its warmth all over the skin. Many things are happening here. A piece of brick is laid with its kin(d), a st nds its way into the air, and another into a smug face. All the many things are happening, even in that new page being written into a story
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 12 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 13 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Fable of Two Rivers Meeting there are mythologies of beings who change faces depending on the places they were in and somehow I have become the child of such stories, this body a de led place of worship for it was an altar that knew the separation of identities like the false borders between nations and there I was, praying at it, unknowing of the history I was forgoing but still laughing and breathing at an intersection in need of the sky’s protection and even as I was moved by the seas around me, I had never known a sense of ease so as I began to forge a well-ranged path, I was becoming trapped in a gorge despite the teachings of elders a generation past, I had allowed myself to be miscast in some chronicle of a black kid, queer kid, being locked out of an inherited masjid until a kin/dred spirit made a space for me to be, Black and Queer and jubilee tying together the strings that hold me to the universe, with nary a curse to my name and a new scripture on my tongue and a thousand new melodies to be sung in every church and temple that weaves magic into people as trees do unto their leaves as community is found across untraveled lands and I nd myself reaching for their hands breathing myself full of ancestral spirit, a new beginning best described as orchestral for the way our laughter becomes the incantation that speaks music to life, a foundation of all that history I nearly lost, but which a distinguished peoples made possible at all cost for which I am grateful, their collective acts of union and rebellion fateful to my existence
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 14 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 15 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
survival by creation to lift
this brush now to look
to craft a Black art
as
snow
drizzles
down
somewhere, a Blackbird sings out telling all to
make
their
homes
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 16 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
B4 & after 4YRS The summer between graduation and yet another school year freedom laughter adventure exploration movement friendship creation All I can think of is how we, for a moment, became young birds that soared through all types of skies like there wasn’t no systems to stop us from being grand and joyful and we took all the lessons we learned and breathed something new into the air. Our hearts been scarred, but bigger than even the giants in the kids’ books we used to read and how could the sun possibly create more energy than our laughter when I’d drive my godly-tan Buick LeSabre with a cassette for an aux down our potholed streets and my friends would crack jokes like eggs on how I drove and missed some turn through a neighborhood, highways never made it into my religion, but we still made it, and we was still eatin’ and reality seemed so far away even though you could only get in the back seat on one side it was still the seat of so many memories that are worth getting to playback on the radio one more time, just one more time. I’ve since lost that old car, and someday I may lose those people who dared to create such a whirling heat within me while the streets have kept decaying and ugly neon houses are starting to appear around us again with no clue of what the next four years will hold in its clammy hands for me but it was all worth it
I’d do it all again, just let me play it back
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 17 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
What they Teachin’ them To be artist is to survive on nothing as school programs do when they cater to cultures beyond whiteness To be artist is to put all your broken pieces together and create the new, the reborn the revitalized only to be gentri ed for the kids who end up moved from their hoods To be creative is to make ink out of your own blood put that ink into the latest state testing booklet with no hope of saving your school To be creative is to laugh at how they redid the school playground but never gave you chalk for the blacktop because when you learn words you practice gra ti To be writer is to traverse language on an unwritten border between the strict vernaculars of schools and the slangs spoken on your home street To be writer is to speak in tongues that were almost forgotten and to see your old schools teach your message without its meaning To be imaginative is to make up new words for when the ones you were taught don’t t so you nally remember a heritage of gold made by people who walked over broken glass To be imaginative is to know that the street’s potholes and cracked sidewalks are a language you best learn to translate; “they don’t care about us” and “we’ll make do with what we got” To be storyteller is to hold onto the names and faces of those you witness and play eulogist for those who no longer be – even when nobody originally cared To be storyteller is to keep places in memory that have long been torn down, replaced as the new kids come in with no recollection of what was once before
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 18 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 19 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Ordained & Pronounced There is something about your name when you speak it, how it is a form of alchemy something you have grown into,
do not allow them to sully it and its power.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 20 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 21 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
A funny thing about me is my love of being in a cold room and wrapping myself a blanket into a home despite how I hate being trapped in hot spaces and how it makes me feel like I’m losing my senses. But that is okay, because I’ve also come to lose my love for snow even when it is untouched and brings many to a peaceful sigh for I have seen how it kills when its “stillness” is disturbed, so I have come to replace it with classic blizzard treats like ice cream or slushies in blankets on cold nights. It is truly an experience crafted by the gods when rays of sunlight touch you beneath snowy clouds
or how a ame kricks and crackles within the moon’s deepest chills,
as stirring as a stream of water down your throat after a bit of mint strikes your soul. For some, the meeting of heat and freeze, however brief, through their body lights the spirit to lean into the rushed movement of their blood. But for me, it simply fuses me to my pillow, to rest in warmth. Couldn’t it be a holy thing to sleep like this? Snug, cozy. Let the snow fall only after I’ve retired to earth.
To have the wind whisper the haze in its breath down your neck, your spine, in kisses blown along the softest kind of breeze, the wind hushing all as the earth wraps itself around you, the magma in her core all the warmth you need for an eternal kind of sleep. Rain may continue to slip from the clouds, but they will carry in them the love of a bright sun whose a ection will grasp onto thee as the believer does their scripture, in the most sacred kind of experience found only in the vortex of frigidity and heat. And I will love it all, love it all like cinder does its embers and ashes, temporary, corporeal.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 22 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
It’s all cause of you but I’m begging you, please don’t leave me all alone, I need our reworks to keep me alive, us and our cyclone
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 23 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Time’s Stories The clock tiks and toks. Its body is cloaked in a burnt rosewood aura, its face is counted the Roman way. And its slender, calligraphic hands move when you don’t see it. Sometimes, it points at nine forty- ve, in the mornings a living room painted beautifully in glass and burning rosewood and play. Then when the sky is the hue of midnight, and the slender hands point at nine forty- ve, it also calls for infernos to be alive in the dead of winter with all the cracked leaves buried beneath the frozen tears of clouds. In the re ection of the clock’s face, at nine forty- ve, are memories of absence mixed with a lonely burden, being the one who winds other clocks, so they can go a long time. Somewhere, those timepieces forgot the line they came from, thought the rst clock to be the one who abandoned them, when no one has ever looked at the clock that keeps its tiks and toks, not at nine forty- ve anyways. Everyone knows that when a clock’s hands stop moving, they get thrown away. Who would give life to that which has already given everything?
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 24 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 25 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
buried child He didn’t know the ways of the world. He had such a purity to his spirit, to his laughter. He used to know that being alive was the best thing to be. They were what I was born from, what I forgot They held love to their chest, and so I grasp for such things I’ve been learning to necromancy joy from the dead The young ones grow up fast, they can’t live long enough They’re creeping back into my bones, now with a deeper laugh I’ve been visiting this place he stays, all lonely and whatnot And here I lied, thinking that death was to be my peace.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 26 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 27 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Relishing the Fragments of Space This,
this is a taste I must hold onto. I can’t imagine an existence without such a variety of avors, all packed into a tiny little prism. A kaleidoscope of these things providing an arti cial taste of the most luxurious of fruits, the kinds you hear people from nowhere call exotic, the kinds that act something like love treats in rooms touched only by the moonlight, all packaged into the sweetest little things. It’s something you bite, something you chew and swallow and hold love for like your bottom lip, makes you think of a hand resting in your sweaty palms. It’s funny how they call these origami-packaged things Starbursts, so I know they must’ve had quite the ambition to believe that something as cosmic as the birth and death of celestial bodies could be distilled down to a taste as tender and saccharine as this. To rest a supernova inside a mouth that still stumbles over its own Mother Tongue is almost to say that we could package divinity inside the humble pages of a book or even to pretend that we somehow have the capacity to transcend our own humanity. But I must say; this is a damn good attempt.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 28 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Ichor; Magni cence in Circus His face is that color of clouds still deciding between rain and sunshine with lines the color of a clean, starless night sky painting an expression that twists in joy. Never has a face been so simple, complex and confusing to read A ball of crimson glows at the center of his face, a red sun you can stare at when the kaleidoscope and exploding colors beneath this face confound for they are the tiny chaoses of the universe made visible, the frantic movement of atoms and how they shift colors has become a wildly-colored collage upon the body of this being In one hand, he holds a clean, metallic thing whose handle tastes of charcoal and whose blade smells of rust despite its sheen while the other hand grasps onto the string that keeps a balloon tethered to us, without which we might see him oat towards the sun like moths escaping our touch If you ask him how he came to be he might honor you with an altar after you’ve left this circus we know as life, your rusty stench trapped beneath his ngernails, painted all crimson and scarlet
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 29 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Lost Ancestral Maternal Being We started o saying her name three times and then we inched and we stood there for several seconds, the only thing holding us together was this tiny little candle We decided to call for her even more, raising our voices with the ickering orange dance before us glowing upon our earthen re ections when we heard her voice. “Young ones,” she said, a familiar rasp to her voice, “cease this foolishness.” All we could do was freeze, nothing to battle, a ceiling caging us from ight. My kin of spirit and I exchanged questions through the mirror’s re ections, just before everything went dark and we found ourselves wrapped in a warmth that felt almost like home full belly, blanket, laughter, bloodied hands and all. “Come to me, my dears,” she said, and suddenly we witnessed a ritual dance made of umber and ame —the kind that I thought was only passed down by bleeding traditions
“Tell me, why have you called upon her when better names exist?”
How do you tell someone you can’t see that you couldn’t think of them, because your line of connection was beaten, stripped, burned, drowned, buried “Do not believe that we are gone so easily, young ones.” “You are me, and I am you, when you are seeking wisdom, inspiration, love, something to hold onto, a lesson in a story, you just look in the mirror,” In that glowing light, I saw a woman with a face like mine.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 30 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 31 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Feels like I’ve been here before * A persona poem with a creature’s voice. Standing watch over greying hills, my tail sways back and forth in time with the wind and in my mind, a mirage of my one tail slowly becomes three, becomes nine. Up here, I feel like a giant rose that rests alone though I know the other creatures of these grounds see my coat as being only a shade away from being mistaken as blood the thing they fear losing their loved ones in, my fur a trick of the eyes, I suppose I miss my lovers, home to the same elds I roam, he was earthly softness brought to life I could nuzzle against his warmth for days on end, no need to eat his black eyes like luminescent stones that even the sun stares at and I wonder where we went wrong where I lost my little prayer who found protection in his burrows he reminded me of how sweet the grass can be I never liked to ght, but maybe he never liked my penchant for biting I had a ing in the skies, who ew with crackles of lightning and whose voice thundered so deep he brought in drizzles with him that satis ed me so I wish he’d come back to the land they used to say his scales were too hard, but I saw armor and when they said his teeth were sharp, I knew all the better for a shared meal the day they called him a ruler, a god, I feared that I was becoming his play-thing, something to dispose of like the night does to its stars and along the coasts, my last paramour chose to dance between worlds the ways in which he could climb high and dive deep astounded me kept me hooked around his horns, my feet in the waves sometimes wanting to glitter just as his n does beneath sunlight and sprinklets of water oh how I longed to join him along the mountainsides I think I could’ve survived such a trip, even to the stars but with all that he was, I knew he could not be my destiny, though I still stargaze
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 32 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
These days, I wonder if I should lie down and wait for the stardust to claim my skin and turn me into a skeleton, to turn me back into earth. Here I am, tired and watching the land and skies, mountainous coasts o in the distance I’ve done enough adapting for now, maybe I could nibble on a few clouds while I wait
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 33 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 34 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 35 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Colophon Published April 2022, online via Issuu. Cover page title, back page title, and page headers/footers are set in Rock Salt. Cover page subtitle, back page subtitle, section titles, and body text are set in Andika. Fonts via Google Docs.
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 36 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
About the Author Tylyn K. Johnson
Tylyn K. Johnson (he/they) is a part-time writer from Indianapolis who was crafted by a love from community. A BSW graduate from UIndy, he nurtures his passion for writing through the occasional spoken word. Tylyn seeks to honor the tradition of empowerment he comes from through the glasses of Black and Queer artistry. Their language has appeared in Queen Spirit Magazine, Etchings literary magazine, Indiana Voice Journal, and Rigorous, among other spaces. They also earned the 2021 Myong Cha Son Haiku Award. When they are not writing or gaming, Tylyn is learning how to better support the work happening around him. If you want to keep up with Tylyn’s projects and/or hear about resources they learn about; @TyKyWrites on Instagram, Twitter, Medium And if you want to show a little money love to Tylyn; @TyKyWrites on Venmo $TyKyWrites on CashApp Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 37 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 38 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
Tylyn K. Johnson
Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre A chapbook that demonstrates how a mind may wander time and space, all while playing with language and the way words can become an artistic creation. This brief collection of poetry is a moment to re ect on just a few of the ways in which we live and breathe our connections to the universe, and how we come to terms with both how small we are in this cycle we know something and nothing about, as well as how impactful we can be in the spaces we exist in, and even the worlds we may never know of. Tyme and Playce in the Cosmos ___ 39 ___ The Natural, Cultural, Mundane, and Macabre
