a rewiring

audio version

The privilege of contemplating privilege

The privilege of education

The oppression of education

The privilege of oppression

The privilege to never need to question our backgrounds

to make friends based on who knows who knows who

of knowing how to get ahead in the world

of thinking we know what it means to get ahead in the world

The privilege of not knowing

The privilege of a 32-year old friendship

hot showers and dinners

picking her bones from the ashes

The privilege to attend famous institutions, banquets, receptions

The privilege to live in a house that is a palace with no rooms where we cannot hear one another scream in the night in our nightmares collapsing with loneliness

The privilege of being your friend

The privilege of listening to your heart beat as the sun rises over the quiet city cacophony of souls dying to be loved and I tell them

they are Loved

Magnified 700,000 times under the eclipse

They hear in the recesses of their entrails abducted by Ahriman electricity pounding in blocked arteries clogged behind their eyes pulsating uncomfortable residue of the Past they prefer to save for a rainy day

And the rain falls as the sun rises

Washing our cauldron of phlegm from the pavements

Re-in-car-nation

Through snails and rats and sewers and pipes to the ocean to seaweed to plastic

Our plastic experience, elastic, ecstatic

Our cycle of unconscious alchemy, the unending cycle of phlegm

This collective disjointed malfunctioning

of nightly psychedelic reckoning

The privilege to question

The privilege of paralysis

Paralysis by joy. Paralysis by grief.

Hair matted to flesh

Mine or beast's

edges of flesh

Mine and beast's

Not knowing, but Knowing, you know.

Edges of light

Edges of air

You need me more than I need you until

You don't and then I need you most

I need you

Knead you

I didn't need you to complete me

But I needed you to remind me

The privilege of languagelessness

The privilege of dislocation

The oppression of connection

The demolition of disconnection

Grappling with language for the void beyond

Language

Grappling to stillness

Mind grappling with mind

Mind grappling with entrails

Entrails grappling with beliefs

Body grappling with the trueness of the beliefs

Grappling for release

It's curious how far this cave can travel

Through time and land and ocean into this room

In a different darkness

Showing us pain as pain

the endless stream running in our veins

through umbilical cords knotted with strings

threading us back to the original womb

breathing with lichen and wings

You are too grotesque for this world

You are too beautiful here

Under this tree crouched with a stick

You are too beautiful to be walking with all this grief

In side like stars

Like we all do

You deserve it

As much as we all don't

We threw tables out of windows

We started a new story

The dawn the birds the rain

Each moment, dying.