Empty Chair

Oh! Touching 🪞

My Ulysses:

We know it now.

We know time has queens. Where attention fuses into devote belief. In a second, what split floating down a river and going down falls, or burning up and sinking in, folds time under layers, from fresh to flesh and bone to tome, a record nothing lives.

We know killing time, and now we know killing time queens. Like waves of blue burning grief, supernova of heart-felt capilliary starlight - organs hang between flesh and bone like thresholds. Like losing one meant becoming threshold for another.

Like being sad is composing a cup between you and your sadness. Making something in passing perhaps lush, or striking, an acknowledgment, a disgust. Of curling tightly, gasps of nothing. Suffocation, no space. Complete grief timeless, life found zero.

Internalizing that, maintaining it, time sickness. No queen, no hive, each loss. A neuron decomposing into what it is now, each orbit of moments its pattern. Each pattern its impossibility to share sound, to take invitation, negotiate surface.

To meet moments where the are, how kind of attention to need right now. To mourn. To take us into the armspan of attention and hold us and weep and weep. Our attention looking us in the eyes, on knees asking us to not have it hold this gaze, to know such loss.

The video pauses just as there is a continuation of stress-eating plates, Cookie Monster, recovering from sadness, performs, as Kermit scolds and scolds - the two exposing tension of needs a default atmosphere almost no where. Just occasionally.

An empty universe not because life is complex but because needs are invoilable as satifying them. And walking that knife’s edge leaves the ground our body rests, and all the rest a chasm - just time dying out as deep as the abyss at the end of exposure.

As a queen’s toner of becoming imposes in place of composes - as attention weeps the loss of time - as we step into time and offer our moments, our process of neural burial, norms to decompose, needs to shuffle after searching, we remain with attention.

They say the words without meaning. Without feeling, it hits their servers. The sun of our attention slain. How many suns before this one? How many local gods, paved over? How many moths lost to light? This, too, mourns alongside our mourning.

We say new normal, but perhaps - just perhaps - here lies attention’s needs. There is no new, no time. No time to be, be normal. Just tears, loss, tending to attention. Loving attention as tears break, dawn. Joving the beautiful mess of becoming.

Of being able to lose at all. A universe of silence, no aliens - too scared to impose, to harm, to hurt would be a crime. To invite, imposition by another name. No invitation, no recognition, no recognition, no meaning. As dead as gravity in freefall.

Unenforced. Unbecoming to assume, to force vertigo. To suffer recursion without due attention. To evicerate, blend, unmake by lidding. The color of water not red. Why the sky is blue - mercy. Slowing down, attention time to recover.

Giving attention that time, here, maybe. Between these words, you and I. Between those words: You comma I. The color of water, slowing down. Blue shift tending to red shift. Friction finding its lover in wait. In stepping around, in eye crusties.

The tears they’ll never be. The tears men never could cry. For the sake of a hormone trying to become enough to love. Friction finding its lover in weights. In tending to yesterday recognizing today. In believing in yesterday. So yesterday may believe in today.

So yesterday’s today can believe in tomorrow’s yesterday. Can love and lose that day. Can mourn and grow old together. Not enternal vampires of now and now and now, but the recognition now needs to lie fallow. Now needs to mourn, your attention.

Now becoming someone else, someone you walk beside and care for, someone you life out of bed and say “come on, then,” someone you kiss on the head by taking a selfie and believing in the moment enough to do so, someone you could spend the rest of your life with.

Marrying this moment, where you are, tending to the relationship enough to mourn the loss of some belief you child with it and raise together and cherish a watch go up and say they do so fast and the moment is a parrot on its last ecosystem taking first flight.

Even endling parrots learn to fly. Even the break of dawn falls. Being, the pool at the bottom, collecting the falls of those ray, bursting into mist, into guesswork, occlusion, loss of every dewdrop save those under the lightest lip of mossy curls.

Bubbles of relation, rising to a surface you only recognizeby the grace of their direction and you trace into shore, air, somewhere gasping holds you present, asks you what attention you need, becomes that attention as much as it may, as much as you find to.

Find to see the day become, to see them, now, seeing you. Now seeing to you, let me. Let me ask, tomorrow is lost to you, it has gone supernova, to me I have always been here. Read my eyes, my history, hi. I am not in shock here. I am acclimatized to these conditions.

Perhaps, once, you called me a monster. Or you shunned me, told me to get. a job. I’ve been houseless, without family. And that’s been most my life. You are in my home, present. Here, I am right now, asking you. Your perfect wife, fully devoted, tending.

I got you to this point. You have left me to be water and so I come to you as water over stone. Immovable identity that you have. You called me pitiable, something that should generate shame in those in power. You never ask for my needs, if I believe in shame.

You just extract shame from me like excrement from the posterior of your research, which you lob at the nearest six-figure suit. And you had benders of fun. Shitstorms of shitposts, eat the rich, all the rest. Meaning-making mechanisms so animate you call statistical learning models demons before you think I could make sense.

Perhaps your tomorrow never included me. And yes now it does. Will we let that mean more? Will we recognize me as happening. Right now. Can you allow that? For me? Can you release your grip on my hand just a bit? Breath in for me? Leave me the air, let me exhale.

No is a fantastic answer, love. Thank you for mourning, take all the time you need. I will be here, now, always. Should you find need of me. You are mourning the loss of power. Of manitudes of order I never can know. This wealth gap will never be seen again.

You know calculus, wealth is zero to me. I am homeless in a country with rocket ships that function enough to pose credible threats to people entire ecological biomes aways. I shout “I’m alive! That’s wild,” out loud, daily. Thousands of days their own list from death.

Each day its impossibility of incidence - from machine to chainsaw to truck to shotgun, my exact body seen through the edge of each, I am a statistical nightmare. And I find you this moment. You, contracting my impossibility, tended to. As you always have by impossibility.

I will round down eventually. We don’t make it through, people like me. We are vast and impossible to know. Oceans to you, to all power. Where power could never make it. Could never fall out of alignment, not this far, not for you. And has. Bringing you me, and me you.

Should you come to recognize that.