A message from the world where everything has already happened (Patreon)

audio for this post is available here.[last week I performed for the first time in a year! I'm relearning how to perform...like how I'm relearning how to do everything...I certainly felt this reading had a different flavor to it than readings of past...I was trying new things in my mind while I read. to the fifty people gathered there I talked about:

how our being there wasn't random,

how it was very special we'd all found ourselves there, in that room, at that time,

focus, how you can move it around your body, and around the room, so, through space, but also through time...to the past, or the future, which are not real places...or you can hold it in the real time place, which is now,

how, when I performed in the past, my focus had been completely on the audience, which I'd convinced myself was a great act of service to the audience, being so focused on their experience and what I could get them to notice or think about me (like, wow, she's so clever, or, wow, she's so hot). this was not actually a kindness. I know now that the kindest thing you can do for others is be exactly yourself by referencing only yourself as the authoritative source of quality or being-ness, the thing you know you are, and amplifying that yourselfness to the greatest degree you can with the time you have. I tried to think about that while I read, rather than anything else, and,

how the way I used to listen to poetry was so 'brainy'...very in the head...moving lines around..connecting thoughts to other thoughts. there's time for this. but I told the audience, if that's normally the place they occupy when listening, to try, this time, to notice what their body is doing in response to the things I say, to, if they can, as they listen, to focus only on their body, and the sound of my voice.]1. (SPACE)

This is the end of the poem. The world, too, is what we decide it to be: robin eggs, blushing days, creatures made of light, its wizards, its physics, its right and wrong angles. What are atoms made of? Mainly space.And what is that space? I went into the dream and discovered there the smallest unit, which is a love that exists beyond desire. You can take this love places, like the post office counter, the internet, the mirrored surface of the water.You can move the love through time, to that girl with your namewho trembles with rage.You can, in moments of recognition, become the love you’re made of, and use it to ask good questions, like, What parts of this are real? and,Which thoughts are mine alone? Some. None. February snows onto the cherry tree, just opening its eyes. Everything and its place. Everything to its time.

2. (KNOWING)

You were born with all your knowing. The adult teeth are lodged in the head.Knowing is a natural law, like magnetism, a force outside of time. A spray of orange monarchs lead their friends to whatthey’ve only seen in dreams. The bed is a temple. My eyes are brown.He is already on his way back to me. Two things: one, the tides go in and out. Two, the tides don’t go in or out; the big rock spins around the water; the water never moves.True, true. The tides go in and out. The water never moves.

3. (IDEAS ARE REAL)

The pixelated sunrise filters throughthe portalled windows. There is a remembering of something forgotten. A symbol of remembering perches in the courtyard and undoes an old fear, some splinterrelated to your shame. Revelation isn’t the discovery of something new but the dispelling of an illusion. We are perpetually trying to return to the first place.I’m thinking of truth,truth, which requires only the absence of doubt in a soul emptied of fear and has no other condition. Your pixelated sunrise.The idea of breath is as real as your breath.The idea of breath is as real as your breath. The idea of his hands lights up the final synapse we can’t see, its little voice saying hands, hands, hands.

4. (CONTROL)

Now, a field shivers with globes of white dandelion.Imagine if you’d like that you’re the wind, divine occurrence.Wind as a series of operations, a series of invisible lines. This is your life. Cicadas braying in the darkness; you know them, somehow. This life is not a tarp fluttering above a void. it’s a field like a sphere, horizon lined in mist, the droplets prisming every beautiful mood that came upon you while you were here.God is the space between atoms and it is the atoms.You are you and everything not you.The earth curves towards me when I want it to.I pin the ego to the floor and kiss it gone.

5. (DOUBT)Doubt springs from the ball of nervesin the chest. It’s never clever. You dissolve it, and the doubt precipitates over the moment,gives living things the gold they need to grow.You wake up and wash your face. There’s that strange delay in the mirror. You wave at yourself. Your eyes move on their own. A lightning bug blinks in and out of existence. A story is told for the last time. Then, a sharp intake of breath –

6. (SUPERKNOWING)A door. It’s locked in front of you.The key turns. The mechanism thunks,the sound of a consciousness returning to a body. The locker looks to you and says, this door is locked. Here is the insanity of what you must do.You must know – in that way outside the body, in that way of laws, in that way you know the sun rises – that the door is not locked. And this is what knowing can do: it can make it so when you put your hand to the knob the door falls open as easy as eyes.You’ve created a new inevitability. You move through to the other side, where the lover is, has always been, and then there was never a door at all. The moment with the door – it barrels into the past and the future, the semipast, the semifuture,a memory of some future of doors, flapping openlike mouths, tumbling into the spangled darkness, It won’t matter then. As if we can separate anything from anything.One room from another room. The sky lowers itself to you. You get blue dust on your fingers.

 7. (SURRENDER)

You surrender every night, to the urge to sleep. Inside your sleep you see a beautiful tree, a dandelion mouth, a universe of feeling. Breath, when it stops being held, becomes air. This is a secret, but in the night, you can lift yourself out of the body and become a blue ghost, goingplaces, learning things. A spiral gives over to itself.We collapse into the center, this oddnesswe can both hold and be, here, we’ve all gathered,with no conceivable delay,at the beginning of the poem.