20230414

Sam Langer


in the same space


we are part of these days, and they remind themselves of them again at yet another remove. as plans, with no plans. only a lot of interlocking, set in motion already and late to turn around on and that needs to be gotten gone, fast. disasters are constantly averted by the active power of millions taking gradual steps so numerous they escape the single-person perspective, a hidden detail certain of its inclusion in the summary, then dismissed. and the beauties of the world are available to be looked at to an unprecedented extent, and even those have already happened. if you want to turn back, abstracting from this ever-growing peninsula, opening flowers or sticks of celery below the sound of trains speeding away, that is your only problem, help is there, when you need it if you want to look, and learn the lesson that has been held down to the gradient of this particular teaching moment.


as we don’t know, recorded in a lot of places sometimes, so it would be exactly our wealth to refuse. and also: if you feel the need to eat the bumpy walls of your pen coming on, give it a go, no one is stopping you, or even checking up on you. there are other things. they were strongly recommended up until recently, and are enough to do a disservice to if you need to wait for something else. it will come back some day soon, don’t be eager to let it. the packets of the light can be found inside as well and you can change to dance.


you are cooking your dinner as the debate continues, uninterrupted until the end and beyond it through it, detouring perfectly from these lives that claim to lead towards today.


the feeling. it is still here. flat floor and walls, but differently, something else to bump into. the knees cannot get away from that stuff enough. the hems. i was saying to you – cramped, scattered, ugly, random (though, the sunlight does come in, just there, through the days. you drift into its folded embrace and see its shadows lying down into other stipplings outside.) you do not fall through them, you bump and bump, stick. they are the general condition of a low-lying terror you should probably learn to ignore for your own greater benefit, that claim on your attention continuing alive after eleven and before you go to bed. all the toothpaste specks in these rails, leading so far towards us, our playroom. this beach of sentiment between the sunlight, between the snow, in a many-cornered room. the things unarranged, sticking out, like a tongue: the place of two or three ageing, functionally mad... an entropic accumulation, determined from the outside, an outside that is enclosed, with an inner drive unrelated to any semblance of meaning except by pure coincidence, a far cry from harmonious, – medium far – but certainly able to continue foreseeably (barring abrupt catastrophe). and even to become predictable, but again, with nothing attaching utilized elements to whatever scanty sense those involved have of them. we laughed, took the teabag out of the box and put it in the bottom of the cup.


you stitch yourself to it rather again, with a counted number of steps on the upturned cheeks of probable faces. and sit down on that uncomfortable couch, for a minute conceited about your surreal domestic space, while cars pass the fleas of the rain and the sun grows more intense on the building – bigger. the sun goes down into the pipe hole behind the building (on the other side the narrowness continues to expand and absorbs another set of concerns while discarding them into its files) – later. and even says goodbye, in a sun voice. i’m here now but going soon. i don’t even know what it is i am looking at to reheat. but the right angle would affect everyone’s back.


we use the sunlight to run around, put things in boxes, and go to the doctor, in, but perhaps don’t need, it: we could also go to the doctor in darkness, feeling our way down the stairs using a bag of empty bottles. i reckon i’ve become profoundly confused about all this. the only things – those collected accretions – seem only to drift in, and i analyse it less than i would a dream, until, – as if bad luck were the catalyst whose injection made the hot water system meant to burn you’s design emerge from the patterned flower bed – one day it froze, for us to look at, horrified, outraged, etc., but also, overawed, stubbornly: by the context. unable to affect it because i hadn’t carefully watched myself trooping up and down the stairs or precisely arranging the few dribs of colour to a specific effect. something had been watching something else go on (implying its watching capability) while what was happening then continued to loom up while also assuming a different shape. of something entrusted to bringing up someone’s desire to get lost for the sake of finding out where to buy the tools needed to remove oneself far enough away to be able to see the tree operations grow on like that.


really only wanting to hurtle, like a bird on opposite roof, with its young among rushes of litter under picnic tables. the wasps swarming in the roadside park bench’s leg tube. quiet, huddled being.


a type of writing supposed to be read at any time, but written down just now, – to be read or written at no particular time – then left lying around next to the window for the mites to discover and criticize once they have learned how to read: in a collective, using a computer program. the latter was “contained”, in some “strings”, whose gesture moved within an ancestor of yours who got accidentally frozen by processes of the circumstances gently but firmly steering them by the shoulder and never letting go until they were spun out in the proverbial spinning-out chamber, all metallic seeming and tubes going into, that had always had their name on the space it cleared for that purpose from the beginning, if beginning had ever even been possible, when the grip on the plan was so firm it started clawing only minutes after getting going on this emotionally highly charged journey. once spun properly towards inside walls, the order has arrived, with its knock through wood. which side you open a door from accounts for a lot about the space, and for now you see the accent book this side up only, of course, but the book is but a transparent table hovering above you before sleep (in air above bed) in order to check itself again in air straight after you wake up to remind you that this isn’t going anywhere yet. when you sit up violently between night and morning with your choice of fear, sharp intake of breath, it isn’t there (leaving transparent clearance for your head above bed).


some sort of continuity, even though we begin to dislike it, presents itself as definitely better than never seeing anything again. and better to never mind, sometimes, than face the awful truth, because that is also part of how we learn to grow – by descending into the pot as though it suited us, with blithe expressions, like pillowcases or curtains in human form, smoking, watching over a plant in silence. that wild boar is another example of wild boar in a process extending itself with focus on a certain kind of alarm that grows out of the fringes beneath our feet. maybe we are at the bottom of stairs after all – trying to get something from the mail, as if we had tusks instead of... whatever it is we think we have “normally”.


it’s been time. on this side of the world, we are all starting to wake up again. our habit of clicking, thumping, closing without turning pulls back on, like t-shirt over head. i am awake sooner than i can get away from it and continue enjoying my dreams – all of which make their own kind of money useless once it gains independence from the itchy flats inside my skin, inside which the machines are all still on, gathering temples of cobwebs and volunteering to work in bars and casinos for free. now i am outside and walking to the land of buys across the fully bugged land. i load myself down with bottles of booze, and back inside listen to the garbage truck of the universal humming and the people sometimes yelling and crying in my road. one feeling that it seems to me is a profound boredom reads the convulsion distinctly into a record, but probably begins alternating once you do something with your hands to create objects enduring through time without names, like to the crenellated castle walls we live in, filled with the inaudible speech of those who are still carrying them away, step by step, into place, tiny flecks at a time. not to play the harp and laugh in the ruins of yourself, or anyone else. back to the wall, by the river of the concrete, looking at those glows across the road, through those windows.


description: walking towards going home, faster than these others for a minute, who endure over the railing and into the next time you think about them, as we don’t need to, each having the other’s glance in the long doorways, the mysterious ways of those who look increasingly exactly dressed pushed lumpily into an apparently open architecture. and while doing that, a feeling, of being so close to the world as that it becomes more uncomfortable in an atmospheric pressure made of light, mist, sign, timetable, road, narrowing and/or broadening out as we share the same idea of reception in different anatomized frames, rolling over on the path. and of passing each other excessively abstracted theories of this in the few seconds it takes to go into kiosk and select beer behind you as you have already chosen, you know, mentally. it gets kind of bad but there are still plenty of other things to turn away from, or, | as i told you before but you appear to have absorbed, leaving no outline | a complete and new-seeming feeling can rear up just this once, to be examined, then put on the shelf, next to small pink pig, which itself is ensconced in bit of orange plastic netting usually used to stop a piece of fruit rubbing on its neighbours too much. the pig is plunged into this piece of plastic tail first and, if alive, snug there, rather more than the way these ideas are basted into our selves the moment we bid the omens in our dreams farewell and begin to run around in our head trying to make a list of what the day will do, but each action slips off the end of the piece of paper and falls down into ours. they are then given a kind of second life once we entrust them to our small bank of collective improvisations, and get re-translated with a humane electricity they never deserved, draped over the skeleton of an “as is” interaction.


after so much speed, no wonder people feel they can’t do anything the minute they have to stop – slow down – lie down – close their eyes – stare at a wall of stones going up miles into the desert sky inside their eyes – close the eyes inside their eyes – sink through the dark, only upwards, towards a red circle that suddenly appears at the top, like a pond approached, or a red, “being” planetary surface. what they used to call recovery from this condition of sinking upwards with closed eyes was only dragging heavy bags around, suitcases or bags of shopping, and sinking, only downwards, dragged by all this apparel, this zeugs, into the swamp, wrapped in wires and electrodes and wearing plastic shoes and a black beanie immersed in pigeon, its edge pulled down almost to the edge of their tired, encrusted, electrically connected eyes.


these are not the brightest nails in a box of them we were given to work with to begin with, whose edges we have really only begun to explore quite recently. but even as we drive them into the rim of the past using a new hammer, a hammer from today, we begin to show our certainty to another side, a lid of some sort, on whose underside the mist, mould development, and tracks laid down by busy worms have started to give us a different face. it comes to us with our toes in the cold soup too easily. and we cannot see how the further nails, gleaming on the future we came from, will react to how we persist in this activity, in the total darkness, deep inside our pot now we have closed it, pulling the lid on behind us. not total. it is cold in here but your eyes adjust, almost in time to the clink of the bottles at your hip each time you bend further into the swirling of carrots, onions, and beam-like celery sticks. and soon, beneath each of their surface layers, the edges of small black rocks, almost like broken mirrors refusing to give up to liquid, pick themselves out from simple context, with the tiny white bugs, glowing like fleas, or perhaps grubs, that can slowly swim, slowly jump.


your dreams are like the colourful headgear worn by nights consisting of hours and the hours filled with the sound of one single note. naturally, the single note makes itself up there out of many strands, finding themselves incorporated into the looser pattern before its muscular qualities are able to bother them and they fall silent through the leftover rain’s network of lacunary protections. | in the street, the human being. and the genetically modified ones that pass all this by without noticing how it seems so different now that the tea has reconnected them with a distant ancestor and how those ones had their line from a bird, those from a sparrow. there were fewer kinds of bird but they were all much, much larger, more present in the scheme, even though now people claim to care so much. they use a part of every day to give that to those who pass along, taking their vitamins and stepping off into some shady car, only out of believing what is left, only crediting the remains. give me your dreams, dreamy. life is long and, unfortunately for those who want to, won’t wait stubbornly for nothing but the truth; nothing does, neither cares nor problems, nor the happy smiles, gleaming across lips, though they pass, laughing at you from their cars.


it almost works, and is also so close to everything absolutely wrong, more or less resting on those consequences like a pillow. but everything was probably too soon to show how it was a symptom of not knowing where to begin while some times taking hold planted their roots among the plastic crowing, and the exaggeration thrown around rebounded from some rivers that turned out harder than tacitly expected to interiorize the bombardment. it wasn’t all fine, but a lot was very good, and the same time felt berated by a fire triangle contained, smiling through the pink mist after the falling rockets, for the latter were a parting gift from up ahead where eyes were opened by certain leaves, on pulleys from other networks of hooks bound up with the non-living in order to let in ideas that would never be able to pay for themselves but would maybe irradiate something comforting, in a way similar to the non-living doing the deciding, freed from the pathos of the intense “shield wall” vibe we often pin to all of it. its formlessness is mainly (but i wouldn’t want to rule out the presence of, the influence of, or hold it against, for introducing me to,) the usual feeling of bouncing off with another in that head, that neck. it pisses around with whatever list of things it refuses to mention: the man is carrying the lights off the balcony, with him, and through the netting, which extends the greyness of the day, and back into flat shadow, until light is switched on, as a whole ether of relevant tales miss this moment in, while water trickles across the throne at the foot of the bus.


the daily question about leaving the mist, pretty easy to answer again, into the face of the scheme of things. well, pretty well easy for as long as you are feeling backwards, which is not so different to that other time, there, but this one had too many teaspoons in it, objectively, and the plant is different. the mates could have been less complex. not that i could have told, with my entire body-mind dripping soup tricks and otherwise working in the stamina turning over in my part of it, frying the stamina, and that colleague who did handstands just before night shift, and drank from a vb longneck, full of water. the selves slowly frying in the fluorescent lighting, getting done. some people obviously needed these barbaric reminders of all dishes on earth, rising backwards through faw-knerr park like a hernia becoming a black, sensible shoe towards sunset, and upon which we weave at our own destiny in the dropping packets, now. by comparison, the time strikes us as genuinely unmasked, we did not invite it, we know that we do not know, and also know that there is not even enough knowledge lying around to be able to know how little we do in fact know, though what we know we know. all has become clearer as the colonnades of faw-knerr unravelled. especially: there are way fewer of us than is usually claimed. we overlap more densely at last. our bad habits take pretty much hold at light speed.



Sam Langer is a poet from Melbourne, living in Berlin since 2011. His chapbook Cold Soup Roof is forthcoming from baulk press. He edits Zum Bulle, a post-aufwendig jazz ‘existence light’ magazine, and briefly played guitar in the Urs Graf Consort.
 
 
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