The sickle moon, with ice chip tips
clears away the day
In amber tunes of the low sun
retiring to its unseen bed;
The knowledge that it never sleeps
unnecessary for dreams
as we rest soundly in dependable return
The sickle moon rests in waxed shade
partly phased inpathic privacy
We too allow the mind its mysteries;
That lunary healer of all things sensory
works in wordless timeless sympathy,
within sleep’s reactive silence,
its filtry ministry
~ LAFogle
first posted on Twitter September 2021
for Nikola
Shh, don’t say a word
on the harvest of the Great Confirmation Bias
All moves, construed, take cover
Links to the center of a silver chain frame
Dark brocade hair lays layered and wound
The Sister Knots fit pretty
at the temple, wrist, or throat
Their mother wore it first
A hand-me-down; heirloom
in dignified terms
The girls learned to fight
over it: tears, fists, appearances
Its victimized cut-off
reenacted on damaged friends
Midsummer
I’ll guide you through the gloom
of the lowermost fathom
where the golden flower gathers light
the moment it is seen;
sparks the charge of a lumined heart
from its dormant reality
Loses the rhyme to court opinion
that resists the loop of a beat.
I should make this a garden song
Nature may not know her future hybrids
what signs await
in the warning hues of bright berries:
the conspicuous guides
the subtle guides
pick their sides
August 30, 2021 to September 5, 2021
shocks
His words and deeded shocks, the paradox,
send reckless current rippling through my brain;
firing patterns change to shield-like shapes
sealing intel from his mission of pain.
He’ll write of your imagined devastation
anyway
dock
On the dock of Bear Lake, Michigan, my weightless stick legs bobbing in the teal opaque water; I sat watching my father, almost young again, fish from a pontoon with his best remaining friend.
remant
Ursula’s kingdom was a glittery tree,
a remnant of the Aracariaeae
Too prickly to climb but lovely to see
it’s refusal to be extinct.
rock
The bones stood tall but water is water to rock
Cracks where stacks of slab lay with land
One cosmic shift in the whole honorarium,
the very idea, could buckle and fall. A lean-to
Devotees return to the land
The serotonin from this soil
the very reason to build here
Jock
Jock Camon grew from the bloody fists of Vales in its dirt sun-burned streets where trees once wailed under the axes of men with immediate need for wood. A doorway, stiles and rails of pink chipped paint unfitted in the frame; a plywood panel where a window had been.
excerpt from the book FutureYou by LAFogle
I get that half the esoteric groupies are D&D flunkies but this is a whole new level of bullshit.
“You sound like a conspiracy theorist. All that knowledge too much for you, Mr Crowley? You losing your shit?” I reached down and patted the chair. “Have a seat. Maybe lay down flat like the earth you live on.”
It’s too bad Greg didn’t do social media because he’d really enjoy some of the fringe theory groups. But he didn’t do social media. He’d get too upset. It’s wild to think about what Facebook would do to him with its groups and gangs of people engaging in relational aggression. Maybe they don’t think people can sense a bully/mean girl/gossip routine but sensitive people might. And sensitive people can be broken. Have you ever seen an isolated person experience paranoid psychosis? I have and it is awful. I like making Greg feel okay. He might have quirks but I can handle it because we clearly agreed to be friends. We’d determined a while ago that being annoyed with each other was okay and temporary. At least I think. Right now he was staring at the ice cream on his spoon as if he wanted to fling it at me. Or maybe that look was more about hunger.
He tossed the words at me real quick before taking the bite. “Um, duh, if the earth were flat then what about Atvatabar?”
“Atvabar?” Damn. I was the one who bit. Asking him a question could delay me by several days.
“At-va-TA-bar.” He pretended to choke on his soft serve. “You’ve never heard of AtvaTAbar? Are you kidding me?”
I sighed and took a seat. The “Are You Kidding Me” game always took awhile. It was a scolding really. Emphatic face gestures, eye popping, deep distant hilarity—a dawning of hilarity at the idiocy of the ape in front of him—some chicken neck stretches, hands at the waist, elbows out with a couple of stick legs strutting forward and back. Because of his emphatic preening, it took forever to get to the point. He beat around the bush like a prizefighter jabbing the shrubbery in the kidneys, remarkably light on his feet.
“I get it, I’m an idiot. You know all. What is AtvaTAbar?”
published August 27, 2021
Horrors of everyday reality face collective indifference/ routines and ambition/ dollars against indifference/ state of the country/ the persona mask/ guns allow kids to be shot; anyone they’re mad at, shot/ defenseless people identified but not sheltered or soothed/ confrontational device implicates reader/ army of invisible sufferers/ male authority: father. profiteering boss. turncoat angel. god/ inferno: suffering, dislocation, hidden spiritual costs, rapid social transformation/ industrial evolution: altered community, personal identity, social values/ city as darkly paranoid as the remote/ chartered: mapped, liscensed, controlled; choked with commerce/ reserved and rented as buses, boats, planes/ rent your mind/ intellectual property with a rental fee, subscription-based agreement/ own a physical chunk of brain with each purchase/ else streamed for 20% or 15 for complaining; 13 to automate a response/ signs of illness, exhaustion, anxiety, despair; healthcare/ eat what’s bad for you; watch, cry, die what’s bad for you/ rush to the gloried doom/ hereditary authority from the palace to the board room/ proletarian pawn of selfish higher powers/ authentic intelligence/ consumer, consumned, sadly died of consumption
It’s death, it’s always been death; except for when you’re realizing life. From there it’s realizing death, fear of death, avoiding death, and—if we’re lucky—solving death.
~ Maena, from FutureYou
Aspiring angel, tell me enlightenment solves suffering
tell me detachment is true compassion
tell me you know about righteousness
He smells like musk but sucks the freedom from the room with those moods, as if his is the only true anger. He writes of how I wouldn’t understand human’s search for meaning. Pats my head like a good little vessel carrying man’s miracle. It’s 2021, are we still on about breeding machines and sex machines and body parts?
(haiku)
mend the globe, poet
repair our relationships
cure humanity
I put laughter in a time capsule/
you thought the box was empty/ and so it was Everyday I become longer details/
a barricade of What and Where/
the Who more undefined/ still there A road uncircumstantial till it’s gone/ I walk on/ pause to chomp on elder loss and sibling witness/ love & awe, the next meal Time can flick the value of a lesson to come back overgrown in the lusty spring you’ll “take care of it some sunny day,” said the epiphany worth repeating
excerpt from the book FutureYou
I wanted to impress Maena because she impresses me. And I thought no one could hear me. The shame that I’m doing it wrong squeezes my rib cage where the joints move to allow the lungs to expand, a parasitic backpack I carry like an infant nursing as though a separate helplessness. Not wanting to put it down where I can constantly see it—and when it feels gone, I know it can sneak up on me. What does it want? Blood, proteins?
Don’t say resurrection and peace because I’ve tried that so many times. I could make Halloween a day of the week. These are not demons and they are not saints; they are like emotive entities tied into me, living in my nerve endings. First thing in the morning and late at night they speak—not in words but in the feel of words and sometimes a symbol breaks through. Longfellow called the human voice the organ of the soul; these voices might be several organs come together, the beginning of tissues, a petri dish of consciousness that agreed to manifest. Agreed in pattern, agreed in likeness, agreed in tension, agreed in fear and solace. Agreed to try again and be our own children. I’d carry the obedient and the willful, the lost and the weary, the brave, the angry, the fools and the wise; carry them with me as family. Family tired of fighting and reconciled. You would not tell your lungs they are bad. You would not curse your eyes for all they’ve seen—no matter how much society says conflict is motivation.
We passionate automatons, clinging to story, clinging to a cast that exists outside of ourselves that we can relate to through a tight character we believe we should be. I ride the winged ram to the heavens so we can name the stars in the next galaxy, perhaps stand on the next new earth unfolding new myth under a new sun. And conjure the beasts who will take us there on their own form of oxygen. Star creatures.
Where else to go but middle earth, where else but cracking time, where else but the reaches of the ocean and the limits of our knowledge in the limits of our senses in the limits of our minds in the limits of our fables. Stuck on those first stories and the gender of holy trinities. Stuck, just separated from nature and caught up in tribal warfare and witchhunts and drama, lazily redeemed with religion and not internal peace. I welcome you, Maena. Come to me. Speak.
It took the story of the twin to explore another explanation for Maena’s presence without worry of madness. This was my gene, divided; my split sister who I took into me. Our brain, our voice, our heart, her soul. After I knew for sure, or rather wanted to know for sure, I started courting, summoning, and pleading with her.I could feel the way the others took over in the moonlight, in the filtered reflection of the unseen sun casting safe hiding spaces for shadows. They can grow desperate there but it’s more like feral and afraid. So many dullards will tell you that welcoming parts of yourself makes you insane; theirs are lives only realized by the measured light of day, while the natural world has use for all variety; its imagination conjures everything and tries to keep what functions. Expressiveness is key.
