we are all dangerous until our fears grow thoughtful

I.

Around phenomena a glow
surfaces humanity
is politically
predefined, all space is personal
and every clock emphasizes wartime
“Going dark” on cell phones
a way to generate data
(absence as a form of data)
during demonstrations
while the stars reboot against
a moon, adamically formatted
and while we’re at it
and while i am with you
and while i am you
being with as being like
being with as being like
–the beige crocheted
into an isotope of murmuration
a flock that keeps, sticks, and holds
using money as a form of poetic control
using poetry as a form of monetary control
These are our burial goods, our radiocarbon
dating for the primary motor cortex;
an entropy which abrogates the use
of knowing;  inverted-totemic odes to a future always arriving.

 

II.

even while worlding, i die
i i i i i /                conoclasm
restyled.
your decoupling // your one hand
clap
agentified
caught in the pharyngeal snare
of attempted subcultural exit

 

artist bio: error prone
artist bio: “A NEWFOUND SENSE OF CONTROL FROM MY EGG FREEZING JOURNEY”
artist bio: writing with a necropastoral attitude, envisioning a world already decomposing from hard+soft wares that “once” constituted selfhood, identity’s spectral girlfight pulling its own hair on a geologic time scale, where labor congeals in traumatized earth, libidinal squibs getting lost or transformed in the corporate merger, where language operates as patina for each minute’s yawn, history’s mumbled shards. synergism of numerary artifact, the lock-and-key mechanism of which manufactures Real feeling. ‘cut and paste’ technique without scissors or glue/skipping the middle-person. advertisements for artificially intelligent life, selling a humanizing product.

 

III.

       …otherwise,
all’s well in duplex manor
running radially across drought-tolerant cement
into iris’ rented gradient
another agonic procedural
while shadows recant and sun is forced
into cataract.
feature towns on the uptake, a focus on specific industry
“lingerie, pets, chocolate, drone aircraft, traditional Chinese opera, glassware, fund management and poetry.”
need picks up where desire left off
see also: transcendence
achieved at the end of your Gruen transfer
–like reversible birth or applause,
or any least stochastic process–
ejects you safely
dehisced into more
arpeggiated hue and cry bloodsport, more
value-added surrealism.
a signal theft clicks; gasps for more calendar, grafts
tangent of silence across estrus’s ear
my pulse
forms a littoral zone throughout negativity’s rings.
inchoate slack-verbal baby Id’s word-dumpstering
a copyleft mood board
18 by 24 inches, gouache on background
of infinite scroll, bare-handed troping
the jailbreak gesture
in your three-room window
device’s gamut delimits:
citizen, or, bacteria on statecraft’s burner phone?
research has abandoned that animal.
non-gerundial driving STOP
non-gerundial fukushima STOP
non-gerundial shot spotting forgives you at dawn
a note is just one measure of the night.

 

IV.

always half-dressed
for war in retrograde
you backchannel, the polyhedral
spleen of language torquing chapters of tongue
the future’s DNA mutating with sexual frequency
in our thick now, spatial tumescence sits
at the bottom of a denatured graph
all pots for pissing
in speculative opulence–i remember
seeing someone on public
transport lick their cell phone screen, a picture
of food
there is never justice
in the simulation, in the
not-having.
we continue to envision making
the revolution with the materials
we have but what new materials
might inherit us // experimental compounds for
a different world a remixed last words of the emperor marcus aurelius
that depicts the decaying of american empire at last.

 
 
 
*the lines “being with as being like” come from Sara Ahmed’s lecture “Queer Use.” UC Berkeley. 16 Feb 2018.

alex cruse

alex cruse is a writer and interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California. She is the author of Contraverse (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017).