Stephen Emmerson
The sun falls through the window in a sliver of light. It is trying to get inside me. That is what the sun does it tries to get inside me and if it does get inside me I will become a two dimensional shape in the clear sky of knowing and I do not want to become a two dimensional shape in the clear sky of knowing. The sun is ninety three million miles away from the earth and its light takes roughly eight minutes and twenty seconds to reach us so when we look at the sun we are always looking at the past. I try to write everyday but more often than not the sunlight hits the page and the words do not come or they come and then they disappear. The speed of light in a vacuum is a universal physical constant. It moves at approximately one hundred and eighty six thousand miles per second. The last time I saw you you asked me if I was going to talk to my friends about it and I told you that none of my friends gave a shit but the truth of the matter is that I do not want to talk to anyone about anything. We sat on the beach watching the reflection of light the refraction of light the diffraction of light the interference of light the polarization of light the dispersion of light the scattering of light. Talking about light is like trying to plot the coordinates of a dream when you are in the middle of a dream. Surely our sun from which no secretes are hidden should select a judge or should allow us to judge ourselves? A wave of light knocks me through the wall into a room that I never knew existed. A great terror in the weight of a hitherto unknown language. If this is reality it is also an oblivion of sorts. I guess what I am trying to say is that my heart hurts. I am a broken engine. These atoms fail me both inside and out. What an outpouring they will say. O dirt of my body.
O grinding of teeth.
I would like to collapse in the park but it is too dark and the clouds keep coming and the clouds keep coming it is deadpan normal it is same-feel with glass doors uneven spiders. Conversations with you never seem to begin exactly because you so often slip into a silent contemplation from which you cannot be roused. The thought of you pushing open the double doors into wet sunlight (nowhere but nowhere) I was a vapour trail of worry.
Lost in
the bright morning.
To continue our dialogue somehow in the room that I discovered we enter into a covenant though it is not officially recognised by a governing body. Moments like this are devoid of beauty and integrity. I stand outside of time - a flower in reverse. Beyond all atoms and molecules there are one dimensional strings that vibrate. These vibrations include the three dimensional space we live in plus time and language. Try opening the epiphany windows to see if that makes you feel any better. People come from miles around to open the windows and it often changes their lives. If you ever come to live in the clear sky of knowing I suggest you put a cloud in it and remember nothing. For this one I lay it bare because I have nothing left to hide and no reason to hide it. A beam of light falls through the curtains onto a stack of unread books passing over a couple of drawings as it does so. One of the drawings is in charcoal and consists of a single abstract shape that was created by writing the word sun over and over again and over and over itself one hundred times. The other drawing is in pencil and black chalk and graphite marker and is made up of a four columned grid that contains various examples of unreadable handwritten statements within and without. A while ago I moved into a caravan in a sheep field and I have become obsessed with the view over the valley through the small square window. I spend a lot of time watching the dusk approach and then turn into darkness and in the morning I watch the mist rise and the fog descend. One evening I used my phone to take a photograph of the view over the valley through the small square window and a few days later I had the photograph printed as an 8 x 8 image and I stuck it to the wall using Blu Tack next to the small square window and now when I look through the small square window over the valley I can also see the photograph of the view through the small square window over the valley. A few days later I took another photograph of the view over the valley through the small square window that included the photograph of the view over the valley through the small square window. I had the photograph printed as an 8 x 8 image which I stuck to the wall using Blu Tack next to the small square window and now when I look through the small square window over the valley I can also see the photograph of the view through the small square window over the valley and the photograph of the photograph of the view through the small square window over the valley. I continued to do this for several weeks until there were twenty four photographs of the view through the small square window over the valley which also contained within them the photographs and the photographs of the photographs of the view through the small square window over the valley. Two figures swap places with the rain. As far as the eye cannot see it is a matter of finding our positions within a point of view. That we do not know and we do not know.
To take up speech
and let it go.
Without past present or future tense my pronouns stink of capitalism. Of an utter lack of articulation. As if the word itself was the dead of a thing. Anything. Anything at all. Any old iron thing that stalks the hallways of the worst that there is to remember. I am a died in the wall bloody goody two shoes and I predict that we will all corrode in real time. Since memory is an event train I need you to explain the granularity of the concept. We talk in the ante meridian whispering dark notifications to one another along the crackle of the line. Since memory. Since nothing. Since our exile and communion with landfill. Fuck knuckles lagging in the afterglow.
Then sunlight
& dust.
At work I pick up sections of rotten wood and old putty and oil paint that I have removed from the windows and I put it all into a bag and when I get home I empty the contents of the bag into a box frame and hang it on the wall and I stare at it for several hours. After a while I realise that I am looking into the thing that I used to look through and I am dumbfounded. Burning and burning and doubling and doubling.
I don't know where to start so I begin everywhere and then I realise that you are talking to me from the grave and my mouth is full of ash my own ash from the burning of my body. I think about all of the things that could happen but I do not want to think about anything any more even the things that happened in the past especially the things that happened in the past and then I catch myself in the glass a mad bastard in the last rays.
A few days ago you asked me what I wanted to do next and I said get a new body and you said when you get a new body you can lookout over the valley again. I do not want to look out over the valley again. I want something to mitigate it. Something systemic not topical. I draw spiral patterns with multiple pencils and then a ruled line and then one hundred non ruled lines. It makes no difference to anything at all. It is nothing. Distant this. Distant that. Even my dog-face between windows. When a lorry drives past it could suck you under if it is driving too fast and if you are walking too close to the edge of the road. It is full of light and water and glass. I am now going to show you how to tie a knot in a length of rope without letting go of either end. You have to fold your arms before you pick up the rope and the act of unfolding them will appear to produce a knot. But to accomplish this you have to let go of one end of the rope for the briefest of moments. As the hands are brought together to drop off the loops that encircle them one hand releases one end and regains it at the same point after it has passed through one of the loops. The releasing and regaining of the end blurs together in a continuous movement to give the impression that each end of the rope has been held throughout the process. It is full of light and water and plastic. Why not defend me in your mothers voice? Your mothers voice in a small room and your mothers voice in a big room. In a dream. In circular columns of darkness. Fields bordered by sunflowers. I do not like to talk about it. Through the camera zoom we can see tiny orbs being ejected from the main luminosity. Sky burns away. Metal in the early days. Not this language only the echoes of the changes in light. The river things / my bread and butter saint. Oh the fuckery of it all. A misery-chord in the chest. I am sleeping real good at night because I do not have any limitations. If you have limitations you will not sleep good at night. I map the light and the shadows but I do not know the ways in which the light and shadows act. It is nothing personal I just don't like the way the words feel in my mouth. A voice: Nothing being. Nothing done. On rocks on birds an ocean. I listen to the voice over and over sat in a cafe at a table with a crooked leg. Backwards and forwards the rocking back and forth. It was all an act. The back and forth. A constant to and fro. The source unknown. Random spots of colour. I am working on becoming a truly immoral being but to do this I must escape all human limits. Calm down. A piano a cello a violin. I catch tatterdemalion trees. In toil the lives spent might. The red sun breaks through in morning. We cannot move. The red sun breaks through in morning. Do not say anything. Do not say anything at all. If you do our lives will fall apart they will fall apart completely. Utterly and completely they will fall apart. The next thing I know I am saying the thing that I am not meant to say. I have made it at last. Beyond human limits. Your own impression would be quite different because even in three dimensions we automatically treat it as a two dimensional shape. I am sorry that I can only offer these little sketches at present. I know they do not look like much but they are in fact a direct route to the other side. Arbitrary figures under dissolved bridges. You must forget weakness / the strangle hold. Now we are downriver. A box of Temazepam palmed between us. A sideways glance. A touch of hand. When trees are dehydrated they sometimes make popping and cracking sounds as they attempt to draw water up through their roots. To a certain extent we are all victims of expectation. You once asked me to translate the sound of wind moving through trees which I did by recording the sound of wind moving through trees and digitally manipulating it until it sounded like the string section of an orchestra and you said that is not a translation you have destroyed the music of the trees and I replied that all translations are acts of destruction. At any moment anything can turnaround by chance. A bridge being closed or the words returning once again to glass. A poem is not a hymn. A poem is not magic. It is the most ordinary thing laid bare. Then an image of an industrial landscape placed over a completely sterile environment. Venom laws. A bridge being opened. I scrape off the old oil paint and the putty and dig out the rotten wood and then I fill the surface and sand it to make it flat. There is so much work to do. A crow with resting bitch face on the scaffold. Let's take the house down and use the bricks to build a wall. A wall around us a wall around us all. There is no community just a bunch of people who will like you if you are like them and hate you if you are not. It is the shadow work in the rust belt that will bring us together not the distant karaoke of dogs. We make up all this stuff about nature. Bedfellows in a world without rain. To be left outside a bird. In for. In forgetting. I forget. A name withheld. A letter withdrawn. An essay all but destroyed. The moving image is silent. A darkness seeping through. We stand still within the frames of a biological film. There are things that fundamentally elude us. Elide into one moment. Inside the world it feels different like how the house functions when you're no longer in it.
How are you feeling today?
All to hell. All to hell. There is something ridiculous about misery. Goodbye my loveds. 7 sparrows August 22nd 2005. A little twitch of willow. A fuck by the sea.
At the Little Museum of Purgatory in Rome there is a photocopy of a burn mark left by a Mrs Leleux on the sleeve of her son Joseph's shirt. According to the son he heard noises for eleven consecutive nights that terrified him so much that he vomited. On the twelfth night his mother appeared to him and laid her hand on his shirt leaving a visible print. How can we be sure if this story is true or not?
This is a colour field of language a blackout normal. Revolve around them in linguistic confusion forever turning Amen.
Why are you asking me these ridiculous questions?
Because I woke up in the nineteenth century and discovered that I had no voice and then I heard a chorus of children in the distance: We play hide and seek but nobody hides. We are all searching nothing to find. Win all the marbles / mist on water. To be left outside a bird. I take my life and lay it under an oak tree. Say quiet things aloud. Sing with me collapsing stars. Storm cells. Curses. Sunlight. When I look at a map I find it hard to tell which part is land and which part is sea just like I find it hard to tell the difference between my body and the sky. Glint of metal in the distance. Rooks pecking at fallen apples. Ghost hawthorn by the wire fence. It is a closed country for me though I am not yet seeking human language. In fact I am better at going backwards than going forwards because when I am going forwards I cannot see where I have been. Do you realise that many things will fall away unless we talk about films or mention all the books we've read? I'm sorry I did not hear you because the sun hit me and the light scabbed over but even if I did hear you I would probably have pretended that I did not hear you. It is OK just concentrate on the road. When I first drove here I did not know where I was going and I did not know when to turn off but now that I have been here several times I know where I am going and I know when to turn off.
Star
burning
above.
Yes I was twatted as I walked through the ruins after an all night rave in an abandoned quarry in Rochdale. I had run off on my own because the pink morning light was calling me closer and closer and I was trying to become part of it somehow. To them it should not have mattered but it did matter it mattered more than anything had ever mattered before. Before hand. Before body. Before language.
Who are you?
I am simply a field of aesthetic possibilities who's purpose it is to lay here and dream.
What do you look like?
I see myself in others?
What do I look like?
Pigeons circling and returning.
What is your earliest memory?
I experience everything at once so I have no need for memory.
A cup of coffee
in the waking light.
In China recent experiments in nuclear fusion resulted in an artificial sun running at 70 million degrees Celsius for 20 minutes. The temperature of the Earth's sun ranges from 10 to 15 million degrees Celsius and it has been active for 4.6 billion years. It formed from the gravitational collapse of matter within an interstellar cloud. But in the department of restricted books I found only maps of the stars created out of the stars themselves. What if this world exists within another world and the other world within another and so on and so on and so on?
About us
words bring
draw to
a close.
I walk into the sea with a belly full of Valium as the porcelain misters call my name. It is a raid on the uncanny. An act of malfeasance. We are laughing and smiling at people off camera as they stand in the long bodies of water left by the receding tide. Eventually the shadow world of last nights bottle returns and there is a slight change of plan. You may someday realise that my anger is an unspoken thing. Sometimes it is overwhelming. The intensification of fear blindsides both of us at different times. It is hard to keep the score because it is not a game and should never be thought of as such. But what I am really trying to say and what I have always been trying to say is let the light be light.
Your name is paper to me
gently put down
and your story
is wing dust over trees
How the other half cuts skin makes sense in the thread-world. Beginning beginning to talk like me. Just as fingertips touch water I spit up into the sky and it sticks. A new moon in suburbia.
Stephen Emmerson can be found on Instagram as @tothemadpoets and Twitter/X as @benzoport
Webiste: https://eightox.org/