This piece was originally created as a wall text installation for the group exhibition Fissure:Fog (curated by Bennet Schlesinger) at SIGNAL, Brooklyn, February 6 – March 8, 2015. It was also recorded on the album Dematerialize (Soap Library, 2021).
Signal
An ebb in the pain and sight stretches bridgelike Etiolated with glistening jewels Noxious gems set heaving, sloping offering themselves to the dank Hysterical light mirrored in the abyss There is something lively and consummate in this jealous elixir Muscles ripple under a lithe coat of sable Coursing in the tissues, a slow-moving, burning oracle Emerge, consolidate, become pure Vision shining in coals Fingertips on knees I bow, rise to mount these treasures, not a word out of place. Aureate poem glows like pain made of forked tongues, mineral eyes, and teeth blazing in alchemical fire The people of old, old times under my own skin, alive and walking The dead are a frequency, current as sound caught in the ear And they are still writing As I am willing to entertain Frightening to hear and terrible to read Things I exterminate in spells cast a thousand miles wide Radiant bandwidths exonerate everything they touch Neutralize poison And turn enemies aflame in supplication I dissolve our manacles An awe inconceivable to the untrained senses It’s not what you have, my enemy It’s what you do with a certain etheric yearning that marks the welkin While mouths of wish-granting beasts open full of embers to devour and transmute Emissions too fine for the physical eye circle round reptilian dialect Explanations slice orange flares in the haze And sunset gathers countless reflections My cigarette is imaginary, a ghost Smooth scar where once shone a rosy gash, glossy as the jaws of bloodthirst I was glittering, raw and single-pointed in my aim Pouring fresh from the wound Yes, I am empty of phantoms now, though if my gaze lingers glancing across my body I recoil, soften dematerialize My appearance translated as signal, proof, and sign.