This prose piece was originally performed at Cashmere Radio for Haus für Poesie’s “Poet’s Corner”, part of the 2023 Poesiefestival, Berlin. It was later adapted as “Another Vista Inferno” for the 2025 LP “the ears of animals” by bitsy knox & roger 3000.
It’s not that I’m a different version of myself, just the version of that belongs with this place. When I return, I’m already here.
I feel as if I’m running out of time. The reasons remain incoherent. I’ve taken the batteries out of the clock. I prefer the arrhythmic ticking of the electric radiator. There’s a merge in progress, assisted by offerings left behind from past visits: drugs wrapped in the makings of a tent, running shoes ravaged by barnacles, books deemed inappropriate for city life. I’ve just looked down and noticed that I’m covered in mud. You asked me if I’m still thinking about the “woman, alone” thing, and I can tell you that I feel the difference now.
I’m staring at an edge. Past the rocks, somewhere in the Pacific, is an edge.
The edge is unconcerned with my attempts to mould it, transit or anoint it. It doesn’t rely on my belief in its existence. Like geologic time, it’s indifferent to human scale, to numinous appellations. It has no language for the ticking of clocks, it utters no language at all, because it attempts no communication, it is nothing less than and merely the first sound, an oscillation of tenses, the digressive angles of a Ring Composition of change: of air, fire, sex, and water as the agents of change, fraying continuity, illuminating incidence. The edge is not an ending.
I’m staring at the edge, and considering my approach. I’m considering the upper-body strength needed to pull myself up over it. I’m considering fear as an ingredient of conspiracy. I’m reminded to ask you about the erotics of danger, about enmity breeding enmity, about asking the wrong questions, about dwelling in digression, about falling into a chasm of collective decision-making, about the folly of meeting in person at last. Maybe it’s the woman, alone thing. I’m so risk-averse, isn’t that dangerous too? Isn’t there a febrile balance to staying or to leaving? Doesn’t change come regardless?
I’m staring at the edge, and you are there, you’ve always been there, on top of it. You are its floating zenith. You reach for me in waves. You recall all of your past lives. Where you are is always somewhere else. It’s like the trick with rainbows—shall I ruin it for you? There’s no magic, it’s about position, separated spectrums. There’s nothing there when you get there. Only a vast middle. A middle, all atmospheric incoherence, all pliable distance, all time is contained in its stratum. A middle, prettily between us: a view. An eagle and a raven are in an ariel death match here. An economy has been written here. A binding spell is cast here, its choreography consists of turning your back to it, outstretching your phone, and taking a picture. When you show the picture to someone, the spell will be broken.
I’m still here. Night is setting in. I avidly await nighttime now, and with it the erasure of the edge, and the language to describe it, its economy. Nighttime is an introduction to the transformational properties of glass. The window: a mirror, an unwitting stage to a passive performer. I’m considering truth in reflective surfaces. I’m replaying scopophobic scenarios of trickster reflections, the calculated movements of a nighttime audience crouched in the velveteen abyss, awaiting a single lapse in my attention. What then? What then? I am attempting nonchalance, but I keep forgetting to breathe. My rabbit heart is fluttering. I’m thinking about fear, and its role in conspiracy. It’s the not knowing part, it’s something about control, about the desire to identify every angle of incidence. I’m thinking of the “woman, alone” thing. I’m thinking of a visit with the night sky. I’m thinking of joining its textures. I’m stepping outside, no light, no backscatter, I’m just outside, a long exposure. I’m testing my endurance like holding my breath underwater. I am, nevertheless, seeking the light. I turn to watch myself through the window, and I am still there, cosily hunched on the couch, no overhead lighting, no lapse in attention, attempting stillness.
I am in three stages of erosion: gravel to sand to mud. I am eliding the footprints of a day. I am compacting the artefacts of the day. Turbid currents carry me down mountains into submarine canyons. From this low vantage point, you are asking me to make a choice. You ask me to explain myself.
I say, “The other day, I was drawing pictures of sleeping couples spooning each other. I was disentangling them, suspending them vertically, holding them alone in space; they looked like dancers clawing at the air. They looked peaceful, or maybe peacefully dead, caught in suspended movement, transposed somewhere presentational, observable from all angles, like Pompeians coated in the pyroclastic agent of their demise and enduring detail, the reflection of a day. The drawings were disappointing, I think it was a form versus concept thing. I went to the stream in the forest. I waded through the water and dug into the hardened bank, transporting hunks of it home in a ziploc bag. I didn’t ask for permission. On the back porch, I submerged the clay into a bowl of warm water and massaged it in my hands. Its pores squealed the cry of slowed lithification. Sinister grey worms and what appeared to be long strands of hair surfaced. My hands became covered in small cuts, blood mixing with clay slurry. I lean into mysterious demise, spectres of unsolved crimes, here at last, I was sure of it, it was so early, it was almost the end, it was already here. I was kneading the clay, imagining a curse as a completion. I looked down to find my hands attached to my body, my back hunched, my bottom lip jutting, my legs akimbo, mouth breathing. I looked up, and you were there, perched on a rock, awaiting a single lapse in my attention.
(I screamed a real scream)
You said, there’s an erotics to unwitting performance.
The edge is folding, I’m reclining into its digressions. Perhaps we will never meet. Ask me your questions. I’ll answer to their satisfaction. I feel the difference now.