The Silt Quarry (Negotiations with Silence) :: Joseph Robertson

IN SMOKE UNFIXED & GLINTING

Tight sectarian interim
Waiting for news of successes of fortitude
Waiting for hope to make gains on quiet panic
An army of would-be critics is massing
Time is being distilled to its essence
Pressing compressing
Misery comes winnowing hindrance shimmering into view
Hunted by satirical improvements over small dominion
This world is a sketch tattooed into weakness
Limbo
The dream is another chance at dreaming
But rest
First the perfect rest
A militant but unknowing rest
Anything untenable
Waiting for a break in the pulse
Drumbeat
Pushing toward...

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LYMPH & PRIVY PRAYER-MAVEN

light-party lymphic
spending the age in swaths
each contemptuous foreboding
you say yourself in unrest
knowing no names

you are the first & foremost
abstracted from all the gentle
context of your recollection
you are the sound of glass
coming apart in the cold...

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QUAKING AT GRIEF

living at the end of time
on the furthest outcrop of history
pallid impersonal
subjective in the utmost
outpacing radical fissures
in melancholy avowal
penetrating the mystery of balance

we live in the space of a smile...

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REPHRASING VAGRANT MANDATES

today's light was today's light only
riveted to shapes
passing between us
like words & clock hands
in seaside soup...

today's light was something other
than time gathering in folds
to reorganize
the road ahead...

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A CROWN OF THORN & BERRY

i am angry at confusion
my own or the world's
angry that a muddle of false fresh hopes
can turn good depth of meaning
into peril stark & senseless
within a breath of indiscretion
angry that rules are inconstant allies
ungoverned incorrigible cheats
& mostly desolate

i am angry at the world
at meaning & absence & their
tremulous union...

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FIRST ASYMMETRY

crafted of syllables simmering witnessing
aware of hints of expansion into purpose
permanence replenishment
into light like glass castles on cloud
this ideal this indefinable
as something beyond progressing
progresses in a stark array of elements
the finery of stellar shift
an absolute remaking of every everything
interlaced & simultaneous

do you have a viable defensible answer?
do you have a reserve of time to search?

in the sullen shadow of a creator-raptor
in the wake of revelations dismissed
these walls have witnessed knowledge
in its squeamish remarking...

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SPEAK WHOLLY
THE SMOLDERING PLUME

speak wholly
defiant
face to face
the truth
that brings
power to dine
among us

speak wholly
the fruit
of long years
of contemplative life
of learning
to live beyond
the obvious

speak wholly
the smoldering plume...

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WRITING & NAMING: the medicine of acquiring knowledge
Joseph Robertson

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such...

Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. [Keep reading...]