1. |
On My Own
03:59
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and if the time capsule swallowed
is a placebo, and so my shell is gone
enteric
and if I cross dissolve and glower
in between the folds,
is my packaging generic?
I feel it on my own now
never told me nothing
I feel it on my own now
hold me to nothing
I feel it on my own now
can’t you see?
while floating on fungi everything had turned
theatrical, full of noble intents, gas
and gravitation pulls
earth to head-ass in them
sock-covered toes, them rotations don’t stop
for your manners, medians, modes
that color you’re seeing,
does it hold a pretense,
a layer of declension over
infinitive meaning?
that epistemology is just a slow sink,
I clarify in my patterned breathing
(just breathe in)
I feel it on my own now
never told me nothing
I feel it on my own now
hold me to nothing
I feel it on my own now
can’t you see?
and if the time capsule swallowed
is a placebo, and so my shell is gone
enteric
and if I cross dissolve and glower
in between the folds,
is my packaging generic?
let me sing in unadulterated sub bass consciousness
let it slip to a rap unchecked
flutter notes and words
let me feel the unheard
told myself it’d be like this
when the mortal coil is
4c or tighter
my second person
in the dingy darkness is
harmonizing,
singing through a sense of self
low voice and edifying
I feel it on my own now
never told me nothing
I feel it on my own now
hold me to nothing
I feel it on my own now
can’t you see?
I don’t need to seek
I’m right here
I’m right here
everything I need I know is right here
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2. |
Amber Deception
03:27
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crumbling RAM chips
and these phonemes race hertz
the monitor fails and
the heartbeats learn
to undulate dips
dim rhythm that kicks
at Genius Bar spurned
sound bar lit aflame
planned obsolescence powdered in an urn
the confectioner in afterlife
plays Dreamcast
face mask, split screen
half-caste at the repast
Nella Larsen begging pardon
for amber deception
emotional guarding
set in sharp relief
ghost notes
shadow work
insights, metrics about posts
searching for an essence
high RPM spoke
blur of the disc
see from fish
we complicated vectors of
purpose awoke
in between roofed mouth
I’m breathing
as I coalesce
I’m perceiving
what’s kept me here right now
and I couldn’t tell you
right to repair the look of love
from a male gaze
grasp a drill bit for more
purchase down a parkway
city planner drank too much maté
for life to be lived
when you walking down skyscraper hallways
developers in bed with isotopes
social decay
René Magritte scapegoat
inked on national television
gravity for airtime
cultural construct wrote a sentient rhyme
self-conscious and embellished
not a child’s pendulum but cellist
bowing twine, acetate
needle on vellum
artist study in the late 20s
framed, mounted, centered
(centered, centered, centered).
in between roofed mouth
I’m breathing
as I coalesce
I’m perceiving
what’s kept me here right now
and I couldn’t tell you
in between roofed mouth
I’m breathing
as I coalesce
I’m perceiving
what’s kept me here right now
and I couldn’t tell you
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3. |
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[Immortal Nightbody]:
watching pornography never beyond flesh
Jonathan Grisham I wrestle with progress
3000 bars but I am not Andre
words that I sing don't mean a thing
I am a parasite not even malachite
ease my anxiety, fuck my sobriety
all consuming
self abusive
thoughts intrusive
do got a cause,
cause is the capital
manic depressive I can't afford therapy
really in shadow, you living vicarious
ten toes on the bluff, from a great height
paper chase blind with the loaded low lives
half an 8 ball and a full st. ides
we are not similar, of the same kind
bitch, you homogenous,
I am the opposite
of expectations but I am exceeding them
even that shit is tedious
simple units of time
trace the space in my mind
Lysergic acid
diethylamide
[Immortal Nightbody, Rhys Langston, Pioneer 11]:
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls are melting
the walls
[Rhys Langston]:
Man, I feel like Gorbachev on Zoloft
huffing insulation in the undercroft
selling them pieces of drywall
to get my fix
in the American sector
with Lord Quas bricks
persönlich, slurring the side
of mein schwarzen Judengesicht
ja natürlich, stopped and frisked
and spun the block with pieces
in a game of risk
hole punching through partitions
spiral-bound to nervously break down
before my half life
jackknife with a jackhammer
in Chalet Edelweiss
tut mir leid, mouth full of marmite
coughing up plasma and crisps
high-pass filter on stilts
when the dikes bust
and the North Sea
floods the continent in glacier mists
melting walls will diffuse in
Germanic languages
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4. |
DoorDash The Basilica
01:50
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DoorDash the basilica
off world
a gig economy of integers
wear the leather off Audio-Technicas
lint on a hard candy Papal Bull
decrees in a paystub
crinkled in coach shotgun
the story is of inventory
boilerplate bubbling English dubs
the fever of a history-less people
ridesharing their steeples
after millennia of market testing
pigeon-holed evils
if warp drive serves their reality without fiction
towards what will they escape
among stars and industrialism?
discrete functions between provincial stucco walls
so tastes the flavor of mid-century modern
Calvinist amber-cast Anglo
halos bent in orbital fractures
below a troposphere
the children’s internet service
does not pacify
glitches here
templates stricken from temples
and thus the metropole is phantom clear
opacity in a P.O. box
and couriers coordinate light years
the plot points tear transit
the holes are black
but the spackle is laminate
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5. |
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(my kitty left on a rocket that launched)
my kitty left on a rocket that launched
velocity of the pressurized doors
her little spacesuit
she chewed and gnawed
through zero G
then she zoomed with her paws
I can’t live my life
until she comes down
at least the litter’s clean
until she touches ground
and from my seat
I see you groom yourself in zero gravity
and behind the ship’s hull
I hear you ask for tuna
and just meow at me
and yes I know
yes I know
you want to eat
but the space station
I heard has a nice cat tree
and you can scratch happily
recharge your cat battery
my kitty in space
just a floating tortoise shell tabby
my kitty claws at the spaceship window
but she forgot she went outside on her own
now orders coming to her
from ground control
complete this mission
and she can go home
I can’t live my life
until she comes down
at least the litter’s clean
until she touches ground
my kitty left on a rocket that launched
velocity of the pressurized doors
her little spacesuit
she chewed and gnawed
through zero G
then she zoomed with her paws
I can’t live my life
until she comes down
at least the litter’s clean
until she touches ground
and then oh sh–
(meow)
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6. |
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[Rhys Langston]:
if we envision
in this languid crepuscule
a tow-colored klieg light
upon a shuttering movement
tracing brocken spectres
delusory bay bridges of
our lives’ peninsulas
trafficking the effusive,
if it so let the grid lock be Euclidean
and the imprints and treads
traces unkempt by the tragedians
[Pioneer 11 & Rhys Langston]:
anomaly detected, my ideal
I’m the only guest staying out here
golden hour
golden hour,
it never gets old
it’s ours
[nahhphet]:
the hour where the high would leave me
the quiet sigh I wouldn't speak of
as the mind deleted the sight of what times before receded
infinite previousness
the together piecing of the blind man’s thesis
swept down from the mountain to beaches
at the hour of final greetings
what was drawn in the sandy line, anemic
briny as the isle/aisle’s kind beaming
still not quite well-received
no this is the hour of the myth of easing /
what I mistook for my breathing,
bereft -
the figure off the easel leapt to life
(as) mirror of the jester’s needle, message-like
sans its own meaning:
reflections unsteady glee v.
crash of sea by kestrel’s singing, weaponized
pierced the tome we put belief in, to roll on like ebonite
where mark of the wound was leather-tight, replete as
the weakest quote from the acolyte's speeches
[Pioneer 11 & Rhys Langston]:
golden hour
golden hour,
it never gets old
it’s ours
[Rhys Langston]:
if we envision
in this languid crepuscule
a tow-colored klieg light
upon a shuttering movement
tracing brocken spectres
delusory bay bridges of
our lives’ peninsulas
trafficking the effusive,
if it so let the grid lock be Euclidean
and the imprints and treads
traces unkempt by the tragedians
this is hour of expiring meters
in the firehouse yelling out slice of life theatre
twirling a blowtorch in a walk-in freezer
saltpeter in a beaker
in a darkroom where our negatives express
within the chemical treatments
breaking the gentlemen’s agreements
refusing tenancy of convict leasing
into the escape hatch
unto the hyper-oxygenated betweenness
the theorist unlatching abstracts
from the beginning of their theories
the course corrected with its syllabus and materials
a student rewriting the standards
to free a Black, incandescent people
a meager surplus, a house upon wheels
the labor repatriated to rightful buried antecedents
whose carbon blooms in thermodynamic gynodioecious
low-hanging light glinting on our facial features
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7. |
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billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
This is the story of the three surveyors
sent to a flickering cluster of light
on a mission of waxing importance
against their world’s waning firmament.
They sped a great distance past their native problems
to arrive at the cluster,
and there they had found
it had transmuted to one blipping beacon,
now a celestial soloist.
The first surveyor asked,
“where did the other two of this winking gleam disappear to?”
The second surveyor asked,
“did we arrive too late in some cosmic irony?”
And the third just scratched their chin
before the deep blackness of space.
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
Measured and carefully
they charted all observable phenomena.
Nothing in their surveying could explain
what had diminished the quantity of luminescence,
nor were there any changes
outside of that occurrence.
But the darkness amplified.
The flickering of the sole light became more intricate
when the three surveyors paid mind to its sole flashing
and standing.
After all, had they traveled the ether
to venture upon the predictable?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
billion lightyears away from my home
traveled long distances between suns
and as I slow down
have I entered the Goldilocks Zone?
This is the story of the three surveyors
sent to a flickering cluster of light
on a mission of waxing importance
against their world’s waning firmament.
They found three had become one
and when they returned home at a distance
the one had become three again.
Indeed, the perspective was the conjunction
and the conjunction was the perspective.
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8. |
To Operate This System
03:33
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a vacancy sign glows
behind a neon ear drum
the levers and pulleys operate
a golden zero sum
a tensile steel thread holds
credentials and accomplishments
past life portfolios passed over
became dense collections
a cellophane dream therein
glimpsing computer blue
shoehorning hard boots
when text to speech
clears the cache and queue
screens dim
then moving parts sleepwalk in twos
to operate this system
the memory must be clear
searching for a drive
but the keyword’s right here
a play on words is in intermission for months
and the resuscitation restarts and jumps
with copper fronts
the flux runs down the routing map
the solder gun
allays the gaps in alloy
parleys a meteorite to a synth
opens a monophonic voice
analog slippage leaking from a sluice
to GDP removed from newness
and as one becomes the future antecedent
how does the dialogue the resume then,
between two lips or
copy-pasted and glue-fed?
followed to the distance
this through line becomes freer
and as the theory holds
the gravity will be teetered
if what is called chaos
is an agent of change
for how long does it subcontract
if freelance, might one
clash it with one’s own spear
before a tournament ground
shifty, between the quick
and those interred
and on its lunch break
what says it of birdsong
and the moment we call calm
how these metaphors and anaphora
chip tunes from marble
and stone fonts
to connect this rhythm
intent belief must douse fear
yearning in the rhyme
so the feeling is right here
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Rhys Langston Los Angeles, California
From smoked salmon to freshwater microphones.
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