kale-cannellini soup for the soul.

there is an esteemed, crimson-stained tradition submitting to the red book. every five years past commencement, the alums tidy up their life updates and submit their stories for publication. you may even call it a collective recollection.

📕

All I do is remix memory; the seasons have always been my time-keeper.

in all the ways i hoped i would be exculpated, i’m instead occupied by the intricacies of my own circulatory system. a true workhorse. keeps the acrimony and anxiety alive, pumping; not a place it cannot reach. upcycles guilt and self-reproach anew. 

observe: garbage emotions. wasteland; wasted hope, wasteful grief.

dream things for a dream house, year 2023

Making my life materially better.

we are forged in a crucible. iron-hot, stinging steel. molten personhood: scraps of dreams and self-belief and ambition. left to stew over an unwatched flame, lit like a vigil. cradled in a stock of loathing and agitation. becomes a shimmery, silvery sludge; occasionally peer in to stare back at a misaligned reflection. manufactured melt. a precondition for destroying knowns, a sublimation of sorts; structures turned to vapor, told to embrace the fluidity. but later transmutes into unrecognizable, unfounded forms. couldn’t hold onto it with two hands, keeps slipping away. left in critical condition.

sometimes the knife is so sharp i don’t even notice it cutting in. slices through, serrated slashes; look closer, that’s where the viscera and innards spill out. that’s what guts are made of. not inside, not holding a person together. not where it needs to be. don’t have the guts for any of this. can hardly stomach it. chewed-through straws and shredded cuticles. bloodless lacerations beneath a mass of scar tissue. never healed properly. won’t let it, will just keep cutting in the same places. wonder: has anyone ever been so revolted by what’s inside of themselves that it simply ejects? all that ugly.

if i am allowed to ask—i would like to know where all my constitutions have gone. imagine i am to be raised up in my own self-image (but razed down, to brittle bone). yet the days clumsily spin forward, regrettable corrosions in a decay function. lost to a lonely rot. can no longer see myself clearly; won’t come into focus. cloudy cataract. i keep trying, though.