Disintegration Loops
After William Basinski
This is the death of a heart in song
in beats of incremental life
born a resonance in blood
sings atmosphere warming up
its pulse borrows static
and murmur of mountains
from granular wind
articulates pins of vibration
slow turbulent metals
cymbal the sky/s/pace
thus we organs of reception
are bodies of interference
a rhythm growing wise
while losing its cadence
glinting ash each loop
the Sisyphean motor
in energy whisper
sinews of decay
refracting inward
like green copper
oxidized and
pulling air
to make
music
Green Age
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever—Dylan Thomas
Green age slapped you across the mouth
and said “Stop! Listen! Get a grip!
Your life is a quickening
root of electric blood,
fountaining to branches
from the baseline of your heart.
Your love is a speechless seed,
for life is the zero of spring.
It’s ok to be speechless
at this electrostatic charge
energizing as it blasts—
the poets are still translating
the astounded language of storms,
and you do yourself no good
howling in the drink.
From speechlessness comes listening
and when the angst of carving lanes
gives out to hard-wired wrinkles
you will long for ground zero
to fuse with the greater idiom
—with the bliss of oblivion —
For there is no storm in stillness of clay
—the womb you will dream back into.
When you are a photoreceptor, witnessing,
you will know the love of everything.
I Deleted It All
when my past was murdered,
compartments of my digitized life
flashed in rollodex glitches
and simulacrum memories
before my very eyes
like a dead face,
the screen drained of lustre,
wearing a blank expression
pixel and letter
formed the sediment
around the concrete shoes,
all the evidence undredged
and without back up disk
agile without the weight,
I’ve flown up to heaven
now I swim channels
in the sky, ghost naked
Jessica Lee McMillan is a poet and essayist with an MA in English. She still remembers the childhood words she made up with her brother. She likes crooked, shiny things and her work explores architectures of perception through music, in nature and the city. She writes from a charming, gritty, historical river city in British Columbia.
