memorial of being: gone with the time

rewritten from death is life, is death, which can be found here.

rot is inevitable for the
dimmed oak forest, leaves
brown to black. eaten away,
slowly.

and yet in this painful, agonizing death,
the oak is never older. bark
is no longer brittle, moss now
a new shade of green. suddenly brimming
with youth.

even through the passage of its memory
there is a glimmer of hope for the
dying. memories of the shedding of pasts,
acknowledgement of bitter starts and
sweetened finishes.

the worms recall when the tree was a
sapling, they say they only knew
through tradition but also that
everything has come
full-circle.

biting away as the moment fades,
bark discolored and the moss
is finally a pale, ghastly white.

dirt patch left over only recalls the roots.

am i beautiful to you?
i know that being human
means i should //////////
be okay with //////////////
not being //////////////////
pretty but /////////////<○
it feels so ////////////////|
painful to /////////////////>
know that /////////////////
i will never be ///////////
quite enough, nor
will i be the perfect creation.
this is the law of living, i am the
dutiful citizen. i don't feel too beautiful.

have i done
all this before?

every bit of
bitter resolve
becoming
amber ash,
am i more
same than i
am different?

it is hard to
form a parity
between
sameness and
difference.

still,
i try to reverse
the solidification
of presents.

e.

fading
glory
you hav
nevr ben idolzd
bfor. it hs left
you

fr good.

yr no lnger
a sint nly a
bystndr to
yr own mstks
bckspc bckspc

try to nliv the memris

aa e i gg nn rrr

yrslf ntil yr nthng
bt a shll.

hllw wth nthng lft
nsid

f.

bitter remedy
you have bitten more
than you can chew

float the rest
of the medicine

down

throat




(choke)



gagging on the

written

prescription
words down the

esophagus and
sludging in the
epiglottis.

he tells me his name has been passed down--- his great-grandfather had it first--- and i wonder if he knows how much weight i think is in a name. to me, names are what makes a man and breaks a man. it holds the history of those who had it before until you rewrite it and become the legacy-- forever memorialized, etching your fate under a long lineage of people who bore it before you.

i say that my name means "he who shall shine as bright as the sun" and he says- "i know. that is what makes you my sunshine" and i am immediately pulled out of my mulling. it is odd to be grounded by love- normally i would say love is this abstract, non-physical concept but it is everything-- the breath in the winter, sand on the shore and sunlight blooming the flower.

it is him hugging me while i'm talking about my name.

I love the name one it's so awesomesauce

our lives are asynchronous,
you live in the stratosphere,
grazing the space-line as i lay on the road,
frozen in the skid marks of lovers past.
i am stag-adjacent, my antlers wring
around the fragile bone you cherish.

we are parallel lines,
facing eachother and reaching for something
we cannot touch. unfathomable higher
planes are so close to us
but we cannot percieve eachother yet,
we have only the shared knowledge
of what the other could be, or has been.

perhaps in another universe over i am
plucking the pearly white beads
out the sky and you are made
roadkill out of heart fragments.

this is somewhat like shrödinger's cat;
if i am to exist alongside you, i am possibly
both star-clinging and street-lounging.
so you exist opposite to me, highway-dozing and
planet-chasing. the yin and yang of simple existence.

in our next lives, i hope we can
intersect, and start tracing the interstate
routes along the constellations.
that way, the doe wont feel so alone
laying glassy-eyed next to a comet.

you drink your coffee with cream and two pumps of chocolate. i say that isn't enough and you side-eye me so i just grip my strawberry bubble tea harder. you say you love strawberry but you are the epitome of dark-chocolate, bitter, sweet.

you say you like your cake with strawberries but i see you slip lemon juice into it. i watch in horror as my blueberry becomes sour. i say you have ruined it and you say you have always ruined everything you touch and i instinctively cover my chest with my arms. i feel the rot.

i sit in the rain and revel in the simplicity of it all as you are shadowed in the sunlight, as you put it you are "polarizing beauty" but i see it as opposite sinning. i am reaching my arm into the light, to save you, you are magnifying my horror into fear, and i turn away.

i sneer, you scowl. that is our only similarirty. you distance yourself from the past but i cannot help but reminisce our history.

tw/ suicide, death

i keep having this dream where i
am watching myself die
in the hands of someone i love
and it happens over and over and over and-

what would happen if i died?

i have spent so long greiving sometimes
i feel like the grived. the tears are
shed only in practice, never when they are
needed for it to "count".

would someone lay a lily on my grave?

dying means you have lived in life, so you
have died in death. perhaps someone
you love will say "i will miss this one,
this one was the one that --", and then
they'll say something like, "wrote poetry",
"loved too much", "was way too spiteful", and
then forget about the rest of your spirit thereafter.
you become only what you are remembered by.

would i regret it?

passing away- deceasing, dying is
avoided. you have "unalived" and therefore
have finished living. your head hasn't come
up out the water, you are still hanging
by a thread, you are laying there, ancient,
and withering in your sheets. you are made
an obituary.

...have i already died?

i keep having this nightmare where i
am watching my own funeral
and all the ones i love aren't there
and it happens over and over and over and-

i am pulled to you like tide:
fading in and out inconsistent to
the brightness of a sun, instead
harsh moonlight and obfuscating shadow.

slowly encroaching down my
seafoam and into my riptides-
you are a stagnant rock beach
that i splay my washed-up carcass
on and mourn.

you say, as i remember, "you know,
if i was a geological occurance...
i think i'd be a desert." and i agree.
you amplify the scarcity of water
to make the oasis look all the more utopic;
burying the rot under sand.

i know there is rot, for a fact.
you ruin everything you touch, you ruin
my coral reef and revel in its shambles.
i watch as your rot transposes to
my grief tenfold.

and a jellyfish washes up onto the rock.

it dissolves into bitterness.

i think i would hate being laika--- her death was our life,
but with life and death being consequential does her life
become our death? we send out myriads of search signals--
searching. searching. searching. lighthouses with wings.
searching. searching. searching. searching for someone other than
ourselves, are we that tired of eachother? we make these
discs with our sounds, but what, we presume that there's
something out there just like us? i seldom wonder if i
was laika, would i have just sat there? would my sentience
have some vague idea that i would be dying? i don't know
whether i am apologizing for her barks that we couldn't
discern fearful woof from elated arf or if i am
to say sorry that she couldn't understand our good girl
from poor girl. if i was her, i don't think
i could have brought myself to watch the
people down there fade into the fog, going up as
they are grounded. maybe she was barking up there
where we couldn't hear her. head rotating, looking at the
marvels of suns and planets. searching. searching. searching.

[preface] laika was a dog sent to space. part of the soviet space program. she died of overheating. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laika


dogs know so much more than we do (oh laika, oh laika, oh laika)

i think i would hate being laika--- her death was our life,

but with life and death being consequential does her life

become our death? we send out myriads of search signals--

searching. searching. searching. lighthouses with wings.

searching. searching. searching. searching for someone other than

ourselves, are we that tired of eachother? we make these

discs with our sounds, but what, we presume that there's

something out there just like us? i seldom wonder if i

was laika, would i have just sat there? would my sentience

have some vague idea that i would be dying? i don't know

whether i am apologizing for her barks that we couldn't

discern fearful woof from elated arf or if i am

to say sorry that she couldn't understand our good girl

from poor girl. if i was her,  i don't think

i could have brought myself to watch the

people down there fade into the fog, going up as

they are grounded. maybe she was barking up there

where we couldn't hear her, after all she was called

"little barker". head rotating, looking at the marvels of suns and planets.

searching. searching. searching.


debrief:


poor laika, sigh. perhaps if laika was here today, she would stare at us with contempt, howling at the people who scratched her head before she flew up there, perhaps if the landing was secured, she could know so much more than us, woofs and arfs telling us that the stars were so, so, so much more vast than we thought they were.


perhaps.


definition:


laika (noun + proper noun)

1. a hero.

    i) a mystery who has yet to be solved. she died as she lived. she lived as she died.

    ii). wistful star searcher, she is a lighthouse. she is searching. searching. searching.

2. a prophet.

    i) she saw the vastness before we knew it as it was.

    ii) maybe, if there is an afterlife, she saw aliens. she saw what we sought.


laika laika laika laika laika laika (laika, i, laika)

"the more time passes,

the more i'm sorry about it...

we did not learn enough from this mission

to justify the death of the dog."


perhaps she died in vain, her barks, her searching.

lighthouses. she is a lighthouse? am i a lighthouse?

laika laika laika laika laika laika. rough on the edges.

is a name really a name when its bearer becomes

something tied to its end? do we all end? how?

she burned in glory, she heated her

heart so much that she couldn't stand it any longer.

will i face myself with the same kind of death

that deserves a hero? i fear not.


little barker, my sweet little barker.

i wonder how the scientist that trained her felt, knowing that one way or another,

the dog that they had fostered, was fated to die somehow.

it must hurt. to watch something so cute, docile, innocent. to watch it

stare back at you as it ascends towards orbit, barking, whining, yearning.

to reminisce and say you're sorry, to be sorry for a dog you raised--

to kill.


when her remains came down did you sit in front if the pod and hug it?

were you crying, were you staring at what was left over of her memory?

were you holding a ceramic jar saying "oh my little barker, my 

little lemon, my sweet, sweet, laika." her deteriorating remains

as one final jab in the back-- you have killed this thing, this thing that

barely knew a world outside of you. 


did you hold her rotting corpse and say "i'm sorry, laika.

i'm so so sorry. you were a good girl. i am just a bad, bad man."