un-becoming

Somehow nine years have past…nine years since The Lost Films of Theda Bara was published in Issue #30 of Fence. The time of its making feels immediate but that’s a deception: nearly a decade has past. I am not now where I was then. The Lost Films was an imaginative essay/fragmented screen-play of almost-erotica about all the things I love because they do not exist. It was a solid experimental inter-genre work that captured where I was then.

Nearly a decade, later, my themes are different. But they have found a home, once again in Issue #39 of Fence. Un-becoming is a pun and the title of a 100+ line poem. While procrastinating on the final proof, I made this Venn diagram to map the terrain it covers:

My old friend Orion makes an appearance (he’s also Come on Lonely from my concept album these fountains rare here). Editing the middle section, which smashes up astronomical facts (the start that will soon go super-novae in Orion’s shoulder) + our mythical projections onto the stars + impending planetary doom, made me appreciate Emily Dickinson for maybe the first time ever. Complexity in brevity. Ah, there’s something worth mastering.

Un-becoming begins:

Though I have spent night under stars
drunk and not drunk
abandoning myself to way-out universal wow

now the walk from door to yard feels epic embarkment
drunk or not drunk
as if wolves as if pestilence as if deranged men as if

my mind, unhinged like a jaw, might not shut if darkness swarms. ..

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Orion murders his way through multiple pieces of my work. Here he is in a song from my album these fountains rare here.