In Smoke Unfixed & Glinting :: Joseph Robertson

Tight sectarian interim
Waiting for news of successes of fortitude
Waiting for hope to make gains on quiet panic
An army of would-be critics is massing
Time is being distilled to its essence
Pressing compressing
Misery comes winnowing hindrance shimmering into view
Hunted by satirical improvements over small dominion
This world is a sketch tattooed into weakness
Limbo
The dream is another chance at dreaming
But first the perfect rest
A militant unknowing rest
Anything untenable
Waiting for a break in the pulse
Drumbeat
Pushing toward
Direction
Limbo seeking inclination for peace of mind
A rain of vegetation made of ether
Banishment! Erasure! Denial!
Victory cannot be assured!
So win outright!
Seize the moment!
Time is on your side if you obey its strictures
And we are waiting for the final echo
So we can get beyond
Limbo
This furtive filling of rifts with mystery
Not to study
Perilous to look too close at what is lacking
Adventure they say
Heroism
Dream-sequence & a cohort of friendly phantoms
Spelling first-most-welcome in smoke

Laudamus Te
We anoint you in laurel sheen
By our industry unfixed & glinting
By erecting cages transmitting capture becoming ubiquitous
Limbo
The desert ache of being everywhere & nowhere
As we feign being
As we gaze on patterned landscapes of fiction
Of reason unreasoned
Of half-life writ large & looming
Streaming a language of combustion across open sky
Laudamus Te
For the sake of living long & loud in limbo
We ask only to be permitted flight
To have some vain recourse to extinguish oversights
To get beyond failure
To make pathways in the wilderness to serve our humblest needs
To make pools of incendiary convergence where to wrestle spiritual excess
Limbo
Like a prayer issuing forth as calamity
Launching new fits of exploration pillage pallor

There are towers in our midst that speak silence
That overtake as overture
That bloom in morning mandate
In confusion-made canyons of hope misery collapse
Edified against decay by combinations & reapplications of purpose
Towers that speak only to smallness & the hollow
Shades of former selves that carried their blue skin like fire
Limbo
Where the air constitutes a grey mass of unthinking
Where breath is continual undoing
Divestment of wills
Strange misfit horror of remove
& there is time to cross time to be crossed
A labyrinth amid prehistories to traverse by reinvention
Laurels & unkempt words without meaning
Distortion unabridged by care
Late lights falling into shadow in the rush
A kind of praise by massive buzzing
Undoing prelude after prelude
Moving without affection for movement
Dressed in tawdry comments on the mill of commerce
Limbo in turbid relief
Looking upward ever-elsewhere
Looking homeward ever-elsewhere
Looking sallow ever-ridden with role-playing & faults too too luminous
Counting what cannot forge account or fall into sequence
Steeped in vague refractions
Hymnal dissonance
Palliative drone of vestiges of homes
The mystic resonance of error
Accident of fact
Being as flaw within flaw in the glory of displacement
Laudamus Te
In ceremonial devotion leafy dilutions ablution
We work & will to move this rock
Upward ever-upward
The clock is set in motion
The time between times is winning us to its grip
Building luxurious failure in delicate forms
To forfend incursions from within
To uproot the earliest seedling tremors
& begin to know of limbo & the passing-through
To see the well-worn & the unworn path as they are
In garlanded breach
Laudamus Te
Without benefit of names dates locations
Without ministers doctors radicals deliberation
We offer something deeper further more
The summoning of reprieve
A relenting for springtime
Limbo leaping into verdure
The one pulse
The never-ending tired calamity of recollection
Seeing shelter where there was none
Making headway into shadow with serenity
Costing all of a wingless empire & more…

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WRITING & NAMING: the medicine of acquiring knowledge
Joseph Robertson

Language is that point of contact in the abstract, that plane where the intellectual life within us is enabled to assert itself as part of the overall experience of living. Language is that plane where the individual self is allowed repeated attempts at manifestation. What takes place in the process of writing, in the spilling of ink or the posting of digital characters, the slip toward defining a landscape, however brief, is the sanctification of an individual, and by extension of the human condition as such...

Not every person is a writer, by trade, nor should they be, but there is something about the act of writing that serves the writing individual as if it were a medicine for selfhood, a healing venture into clean waters. Especially so when its intent is to be expressive of secret regions of the mind or to lay out new experimental vessels for such expression. [Keep reading...]