by mIEKAL aND & Maria Damon

photography by Camille Bacos

They continued to live in the house many years after it collapsed. The real secret was how to get inside without disturbing the unbelievable fungus colonizing the exterior. Many secrets, in fact, were encouraged to take root amid decaying crevices in hopes that they might multiply and eventually yield clues from beyond the veil.

Rain down on me, bright lichen, and bring a bright message from the angels of the lyre. There was singing from the bone-harp and thrumming from the finger-twigs, and by and by the house itself shimmied to the sweet strains of the Little Girls’ Spiritual Choir.

She tears at her garments, they hang in the sway of twigs. Her anguish makes the unseen blue that much deeper. Frayed at the hem, tattered at the waist, heaving against the snow, the face surrounded by hood’s fur, she vanishes.

She never showed up, even after all the invitations I left under the door. Spiritually, she always looked upward, but nothing more, no convictions, no prayers under her breath. Each letter to her I offered more of my self, revealing the ache of how I yearned for her. She’s in there. I know it now.

The spines of spectral books lie skeletal on the dirt floor. What does the crumbling text, all rent and torn, want to sing to the window-shade that sways in the winter sunlight, in the unsheltered frame of the blast window?

A flame of insight ignites the world in her brain, but burns out quickly taking her with it. She wonders how others live, with others to talk to. “Goodnight, monkey-face; goodnight, monkey-face”—she read these words in her solo bed, torn out of the sky and flung into the willow-branches of her eyrie.

Wm Blake in the throes of the Energy Church once remarked “I collected some of their Proverbs.” We do not know who they are, this remains forgotten in the stories that continue. I do remember when the hole first appeared in the chapel ceiling, it was quite awhile ago.

“In the summer of 1808, a furious tornado swept diagonally across Jefferson Township. It entered near the northwest, and passed out near the southeast corner, almost stripping the hills of timber.”

Furious swirl of matter moves across the world, taking the best of its riches as the people sink into political destitution. Too overworked to rise up, the ghosts who have been there before can only look on beseechingly.

There were only two makeshift factories or families left in the barren world, and it was the anniversary of a mother’s death besides. How could she have forgotten. Her friends needed her, and she wasn’t there. Machinery loves to be useless and display the ruin of all love.

This was in all actuality the end of the end. Having evolved this far the Machine People lost interest in their mechanical break down fix-me-up world and they abandoned their existing technology. I can only imagine what they might have thought of. My man operating the rock crusher, grinding limestone, all day long.

After the 77th day, the rock crusher crushed a human hand that then took up residence in a cirrhus cloud above. Whenever it rained, the sound of grinding invisible rocks. This is a tale told 77 times before it was declared too threadbare to scare the children.

We must exert ourselves, especially to the organic life. You are not unacquainted with the threshold the soul needs an adequate supply. A fruitless group of spirits attached to the magnetic agent of poverty. The kind of poverty experienced as unfoldment.

Why twist the day into future no ones, when all our dark sockets peel away into mistrials and denials. There was a black widow who nestled in vain, there was a blank window who lost her best pane, and so forth. Slant her toward a better maybe, that she may sinking go.

Consumption exhausted the better part of the generation, a swarm of journalers with no link to the outside world. Rocking chairs wrought of nature poems, creaking as the roof collapses on the metaphoric white picket fence. The smallest slice of the good life will not be remembered by words.

Unpeopled and deforested will be your future action curse. A few sparks of straw in the snow mark your passage here. All those who want to remember do invoke the breath of spacious memory.

Trap trap trap, nothing obvious please. Uncovered means unbreathed apocalypse for very togethering knots. Twigs repudiate branches squirm away from trunks in imaginary bandoliers. The warfare of nature poetry against nature is almost over.

A trap of What in the province of Where. Mighty successor to the kingdom of Who in the continent of Why. This may sound silly but it’s how I remembered where I lived when I was wandering the unlit streets late at night. Even tho I didn’t always want to come back, that sometimes I couldn’t help but be ashamed of the shabby surroundings I was raised in. I never wanted anyone thinking I was some toothless wolfgirl.

My back arched against the cool March wind; the spirit voices bent around me and passed through the open window. My hands raked through them gently, sorting them out as they flowed past me; they made a wondrous harmony as only the dead can.

I wove these worms into a living earth that moved like a curtain when you called. I parted these filaments like fingers when she made a church of anger with her bare hands. I tore these obscurantist doctrines to cinders when they ignited our hearts by sheer power of their syllables. I melted these sweets in my mouth when they became insoluble obstructions to our mangled futures.

I was never sure of what to make of the charred patchwork ceiling, I mean, it was almost like an ancient language of marks & tallies. Maybe some Thing was trying to communicate to me & I just couldn’t understand. The women on my mother’s side were known far and wide for hearing & seeing things that everyone else couldn’t or refused to acknowledge.

An exhibit of buoyant homes sailed through the windows of the Friends’ Schoolhouse; an insistence combatting the peace endemic to the tall rafters of place where she said, “I dare you not to smile.”

When you consider that the human conception is not misfortune to be poor without popular follies rendering the reformer constantly warring against another life. Then it is day to day there will be no bridges he could not cherish. Your thorns will be a passport to appetites for legitimate animal propensities instead of lower functions. Lives belong under subjection to pre-eminent arrays in darkness for a freedom to ignore nothing. It is how recent volcanic actions refer to changes.

The whole unfolds end into end, a long shot where hill tilts to hayfield and then presses into sky congress. Punctuated by human sadness sliding foreward into lit lines, branches make a rune-scene decipherable only to those repugnant others among us.

Quite truthfully, the entrance has collapsed & there is very little chance that any fragments of the old poetry will be discovered in the ruins. The milk has changed state to snow but the white is still as bleak & hard-earned as my paw’s folks used to tell tales of. Even the radio on the ledge don’t know what to make of the music these days.

Stay away from that velour syntax, and stick to the spirits to keep them from drooping. The bough is but a handle for their entry into this illumined space, reminding me of the graven barrows of Jutland, where the cold dew drips on neolithic petroglyphs and the tourist is given her own key and candle.

Ghost-seeing in the brain is always seen by the fleshly clear-seeing presentiment but is only momentary in such cases. No power for I have no pleasure and I see them frequently in approximation and at various times I am awake and not sensible or plethoric or amused with me. My calmest bedside ghost visits me in their dream although not a syllable can avert my eyes from a magnetic thin cloud. I never observed moonlight I do not know.