dalelans

[dalelans]

The individual macromolecules composing my body are numberless. I vow to synthesize and degrade them all.

[dalelans]

Train poems

The train to New London

Blue boxcars, bright graffiti, orange and white. Common reeds, ten feet tall, topped with purplish straw panicles.  The old steel bridge groans as the train passes over a saltwater bay. A young woman says to her partner that she someday expects to be a mother.

I report the impressions that the light gives me. I have some kind of wild mirror in my mind,  Eyes resting in dug-out caves of bone. The one who carved them is trying to startle me out of my depression with a flock of birds. The one who renders these impressions has made the ocean still and golden in the late morning light. 

Small gods

As we break into the universe, plowing it like soil, Chewing it up with our valenced interpretations, Raising it to our eyes and then throwing it back over our shoulders,  We unearth all the small gods, like worms or weed seeds or beady black insects. We watch as they begin their work on our lives. Quickly they are magnified to immense proportions, Duplicated from mind to mind, like the image of a torch in a room of mirrors.  They attain omnipresence and willfulness and a sort of invisibility.  A part of them rises like vapor  to be seated in the pantheon. 

[dalelans]

their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth - kurt vonnegut

[dalelans]

Don’t just do something, stand there.

[dalelans]

Democracy 3

I am told to keep faith in a world that worships decay and misuse. Let us gather in empty lots where no flags fly, where no markets operate, and remember ourselves.

[dalelans]

democracy 2

How do we govern ourselves? How do we hold power to account? Go ahead and vote in the booth if it calms your nerves. Your real vote is your life. If you are a free person, you vote for the things that you buy, for the things that you do with your brief life, for the ideologies with which you structure your mind. If you cannot live without buying things that you resent, without spending your life in the service of evil or ugliness or banality, without yielding the narrative arc of your life to an unseen other, then you are a slave, and its time to set yourself free. Eugene

[dalelans]

livestock guardian dog your bark and your bite they comfort me.

[dalelans]

democracy

Someday we will have a democracy Where the needs of the land and its inhabitants are discussed frankly, without euphemism or equivocation.

We will debate with eachother about the real issues of our lives. We will teach and provide for eachother And the world will flourish With freedom and beauty As it did in Eden.

but today is not that day. Not here. I throw my sad bean into the rotten soup and pray. Weep America for what we have plundered and wasted.

[dalelans]

The birds that are sleeping in the dark trees are silent, sleeping, trying not to draw any attention to themselves. The night has been long: months and years of songless shivering darkness. Nevertheless I am sure that if I continue to wait here in this cold place then the sun will rise and the world will turn pink and orange and blue again and the birds will start to sing. Eugene

[dalelans]

Terra preta

When will we set fire to the dead forests, leaving only black earth and a single pregnant pause before something green and unrecognizable roars to life from the ash? Who will open a vein to feed the starving diminished catatonic chicken souls of our nation with sweet red possibility? When will the call for jubilee be heard and answered by the axe-wielding angels that have come from other worlds to rescue us? Fists banging on the hot smokey door: ‘Is anyone there?’ Yes yes we are thank god we can’t breathe.

[dalelans]

The difference between adults and children is that only children can be nihilists. They can think that it’s not a bad thing if you throw yourself down on the ground and yell in despair at the unfairness of life. Fair enough. But once you finish your tantrum and grow up just a little bit I have some things that I need you to build for me in the future.

[dalelans]

GLP-1 receptor antagonists

Why are the buddhists not more interested in a way to stop desire neurochemically? Imagine a world where you might live, conpletely independent of the needs of your inner self. Out of a sort of pride we undersell what it might be like to be something else. But maybe pride is even overdue for correction.

-eugene

[dalelans]

Your depression is connected to your insolence and refusal to praise. -Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi

[dalelans]

The deadness of the world killed into him, and at an early age, by materialism, atheism, and the prerogatives of capitalism.

[dalelans]

Children are impervious to the god of quiet natural spaces. They fill the silence with cheers and whines and song.

[dalelans]

The unknown is a part of your reality, acting silently in the shadows until it is ready to make itself known.

eugene

[dalelans]

the unspeakable and undeserved beauty of light

Something about the heavy dark clouds and how they cut the late sun at 7 o clock in August, how that cut light obliquely illuminates the trees in the valley, on just the south-facing side, is unspeakably beautiful. I needed to see that today.

Eugene