Right lung, left lung, blink [1]
Hold on to your seat real tight, hold your breath, keep your eyes in your head, and go on [2]
Meditate on the colour that is flesh void of oxygen, also the
discoloured fruit / fingered out of misted windows / into which I breathed [3]
for years i stood / in the semeny ginko staring at my hands believing / in afterlives thinking one day I’d wake into / a new kind of body like a fish suddenly / breathing air through its eyes [4]
When ready, place your right pointer finger in the centre of your forehead, your thumb over your right nostril, your middle finger searching for its erogenous zone.
o separate(d)/strands of our breath!/Bright silver/threads of spirit/O quicksilver/spurt of fist, scansion of/unfocused eyeball [5]
While here, practice pushing air from the back of your throat up into your eye sockets.
consider making this your mourning practice.
you don't refuse to breathe do you [6]
the primary medium of poetry is not language but breath, specifically the breath of the poet marrying the breath of the reader. This is the key to its intimacy, its strange physicality [7]
the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE [8]
This is (also) why bad poetry hurts so much [9]
becoming dragonfish to survive / the horrors we are living / with tortured lungs / adapting to breathe blood [10]
the hellish (but breathable) finitudes of our present conjuncture [11]
Inhale & raise your arms / above your head (...)
Apply a small amount of tea tree oil to the tip of a cotton ball (...)
all arrangements require pain (...)
Hold the cotton ball up to the opening of your mouth, so that your breath might catch its oil and become dry, brittle, might shrink
