Lieu Journal

Gently inhale & exhale

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 

Is not the acquisition of speech based on the ability to fit the words in one’s mouth? To push the lips this way and that, shaping breath into particular forms? [12]

         Slowly, peel your breathing away from its body so that it becomes a tender outlier draped on the floor. Look over at your sculpted breath-skin; attend to it daily. Think about what it means to denature, to render something so alive—antibacterial, antifungal. Are you now: analgesic; anti       - viral?

as you slowly lower your arms, exhale / & pour your pleasure into a crystal vase [13]

           Hold it there, applying a veil of empathic gauze over the mouth of the vessel so that your pleasure can still receive air, but not without effort.

Repeat three times:

As long as the earth continues / its stony breathing, I will breathe. [14]

Smother all illusions, alas

stones only breathe once         a             year. [15]

            Like last night, on the riverbank, between the moss and the / baby’s-breath, where he had kissed her sticky until she cried out from / her chest [16]

Combat breathing names the mobilisation of the target subject’s life energies merely in order to continue to live, to breathe and to survive the exercise of state violence [17]

 If we can inhale/exhale with perfect / regularity, [18]

if breath / is a leash to hold the mind [19]

proceed to attune to all the ways in which your body—

A body can cause almost anything / to happen. [20]

In the moments before sleep, close your eyes and hold your breath; repeat the words “I can’t breathe” eleven times. Think about what it means to hold.

the new shoots / the streaking old gums / to dawn to dew to breath / held [21]

you don't refuse to breathe do you [22] 

the immediacy of the experience of breathlessness creates an epistemic mismatch between the person suffering and the person observing [23]

His breath a misplaced weather [24] 

Was he limp? Did he stir/ w/ life? Did she hear/ his soft breath in her ear? [25]

Snow kites stretch prone in corries, altitude / stiffens breath. [26]

Where the Greek root of algorithm—algos—means pain, scroll hungrily through your social media feed, breaking the images open through attention to your bio-rhythmic selves.

Do this by focusing on any of a combination of the qualities of the breath that abound:

metonymic ;      sentient ;     terrestrial ;     biotic ; combatant ; pneumatic ; rapid ;       languid ;           diaphragmatic ;     

throbbing ;                 tranquil ;                   calm ; strained ;        delicate ;   laboured ;   stale ;   sticky ; wet ; drunk ; panicky ;           peaceful ;     

egalitarian ;              sweet ;                                abundant ;        precarious ;   necessary.

there is a space between the layers, a palimpsestic interval one is always trying to inhabit, a lateral fascination through which attention passes, as  the  appositional  sending  of  (an)  air,  an  exploratory  envoy  of  breathing [27]

Is this attention more or less surplus?

a “superfluous” mention of breath (that) must therefore designate an emphasis [28]

?

The breathing catastrophe [29]

—

    When breathing can no longer be taken for granted [30]

Think about what isolation means to you. Once you have abandoned all reference, listen to your breath as a teeming ecology. 

          one who breathes (a human as “Atem-und-Lehm”) has aerial roots like certain adventitious plants, and breathing is a tie that unites the terrestrial realm and sky [31]

Grayscale breath on a fluid / field [32] 

God's breath on a compound of silica [33]

you simplified a complicated man, / swallowed his past / until his breath was / warm as Caribbean / concrete [34]

“inexhaustible breath, inexhaustible spirit” [35]

Submerge your head in light and bury your voice in its breath (...)

Colour plus number equals blend, blur, breathe [36]

proceed to count up from 1 until your lungs have been completely expelled. 

Inhale—naturally, desperately. 

Repeat as many times as needed: 

Without your / residential breath / i lose my timing [37]

Singular respiration is concatenated with others’ breathing, and this corespiration we name “society” [38]

A breathing human — even in the face of adversity — mediates between singularity (earth) and universality (air) [39]

Beware of bosses. You are closing / your eyes at night and feeling bones / expand or shrink as you take / and release each breath [40]

         All of a sudden, wake up to the thought of how much air you will need on this day. Take no more, no less. Take things a day at a time.

I well-nigh sunk all my capital in it, and lost my own breath into the bargain [41]

         Take a walk around your block / keep going until you find lavender / pinch the bud three times between your left thumb and index finger / pull down your mask / lean over and take a deep breath of the bud / pull your mask back up / exhale [42]

It was ecstasy, it was sweet, air soughing in and all my little alveoli singing away with joy and oxygen-energy coursing through every space and particle of me [43]

a desire for otherwise air than what is and has been given, the enunciation, the breathing out the strange utterance of otherwise possibility [44] 

Caress your breath.

Remember:

each breath we take is a reciprocal exchange with our surroundings [45];

Remember, on occasion, to give it all away.