Digital Poetics 3.1 Visions by Maria Sledmere

Artwork by Maria Sledmere

I am not writing a history of these times or of past times or of any future times and not even the history of these visions which are with me all day and all of the night.
— Anne Boyer, ‘Not Writing’

1.

Whose flowers were put through the window
that would not hold a vase at expense.
There are spaces available.

We balance on the sill of our branding. Almost easy
like somebody keeping tick for a century.

2.

I say it sounds nice. Kind of
moody weather for pints, it wouldn’t surprise me.
Colours too sweet to resist. Lyme disease.
The colours of spaces available.
Why are you still online
and why do you owe
the government money
I felt stupid to ask, felt like the colours were only no longer
available now.
I was scared to ask.
You look like shit and heat.

That bit in the lecture where
she takes off the straps of her dress is apparent, taxing.
I was ashamed to ask.

Requiring a passcode to the glasshouse, I stick out my
tongue
for the rain, I know it is made of crackle gel, glass beads of it
full of tiny histories, artificial, imitating rain.
Something of this is inestimable.

You went to give pollen on Friday

and I want the walls of the world to let go
like a sort of veritable feeling,
and you look at me like Alice.

And a nurse has touched your arm.
Something of this is inestimable.

It is only that thought is not—
^^
trite as I had said it, the endless sorrys of Messenger,
implacable feeling of acid sleep.
Who is the blue, blonde girl
sliding these things from her clavicle
as she speaks of a long hard seasonal anaemia. I was a
white rabbit, served lengthwise with chevrons of chives and
a kind of chauvinist wine from your childhood.

Watching the rivers dry into palisades of absence.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
watching the riverrun clean over skylessness
we’re both secretly

in the restaurant, after
a coverlet of shame between us

watching the rivers dry into palisades
of absence isn’t a garden.

What do you mean by the caret you carry?

The passcode required of entry is sullied. It’s not
in this language.
You complain of another asemic sentiment.
Then buttercups.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

I say it sounds nice. Another asemic sentiment
like the rain is coming on
not like rain
and you put this under erasure and I want
to call you, yellow as I walk the avenue of lime trees
and like the song
It goes like,
We keep going out ///// and down the river
the ocean never comes[1]

I have never held a child inside me. Not a fact exactly.
Like the rain is coming on
like the rain is coming on
And I love
the ‘it’
Like having amphibian birth
Like wanting to be held, in any case, low-lettered:

‘Everyone talks about the weather. So do we. It’s been
coming on with the speed of a / feral hadron collider,
viscous amalgamation of water and glass’[2]

And I don’t want to talk about it.
Knowing that weather could be always just ‘coming on’, never hard enough
to sweep this under the carpet. That I could hear
birdsong in my father’s voicemail.

3.

Feels like feral advertisement. Go figure
when he says my blood feels common.

‘Whose broken window is a cry of art
[…] is raw: is sonic’
is what Gwendolyn Brooks says in
‘Boy Breaking Glass’, and I can’t make the comparison
except so as to say there is something moving, attuning,
like how glass breaks
from oxymoron, freezing heat, but won’t break through
civic neglect.

That boy is all of the boys
and none of the boys, this ethics, you have to be active
in the anti- and I wish I knew
like Sharon sings very gently
how we had been coming down
always almost the quiet riots of not-statuary
rang out in the streetless thought of transparency, no place.

That this was something to build on.
I did you the glassy structure of cloud
and you pissed in my burrow a stream of it.

Somebody photoshopped my poem
to smell like a brewery.

That this was something to build on.
How we had all been coming down. Hops.
Soft click of the lock.
Drag and drop.
How we had not
been coming a long while down the mousiest sentiment

watching the rivers
watching the rivers disappear, O I do
nothing of visionary consequence. I only sort of eat.

The poster groan of another environment
had been coming down the glow of it
teeming with calories,
gems and my hereditary thrombosis
which is like finding
‘I hate you’ is blissful, asking do you, do you
in the overtone of 34 blue rose seeds
gifted on my birthday. ‘Why garden’,
Cixous asks, ‘when I know it will die?’
So I grow the garden up inside
the glass walls, like Biosphere 2
had never happened like
the pretence of a sequel to Earth, like
I could incubate a world that way.
Jennifer says there’s a study that proves
incubated babies can just die from not
being touched, nothing to validate their existence
they just leave altogether / what they had not thought was a self
and when you ask how I’m doing I say
it’s the old bell jar again, the world moving on
the air here is sour to breathe
so I opt for amyl nitrate in the endless July
nothing is inhaled so gently
whenever you say, ‘can you hear me?’
with my vessels dilating into light, the compress
of space between us equals a time without time.

This is how it ends or otherwise begins. To lilt or wilt.
I mean learning to build
on the always already, these properties of light
without property. When I ask
you say, it properly hurts

Like the tiniest breakfast, bittersweet I am not yet
having quite begun
but out there in starlight, trying to find you
unbrailled in the disarray of surface.

4.

It is all of the night
breaking shells. A river
is a cable between multiplied times. I wash up
on the sandy beach of a username, silicone dioxide
song of myself. To melt, constellate and make of this liquid
a politic.
Something like nothing requires all this burning.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
And the river is stupidly burning; adjacent,
the abolition of imprisoning bees for their honey had happened.
I felt grounded
with starlight inside me
lightly, in the café of the internet
it felt very great. Laetitia Dosch
mellivorous inside the film, Jeune Femme, half-sleeping.
The men come to check on us
as if this was present, presently
they unfurl their uniforms to less of police and reveal an infinity
of bonnie genders
so we say less of the men
is more plenitude, a thing that signs
for parcel outage. And here is your latte!

You stir in abyssal the all that is milk.
I was lifted in the inclement weather
which is not we, pH sensation, except
in a particle sense
the nothing that comes together
and you press ‘tomorrow’ for update, alkali; I like that
it’s never your birthday and the turquoise acid impression
of being here
is just because glass.
The anthropocene is not being managed
in the angst of what otherwise ‘happened’
little bang
insect
biscuit
a hormone

limply on

the crumbs of such sorrow, they call evolution.
The real song
goes at colossal speed
into other financial locales, it is not that

the poem requires superconducting magnets, only that
I liked you too much to end this
only that
I was always coming home to the empty fridge
of another family
thalassic

where the river had dried in my grandfather’s garden
where he dreamed once of drowning
a pure sound
heard beyond
little england
the beautiful cartilage of our once adolescence
and say you could pull a leaf from my ear
and say this was happening

In the uprising led by the bees!

We lost the world.
We lost it so much we forgot
what collects

such thought at all

and why are they dying.

5.

The manufacture of glass
is a common industry. The general process of this
is only what happens when the people come in without gaps in their teeth.

I poke a stem
through the middle of the poem. You say this also hurts.

We start to whistle. The flowers are not coming back.
It’s dissonance.

I am beginning to detect a weakness in you, like yeah
like fuck the bankers like
fuck those who live in the palaces of glass. But surely not
only the plants making money
from money
is harmony
I see myself
doing the same double consciousness
as my foremothers leaving their husbands and country
for something like air
a star in my throat
I see myself
buying thought from the gold sounds of the poem
like plants making money
from the moneyplant
it’s a shame
no, not this specific
cannibalism of emotion;
it is what some folks call a pyramid scheme

Erected in the centre of speaker, psychodynamic
vernacular aside
like you could prod a heart, here, and say
‘this is synecdoche’
and still make a lyrical profit,

We take eons to make up
the anatomical thrust of the water

and call it vision, first love without fulfilment, first coming
to be the star stuff you are,
like natal cut

from inherited jewellery

I want you to go or stay, this is doubling
up against lecture, we stray from cool Victoriana

and visit the mall instead
and you come with me not
like
money is beautiful
milkshakes of futures

and glassy modernist aporias
in the upright spire of what anamorphic shot
had gifted thousands of chain stores, , ,
the blessed summons of everyone’s talk
about weather
I have very little to say, it’s an after effect

of the damage already

the ana-cathartic
illusion of choosing

I don’t want to fucking shop
or father’s day
or financial recovery

so maybe I consult the bees, with fractal intention
dusted with the crystallised blood
of my ancestors.

How I could not write with all of these voices
not in my mouth, a cost
for living not at peace, for not in the lissom
mystery of exit, whole irony of united kingdoms
as if you could vote
for the colour of leaves in any of these viscous, nonlocal utopias

Can a speaker tell if the walls are visible?

‘Becoming visibility of the walls between minds you you you
Visibility of the walls is neither image nor action you me you
Shame at placing this moment beside that moment you me you
Shame at placing this room beside that room me me you’[3]

So darling what is the cost of this glass?
I price it at starlight
I price the interminable coruscation of pronoun
which is to say

(how can anyone tell
if this is A.I?)

however you find us, upside-down between walls is
not enough
oscillation as praxis, nothing we’re doing is
enough
to break the walls or make them seen like
I am posting this on a timeline makes this
just beloved data
when I want the authentic thought

of what it could mean to live & die
inside a form.

Say merely to write a poem is to feed a company… watching
the rivers dry
in this storage, the shops are opening up… we tick boxes
that arrive from how not fragile is movement
the forest-eaters are
at the isthmus of capital, a kissing suggestion…

what it could mean to die here, meta.
Bless you.

Some of us visit the mall instead.
The mall has walls; we sign them off.

6.

Nobody is calling this history; it is just more pause.
Let’s talk fractography in the nude.

I lived ephemeron of a garbage system, a short-lived damselfly
at the world’s beginning. There has
and always will be waste for this.
Empty the heft of your poem for autumn.

And it had to be in plural. Light, tremulous
sounds of the social / tell me what’s happening.
This is the neuter of something
about to be collected, New Latin, starlight
in the palm of a giant. What he hadn’t known
or could not know was the all in the allegory of dying-with.
I had this quote I didn’t believe about life
I felt very green cornfield
after imminent harvest
then I had everything I knew I could believe
if I had the impression
that the world is shopping for more of itself
like the sand had known, like mall security
is the folk story
of having your face known
when a frog hops out of the plastic fountain.

Drop this into the poem-chalice.
Knowing, eventually, that love
is not just anything like time, but I love how
the excess of a stream would be dying,

‘It makes you think one dies too fast.
The weather turns threatening. For forty years we thought of death of life or death of death of life after that of death then of life, after death of death after death of life of the going away then of the coming back, we get away from it, the further away we get the closer we are we run to every window for forty years the same storm, each time we get away from it we think of death, we are giving life to death, I would say we’re putting death to death my friend would say, let’s not talk about it he would say, we’re giving life to death, each time we talk about it let’s not talk about it any more my friend would say, we don’t talk about it anymore’[4]

and I never wanted to be so trite as to say, let’s shop for death
and what if Derrida or Cixous were wrong, in their opposite
poles of living and dying, to be this wrong, by talking of death
here again
do I give life to it, my friend
it’s what we could do or would have said, looking back at this
more-than
moment to say we had given life to it, like the virus could be
kissed back into its
glass sarcophagus, corniced with the nocturnal mammalia that
had started this
because we had eaten for life, or decided to. My pedantry
in saying
it is not the same storm, when Bangladesh
faces the twin perils of
a super-cyclone and Covid-19
and the task of rebuilding the city
I mean poem, after the locusts of Rajasthan and
how inadequate the symposia was
to offer relief in the form of these stupid frontiers of talk.
The glass ceiling of lyric
reinforced by sentiment. There is no crowded shelter here
except for how it was weather, turning, everyone’s talking
so we
can’t hear the speaker
so I say we are putting death to life by being here
reassuring her, sometimes it is only about showing up.
Not shopping.
Am I a body on the line or the imperfect circle of buying
things.
I give you it back
and you wear my life around your neck,
as I had done before you.

So we don’t talk in the face of the question
of breathing
except send each other songs
in the face of trauma, impossible shimmer
of elsewhere
like listening to ‘Avril 14th’ played backwards
is the superscript
of what your soul is doing.

So death is the conch we would touch to coil into / no future.
Before there was glass there was only the sand
polished by the sea, then came
the glass that was polished by sea
and vomited back on the sand…
The never quite touching of immensity.
Keep saying we feel useless / ‘We go on hauling
in what traces of affirmation we can catch’
‘Compared to facts words are only nets’[5]
and you toss up against me, silver, so as to say
how hard this has been
doing activism online, no sense of the scales
prised from scales, where the virus is utilised
for colonial violence
still in this decade to come, the plateaus beyond
which none of us can assume is a river ~ ~ ~ ~
I can only apologise for such uselessness as only the birds sing
and stir in the bassline of such agony as the woods would allow
unnaming themselves to bury it.

I like you. Catch this.

We look back, we can’t keep doing it. I turn on the lights or
fall away.
We can pretend to be here awhile. It’s why I keep writing;
I want to give you the hold. Crawl into
the tiniest that you are, the soft thing
keeled against a marginal breath. We go through the poem
in shoals of ourselves.

Stupidly, the reader is tapping the glass.
It could kill us.

7.

There are words between the lights
that keep writing. They require
the activation of touch or look. A face is what
Deleuze and Guattari call
‘a zone of frequency’ and is this the same as a heart react
or things that make sound
or keep typing. The face ‘constitutes
the black hole of subjectivity as consciousness or passion,
the camera’. [6]
Negentropic expression of how you look in the butterfly dress,
that is fancy
as Paris, captured; the antidepressant lethargy
of how we are now.
We have to be able
to think of time […] as an inauguration[7]
So this the inaugural of the not-yet.
So we had been held on pause
as the revolution was commencing. I say it sounds nice
but this was so arbitrary. There are words
between the lights
that keep writing. I know from experience the lilies
exist in a limitlessness, because of the rainbow. I miss you.

The research question was something concerning
a playlist. It was the transitive
allowance for living between windows. Visions
took place on blue territory, as O’Hara
‘cut the glass / and make it grass […] it’s turf’
like everything is land
like softly you could land this
right in the centre of the poem, which is its exquisite
impression of end
which is why we could not ‘fall off’ the enjambed declaration
of getting there yet, or getting you off
or softly tearing this up forever.

Tiniest, weeping breakfast.
Me in the room in you
in you in the room in me.
This the sea counterpart of doing it strait. No river

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
To live on the line, this close to us, livid.

What is the ‘it’ that makes you think one dies too fast.
The passcode is
Genesis. Aeroplane, crying to meet you
in the polite chaosmosis of Wednesday. Life
is just past-time between the salience of labour.
We work the land at different speeds
which is to say, last weekend
it felt like someone had driven a tractor through my brain
and left it with nothing but the nuphar lutea of thought;
adrift centenary
surrendered its erstwhile water.
Nothing could grow here but further hyperbole. Alone, alone.
The algebraic twilight of not being bees.
I could almost touch you to ask this, a little ellipsis between us;
starlight
hive of the cardinal, masses
a little
insect for bluest and shatterable, to be against the currency
sounds without water, a MIDI guitar goes soft
melodic franchise; inactive now
in the outro, I can’t believe you’re home.

References:

[1] Bright Eyes, Cassadaga (2007).
[2] Sean Bonney, Our Death (2019).
[3] Nisha Ramayya, States of the Body Produced by Love (2019).
[4] Hélène Cixous, Hyperdream (2006).
[5] Susan Howe, ‘Sorting Facts; Or, Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker’ (2013).
[6] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1980).
[7] Marc Augé, The Future (2014).

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Maria Sledmere is a poet, artist and tutor based in Glasgow. She is editor-in-chief of SPAM Press and a member of the art and ecology collective, A+E. In 2021, The Palace of Humming Trees, an exhibition with Katie O’Grady and Jack O’Flynn, was shown at French Street Studios. With Rhian Williams, she co-edited an anthology, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2020). Her debut collection, The Luna Erratum, is out now with Dostoyevsky Wannabe following several pamphlets including nature sounds without nature sounds (Sad Press, 2019), neutral milky halo (Guillemot Press, 2020) and Chlorophyllia (OrangeApple Press 2020). A collaboration with fred spoliar, Sans Soleil, is forthcoming with Face Press and Mermaid Motel. Other writing can be found at http://mariaologyy.wordpress.com.

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