Living low in Europe, but with castles and shit, and walking around haunted like how lucidity is a wound

Recursive lines are not the only lines we can never cross and cannot help but cross.

A BIT OF POESY FOR 2024 POSTMARKED FROM A PERIOD WHEN THE IDEAS GOT PESTILENTIAL

The first house is miles from nowhere, 

One story of right angles and angular velocity

Flat, wide, and seemingly lithe, 

placed on a sloping hill so the exit

Gave it more modernist mystery

Than a boxy slab of practicality 

And you walked into walls 

of sleek white surface

Head to toe wall to wall

A habitat of ceremony

And the host of

This house would begin 

by pricking his finger

And walking from the foyer

Into the next room,

Which would involve 

Another digits worth 

Of bloodletting, and so on,

Until the tenth and final room,

The expanse of the basement floor, 

At which point streams of

red thread were secreting from

Each finger. 

And then you would be expected 

to enact the same sequence, 

A prick and release at each station.

And the weight of that expectation

Set a mood, wet with expectancy, 

Arriving moments after you ring

The bell and walk in to be greeted.

So flinging your hand around,

Spattering self consciously

From the ends of his or fingers,

And then smeared by 

Steps of the follow-one,

So each guest would

Circulate into empty rooms

Making a mark and 

Spinning out a narrative 

Of what came before 

There was no food or wine

But no dust gathered either

Each blood foray of each guest

Inclusive of each room in the house

A winding descent, from

Room to room, then circling

Down a flight of creaking stairs

Still bleeding, gone light-headed

This faux hardcore art gore

the last room’s exit: an open door

Framed by prairie sky 

and the assembled crowd

Of fellow wounded soldiers.

The second house is home

where you grow up

What you can remember of it

Its metes and bounds, the trace of scars

You left in it and it left in you

you go to this place of memory

To perform ministrations

To become drunk on Your oath

 of I-can’t-go-on-I-must-go-on

A place to become rendered

More than just a sheath of meatspace

And wanting to qualify as a genuine article

To inhabiting a self worthy of the name

Like a house is always ineffably a house 

until it definitively is not

Whereas you, encased or marooned

 in your skull, are always already

something else entirely.

---

Closing words from the Situationist who has you by the lapels:

he history of our times calls to mind those Walt Disney characters who rush madly over the edge of a cliff without seeing it, so that the power of their imagination keeps them suspended in mid-air; but as soon as they look down and see where they are, they fall.

Contemporary thought, like Bosustov's heroes, can no longer rest on its own delusions. What used to hold it up, today brings it down. It rushes full tilt in front of the reality that will crush it: the reality that is lived every day.

*

Is this dawning lucidity essentially new? I don’t think so.